8310 Dis 2 week 8

3

Respond to one of your colleagues’ posts:

Who made similar choices to compare and contrast? Explain the similarities or differences in your experience.

Explain the clarity of the connection between your colleague’s research question and choice of data collection methods. Is there another method that could be considered? Be sure to provide your rationale.

Be sure to support your main post and response post with reference to the week’s Learning Resources and other scholarly evidence in APA style.

Angela Slavings Response

Data Collection Methods

          According to Rubin and Rubin (2012), qualitative researchers focus on depth rather than the breadth of research. Two qualitative data collection methods are in-depth interviews that explore a phenomenon in detail. The strengths of in-depth interviewing are that they portray ongoing social processes and capture retrospective changes. They are full of rich, detailed information. A weakness is finding participants for culturally or socially sensitive studies may be challenging. (Rubin & Rubin (2012). Focus groups are another valuable way to obtain data collection. Focus groups have between six and eight participants. This helped get information from several participants at one time. Themes of the focus often appear after three focus groups (Walden,2016). Focus groups help recruit (snowball) other participants. A weakness of focus groups is keeping everyone on track and ensuring that norms and expectations are gone over so all participants can participate equally. In this class, we completed a telephone interview which was a first for me. I enjoyed the data collection and coding of themes, but I was nervous about conducting the interview. I see a defiant need for being prepared, and having expectations, guidelines, and questions presented to the participants ahead of time. I have new insight into the amount of information obtained from a well-run interview.

Data Collection Aligning with Research Questions

My possible research questions are:

Research question one:

          How do teachers and administrators perceive literacy achievement in the middle school setting?

Sub questions to the central question:

         What are the teacher's perceptions of why standardized literacy testing in the middle school setting?

          What has been successful/unsuccessful in increasing literacy scores in middle school?

         What are the teacher's perceptions of how the school can improve literacy in the middle school setting?.

I intend to use the data collection for this research to survey via email for the local middle school setting. From there, I will ask if anyone would be willing to participate in a focus group or conduct individual interviews with me. From these data collection methods, I will have a rich, detailed answer to find themes and analyze to create a schoolwide professional development to increase the literacy scores in the middle school setting.

References

Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (2012). Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Walden University, LLC. (Producer). (2016). How to plan and conduct a focus group [Video file]. Baltimore, MD: Author.