BMC Public Health 2006, 6:313 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/6/313 key informants and health officials will be used to deter- mine 1) if there are additional organizations involved in the response system that were not noted in the official documents, 2) the types of relationships characterizing the inter-organizational ties within and among action- sets, and develop 3) relevant measures of the institutional environment and of public health preparedness and responsiveness. While laws mandate that certain organi- zations be involved in emergency responses to specific public health threats, key organizational representatives may identify agencies that play an important albeit infor- mal role in local emergency response systems. In addition to helping identify organizations that may be absent from official documents, the interviews will also investigate the perceived characteristics of inter-organiza- tional relationships. Mandated relationships, for exam- ple, tend to be characterized by lower levels of perceived cooperation among organizations [8]. While such charac- teristics will be investigated using quantitative methods in phase 2, the qualitative research will reveal the points of conflict and cooperation that emerge in the course of pub- lic health and emergency responses and thus provide a basis for the questions that will be used in the organiza- tional questionnaire. The final focus of the phase one interviews will centre on the development of measures of the institutional environment, network effectiveness, and public health preparedness. What are the resources that key agency representatives themselves identify as critical and important to their organization and the network? What processes do the respondents use to evaluate if their organization or the system was prepared? In phase 1, we will draw a non-proportional sample from the project's sampling frame. We will interview 6 organi- zational representatives from the provincial level (stratum 1), 12 representatives from the sub-provincial level (strata 2 and 3), and 18 representatives from the local level (stra- tum 4). Phase 1 interview respondents will be organiza- tional representatives who are randomly selected from each of these strata and choose to participate. Interviews will be tape-recorded and transcribed so that content analysis, thematic, and inter-textual analyses can be conducted on the interviews. Transcripts will be coded for such indicators as (1) organizations involved in the public health and emergency management preparedness, (2) types of information-sharing among organizations, (3) types of resource flows existing among organizations, and (4) perceptions of local and provincial public health preparedness. Content analysis will be used to identify rel- evant organizations that were not identified in the docu- mentary research [9,10]. Thematic analyses will be used to identify the critical themes emerging in the 36 interviews; inter-textual analyses will be used to compare the responses of interviewees across the three strata dimen- sions of jurisdiction, domain, and geographical location. Phase two: organizational questionnaires Phase 2 involves the administration of an organizational/ inter-organizational questionnaire to Alberta-based pub- lic health and emergency management agencies. Informa- tion on organizations and inter-organizational networks will be collected by web-based or telephone question- naires. For phase 2, we intend to administer question- naires to representatives of all organizations listed in the project's sampling frame (described earlier). The ques- tionnaire consists of three components: 1) an organiza- tional attribute component, 2) an inter-organizational network component, and 3) an organizational environ- ment and network assessment component. The organiza- tional attribute component consists of questions on the general characteristics of organizations such as staff size, training background of specific occupational roles in the organization, sectoral operations, budget and more emer- gency-response related questions, such as whether an agency has formally assessed its epidemiology capacity. The inter-organizational network component consists of items that ask representatives to identify those organiza- tions with which their own organization has ties along specific dimensions. The specific content and dimensions of the network to be mapped will be determined follow- ing phase one analysis but candidate dimensions used in other organizational network studies include (i) informa- tion-sharing, (ii) resource-sharing, including staff and (iii) joint-planning. For each of the critical dimensions identified in phase one, the respondent will be presented with a list of organizations within the relevant action-set and asked, for each one, "who do you share information with?" or "who do you share resources with." The third component of the questionnaire will consist of the respondent's subjective assessments of the institu- tional environment and inter-organizational network, and the impact that each has on perceived public health preparedness. For example, how do representatives assess the environment in which they operate, i.e., do they see resources as easily available or scarce? How prepared do they perceive their own organization and local system to be for a public health threat? Since mandated relations involve "sequential interdependence," an important ques- tion is whether organizations perceive the task transitions among organizations as functioning smoothly. The actual questions that will be used in this component of the ques- tionnaire will be determined following phase one data analysis. Ethical approval of the research has been granted by the Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board of the Calgary Page 4 of 5 (page number not for citation purposes)