Factor | Examples | Empirical evidence |
---|---|---|
The agent: | ||
Intervention does not seem relevant | Participant did not consider their fatigue level sufficiently high to require intervention. | It wouldn’t have been that helpful because I wasn’t … it (fatigue) wasn’t that often. It wasn’t as though every day I had, it was a struggle, not like for some people … I wasn’t affected as bad as some people. (Robert) |
The intervention did not offer anything novel or innovative. Information was not deemed useful. | I just thought it was an extension of the booklet, I didn’t see it in any other way. (Georgina) | |
Participant engaged as a research volunteer in a trial and was not looking for strategies to manage fatigue symptoms or significant personal benefit from involvement in the study. | I wouldn’t say that I was expecting to gain a lot of insights into how to deal with the fatigue, more a sense of somebody out there is needing people for this [study] and I’ll be helpful. (Emma) | |
Intervention requires skills that user does not have (or are limited) | Participant dislikes/distrusts IT/online nature of intervention/lacks confidence to use IT/internet. | I’ve just got basic skills because I’ve never really, I’m not somebody that really sits in front of the computer. I’ve never been one of them. (Iris) |
The context: | ||
Intervention is not easy to fit in to daily life | Using the intervention was too much to do at a time when participant is fatigued. | Sometimes I couldn’t be bothered … it was just making the effort to go on and do it. (Angela) |
Accessing intervention requires additional ‘work’ or making adjustments to routine. | My home computer had broken … so I had to do it using the work computer and I’d only just gone back to work and I wasn’t working very many hours so I had to tag it on either, come in early and do it at the beginning of my working day or tag into the end of my working day. (Laura) | |
Participants found it difficult to accommodate or ‘fit in’ using the intervention on a day-to-day basis. | Int: One of the suggestions was to keep a fatigue diary, is this something that you did? | |
Res: No I didn’t on the basis I was too busy (Sylvia) | ||
The object: | ||
Intervention has unintended negative impact | Using the intervention is a reminder of cancer/being a cancer survivor. | And I think I might also feel, I’m concentrating, the more I concentrate on this, the more I would almost be looking for symptoms? And I suppose it’s also that sense of wanting to kind of move on from it as much as possible … it would be a daily reminder and I think that might be at because of where I am … it was five years ago that I had the diagnosis and I had the surgery. (Emma) |
Interaction with the intervention makes participant question if they are really fatigued. | I tell you what was a little bit, made me feel a little bit funny … was that knowing that some people were a lot worse than me, I thought have I just been wimping here (laughs). (Angela) |