With members of your team discuss who you think your research population will be. Will you have one site or multiple sites? Why will you choose the site(s) you select? Discuss how many participants you will need. What will be the criteria for becoming a participant? Will you need a variety of participants in order to get different perspectives on an issue (e.g. patients, physicians, family members, members of the community)? Will you have a control group of participants? Do you need to choose a representative population for certain aspects of data collection? For example, if you are conducting individual interviews do you want your participants to vary in age, gender, education, experience etc., in order to represent the sample population?
Draft an outline of your participant section. You will need a general section describing your participant population. You will also need to estimate how many participants you will include in your research from this population for each data collection method (surveys, focus group discussion, interviews etc.).