In projects, it is important to consider the way in which we design the research process. Particularly academic research and the literature review, but also other different research methods frequently used.
Interviews
Let's start from Interviews.
Interviewing is always a popular approach. It is a good way of getting a lot of information from other people. There are some difficulties with interviewing, however. And, most of them relates to people having poor interview skills.
Many people, in fact think that there is nothing difficult about interviewing, but that involves a little more than having a chat with someone.
These are some very common mistakes people make:
1) Talking too much. The interview needs to be carried out by getting information from other people and the interviews needs to sit and listen.
2) Influencing the interviewee. Sometimes it is quite possible to give some signs (smile, nod) to indicate your agreement which could influence the responses you receive.
3) Interpreting the responses in the way that you want. Because you have an expectation of a result from your research, it is possible that you interpret what you hear in a way that supports your expectations. Interviews give a qualitative data and interpreting it might give some subjectivity.
4) Putting contributions on the people you like or people you agree with. You might do it without realising, because you want to prove your own views.
5) Altering questions in different interviews. There is a danger, that you will alter the questions, hence it will not be possible to have consistent results.
6) Asking leading questions. It is very important to ask well thought questions.
These are all the reason why when going ahead with an interview you need to consider whether you have the right skills to do the activity.
It is also very important to think what you are going to do with the information and you need to use some good methods to analyse qualitative data.
Interviews can take different forms:
* Telephone interviews - if the people are not based in the same area as you.
* Group interviews - having a group discussion about an issue to get contributions from a lot of people.
* Face-to-face interviews - the most common approach.
Questionnaires
To give out questionnaires is another common approach to project research. It is a good approach of getting a lot of information from a lot of people. However, people might not reply, therefore you need to send a lot of questionnaires so that as many as possible people will complete them.
It might be very useful to enter respondents into a prize draw. People may also misunderstand questions therefore it is very important that they are designed thoroughly.
Some other considerations about questionnaires:
- They are too long.
- Not considering all subjects that need to be covered.
- No deadline for the return or deadline too long.
- No explanation of the research.
- Questionnaire is not anonymous.
Observations
Observation is one other approach you may use next to interviews and questionnaires.
Observation is when you watch people going something and make notes about what you see. However, there are potential ethical issues when doing an observation as you might compromise someone's privacy. Therefore, you need to ask someone's permission to be observed. You must not carry an observation of people in public place.
Case studies
A case study is looking in depth on a specific situation, organisation or event. To carry out a case study, different approaches can be used:
* analysing documents,
* keeping diaries of events
* focus groups discussions
* observations
* interviews
* discussions.
A case study is an approach that involves getting a lot of data, and exploring something in considerable depth. The case study needs to be very clearly defines due to the amount of data being gathered.
Experiment
Another approach is to design an experiment and carry it out. Designing an effective experiment takes a lot of time and skill. Learning the best way of conducting an experiment is crucial to obtaining valid and useful results.
With an experiment you are trying to learn something new about the world. Reach for an explanation of 'why' something is happening. You need to test your hypostasis using different controls and statistical data.
The first step would be to design your hypothesis and make predictions. Then, you need to specify the sample group. It should be large enough to give statistically viable study, but small enough to be practical. You also need to determine the timeframe and and the frequency of sampling. Additionally, you need to ensure that an experiment is carried out to the planned methods for all samples. We than gather and analyse the data. This is very important to deliver the experiment results.
Samples
An important question that you will need to address is the size of you sample. The sample has to be big enough. This is to ensure that the research is worthwhile. As a rough guide, less than twenty questionnaires or less than five interviews makes the research too small.
You also need to have the access to sample you have identified. Never presume anything and rely only on the appropriate authority to give permission.
You also need to define your sample, especially when there is a large pool of people to choose from. There is a number of approaches that you could take:
* Random sampling - you simply choose a random sample from the pool you have available.
* Stratified Random Sample - this is a little bit more structured approach. You divide the pool into groups, for example by age or gender and choose the same number of sample people from each group.
* Systematic Sampling - you list out all the people and choose every firth one, or every tenth one or every hundredth one.
* Purposive sampling - you may only want to talk to people with certain characteristics required by the research.
* Snowball sampling - this is an useful approach when you cannot identify a very large pool of people. You may approach someone that fits your criteria who than invoices someone else and so on like a 'snowball".
Now, once you have looked at some ways of gathering the data you need to analyse of some of this data. You need to find out what the data tells you. You need to submit your conclusions and focus on adding value.
It is also important, that any research that you carry out does not breach any ethical principles. You may need an ethical approval.If your project involves children or vulnerable adults, permission will be needed from the carers of those people.
When you have set of numbers in front of you we want to understand them now in more detail. We might calculate the mode (value that appears most often), median (the middle value) or mean (average). These are often use to make sense of a data.
One important thing to consider when doing your research is to consider the time. For example, if you want to get questionnaire examples from hundreds of people it might take too long, and the questionnaire might not be appropriate. You project will need to be completed within a set period of time and to the budget.
Bibiography:
Shutterworth M., 2008, 'Conducting an experiment', Explorable, https://explorable.com/conducting-an-experiment (accessed 05/11/2021)
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