Research instrument

Research instrument

1. Questionnaires

   • Questionnaires can be designed and used to collect vast quantities of data from a variety of respondents
   • the mail survey, the group-administered questionnaire, and the household drop-off survey
   • Questionnaires are successfully used in many situations to gather data and information on a broad range of issues, but they do have application and data-collection limitations, most of which are the product of poor design in the instrument.

2. Interviews

   • Interviews ‘involve a set of assumptions and understandings about the situation which are not normally associated with a casual conversation
   • uses: Draft the interview, Pilot your questions,, Select your sample interviewees,

3. Content analysis

   • In other chapters we discuss the collection of data through a number of instruments including questionnaires, interviews and focus groups.
   • Content analysis can be used as a powerful research tool to determine, from the content of a message, sound inferences concerning the attitude of the speaker or writer
   • Identify the topic of your research Establish content categories Test the categories generated Collect data Analyse content of data and provide results
   • Decide on the unit(s)/level of analysis (2) Identify the concepts (3) Define the concepts (4) Decide whether to code for incidence or frequency of concepts (5) Establish coding rules (6) Trawl through the information (7) Code the information (8) Analyse the results

4. Focus groups

   • There can be few people who emerge from a particularly uncomfortable job interview feeling that they had said everything they wanted to say, and in the way they wanted to say it, to the panel sitting opposite them.
   • Focus-group research is a form of qualitative method used to gather rich, descriptive data in a smallgroup format from participants who have agreed to ‘focus’ on a topic of mutual interest.
   • The five ‘S’s of group interaction
     synergism
     snowballing
     stimulation
     security
     spontaneity
   • Stages in conducting focus-group research (1) Establish the group (2) Develop your questions (3) Conduct the focus group (4) Analyse group data

5. Observations

   • ‘research characterised by a prolonged period of intense social interaction between the researcher and the subjects, in the milieu of the latter, during which time data,
   • Despite the term’s connotations, there is much more to observation than just looking
   • When to use observation in your research
     When the ways in which people behave and interact with one another in a social setting are important to your research.
     When you are interested in researching social settings and what happens in them.
   • Observation framework checklist
     space: the physical place or places
     actor: the people involved
     activity: a set of related acts people do
     object: the physical things which are present
     act: single actions which people do
     event: a set of related activities which people carry out
     time: the sequencing which takes place over time
     goal: the things people are trying to accomplish
     feeling: the emotions felt and expressed