RESEARCH INSTRUMENTS

RESEARCH INSTRUMENTS

1. QUESTIONNARIES

   • The questionnaire is the favoured tool of many of those engaged in research, and it can often provide a cheap and effective way of collecting data in a structured and manageable form.
   • TYPES QUESTIONS
     • Closed questions :Most questionnaires consist of a collection of closed questions. These are questions to which all possible answers are provided.
     • Multiple-choice questions: Many questionnaires include questions which provide a number of predefined responses. This allows the researcher to hold some control over the responses given
     • Open-ended questions: Open-ended questions impose none of the restrictions of closed and multiplechoice questions. They allow for the recording of any response to a question provided by the respondent.
   • Issues
     • Scale items: Some questions require the respondent to indicate answers according to a predefined list or scale, usually ranging from a very positive answer to a very negative answer. There are a number of ways to scale responses to questions.
       • Other approaches to scaling responses exist and are often used to evaluate products or services.

2. INTERVIEWS

   • Interviews are not an easy option. They are often likened to a conversation between two people, though a competent researcher knows that he or she are more than this: he or she require orchestrating, directing and controlling to varying degrees
     • Interviews have long been used in research as a way of obtaining detailed information about a topic or subject. Often interviews are used where other research instruments seem inappropriate
   • TYPES
     • The unstructured interview is a very flexible approach. Areas of interest are established by the researcher but the discussion of issues is guided by the interviewee. T
     • The semi-structured interview. The interviewer directs the interview more closely. More questions are predetermined than with the unstructured interview
     • the structured interview as no more than a questionnaire that is completed face-to-face. The interviewer has control over the order of questions, all of which are predetermined. There is an element of predictability to the structured interview which allows the event to be timetabled with some precision
   • DATA ANALYSIS
     • The final stage of the interview process begins by drawing together the data collected and structuring them in such a way as to make ready for analysis. In small-scale work, this would typically involve grouping the responses to each question from all interviewees to make comparison between respondents easy
   • Select your sample interviewees
     • Because interviews take longer to plan, conduct and analyse than do some other research instruments, extra care must be taken when selecting the sample group of interviewees. Even the most competent and hardworking of researchers cannot expect to interview all those associated or involved with the topic under scrutiny.

3. CONTECT ANALYSIS

   • Content analysis is an extremely broad area of research – its coverage includes both quantitative and qualitative approaches to analysis.
     • As a research technique, content analysis has been used in a variety of ways and within a number of contexts. It has been successfully used to analyse text and solve issues of disputed authorship of academic papers:
   • BASIS PRINCIPLES
     • the essential principles of content analysis have remained constant. To conduct a content analysis, the data (the text of an interview, speech or focus-group discussion) are coded or grouped into categories which are tested for their reliability and validity
   • ANALYSING THE RESULTS
     • Whilst conceptual analysis is a very useful and much-used tool, it is a quantitative exercise. Some argue that it fails to take account of true meanings behind information and data. To better understand the information or the text before us, we must consider the relationships between words and phrases and explore their emphases.
     • TYPES
       • Qualitative content analysis: In essence, the stages of the content analysis process, just outlined, focus on the number of times a word, theme or issue emerges, and meaning is applied to that numerical data
         • 1 You are interested in very precise results. 2 There is the possibility of the collected data being biased. 3 The data collected will be statistically related to numerical data.
       • Relational analysis: As with other content analysis models, relational analysis begins by identifying themes or issues to explore. However, unlike the majority of other analyses, this approach attempts to explore and identify relationships between the themes or issues.

4. FOCUS GROUP

   • Focus-group interviews are at the opposite end of the spectrum altogether, modified yet further until they resemble hardly at all the kinds of interviews you are obliged to endure in your efforts to find your ideal job
   • TYPES
     • synergism snowballing stimulation security spontaneity
   • The group is made up of participants. It need not contain a fixed number of participants (though fewer than four may jeopardise the valuable group dynamic you seek, and more than twelve may make the group unwieldy); nor does there need to be a fixed number of groups in your research project (though if you have only one you risk observing the dynamics of that group and little else), nor a fixed number of meetings to be held with your group.
   • ANALYSING DATA
     • There is no avoiding the first task involved in analysing your data – transcribing your tapes in order to produce an accurate record of everything which was said in each of your focus-group interviews.
       • This may appear a daunting and unappealing chore. After all, you may be conducting a whole series of discussions, each lasting an hour or more. In order to make the prospect slightly more palatable,

5. OBSERVATIONS

   • Merely asking about or reporting the activities people carry out in different social settings and situations will no doubt give you a flavour of what is involved, but in order to understand fully what these activities mean to people, how they themselves perceive them and what their perspective is on them, it is necessary to see those people in action, to experience what it is they do, even to wade in and have a go yourself.
   • WHY CHOOSE OBSERVATIONS?
     • Social researchers are interested in people and, in particular, the ways in which people act in, interpret and understand the complex world around them, whether that is the world of the classroom, the hospital, the factory floor, the head office, the local government department or wherever
   • Whatever the research project you have in mind, an observational strategy might improve it if you can answer ‘Yes’ to any of the questions
   • So just how should you undertake this complex research exercise called observation? We have always found it helpful to set ourselves six questions (adapted from Goetz and LeComte 1984) – who, what, when, where, why and how – and we recommend you do the same