Research Method and Practice

There are three parts to this assessment – you must complete all three parts.

Research Methods and Practice – SSSC H3015

CA 2 – Qualitative Research Project (40%)

CORU Standards of Proficiency Assessed: 5.17

Brief

Part 1 - Answer the following question – What is qualitative research and how can it be used in social care settings?

Your answer should be no more than 500 words long and contain at least 5 academic references. Your answer should be accompanied by a correctly completed reference list. Your answer should be in size 12 font and double spaced.

Plagiarism will not be tolerated – please familiarise yourself with the university referencing guidelines and ensure that you reference correctly.

Part 2 - You must design an interview schedule based on one of the following four research questions:

1. How do social care workers cope with challenging behaviours at work?

2. How do power asymmetries develop in social care settings?

3. How do social care workers maintain professional boundaries in residential care settings?

4. What are the best things about being a social care worker?

Your interview schedule must contain exactly 10 primary interview questions. These primary questions should be open-ended and must include one accompanying prompting/probing question. This means your interview schedule will contain 10 primary interview questions and 10 prompting/probing questions (total of 20 questions).

Your interview schedule should be typed in size 12 font and 1.5 spaced.

Part 3 - You must code the accompanying interview excerpt in Microsoft Word and write a short analytic memo of no more than 300 words. The coded excerpt should contain 10 codes. An analytic memo is one of the first steps in carrying out qualitative data analysis and it should be more than a descriptive account of what is happening in the interview. The memo ideally should be conceptually and theoretically informed.

Interview Excerpt – For Coding

(Transcribed Verbatim)

CD: What’s that like?

Ben*: Ketamine, ketamine seems to be a really, really intense eh, again my drug taking seems to be around different partners and stuff like that. But I was with somebody at this stage and we did a lot of eh drugs, and it was em, it was ecstasy but it was also the legal ecstasy, you know those ones em, herbal ecstasy, right which were kind of, they were good, they were kind of similar but then there was ones that were really similar and then there was ones that were, they were more just, they were like as if they were just speed, they just kept you awake. And they didn’t give you that kind of buzz or high to it but we had ketamine one night and em, it was more my partner at the time that started to kind of freak out on it.

	He was having some sort of a reaction with it or kind of he was getting freaked out, and that kind of frightened me, so it kind of, my reaction then was like we were both kind of freaked out [ok] and we were in my little bed sit at the time. And he contacted his friend em, about it and she kind of had said to him something about “I told you it’s really, really, really pure this stuff, you shouldn’t be taking too much of it” [ok] and that was where the down fall was of taking a bit too much of it [right] em, but luckily enough em, we just kind of like was due to be in work the next day so I’d actually contacted you know to say I wasn’t going to go to work and we just kind of spent the day kind of hibernating [ok] you know and that kind of allowed it to, to kind of go through its course but that was the one and only kind of time and that was ketamine its self like [ok] yeah.
CD:	Em were you ever afraid to take a drug?
Ben:	No, no I don’t think so because even, even the fact that like em that relationship had broken up em. We’d broken up three weeks before I was due to travel, we were due to travel to New Zealand and eh, New Zealand short, eh it was a short trip my brother was living in New Zealand, was going out to visit.

So went to visit him in New Zealand for a week then I was four days in, three or four days in eh Sydney stop over to see a couple of friends and then three days in Bangkok, in Thailand and then come back ‘cause it was all just before my thirtieth, ‘cause I was coming back and my thirtieth was a couple of days later [ok] and because the relationship had broken up em, I travelled on my own and when I was in Bangkok I knew no body met eh tuk-tuk driver and who basically kind of eh mentioned the word drugs and I was like “yes please!” and what I did was I got to see none of the sights for the three days.

Taken from the research project – ‘Doing Drugs, Doing Masculinity: exploring the role of recreational drug use in the production of Irish masculinities’ © Clay Darcy, 2015.

*Pseudonym

Marking Scheme:

Part 1 (20 Marks)
	Understanding of qualitative research (8 Marks)
	Use of qualitative research in social care (8 Marks)
	References (4 Marks)
Part 2 (40 Marks)	Each correctly formed interview question is worth 2 marks.
	Each correctly formed prompting/probing question is worth 2 marks.
Part 3 (40 Marks)	Each correctly identified code is worth 2 marks (Max. 10 Codes)
	Analytic Memo is worth 20 marks.

Total Marks = 100

Dr Clay Darcy, 2020

Dr Clay Darcy, 2020

Dr Clay Darcy, 2020