BTM7303 Research Methods Week 12

NORTHCENTRAL UNIVERSITY

ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET

Student: Christopher Walters

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BTM7303	Kelly Grattan
Research Methods	Participant Perspective and the Mixed Methods Approach

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Hi Christopher,

Please ensure your paper margins are 1” all around.

This assignment, like all others in the course/program, should be in APA format. That means an introduction, body organized into sections/sub-sections by theme, summary, and references. Adding these missing sections would bring it up to the required 3-5 pages (as it falls short now that I deleted all of the gaps in the paper).

What a horrid survey huh? There are so many problems with it, and you mentioned a few key issues. The survey was created specifically for this course to be deliberately poorly designed so the student can pick it apart, learning what to do and what not to do in the process. For instance, from a participant perspective, the first thing you’ll notice is that there is no indication as to how long the survey is (how many questions and how long it might take), and you noticed that it was extremely lengthy. There’s no status bar to show progress. The participants will see a page of questions, complete them, and then realize there’s yet another page. This may frustrate them, causing them to rush through the next page(s) instead of taking their time to give accurate, detailed answers. Additionally, the directions did not indicate whether the survey could be paused and completed at a later time after beginning.

I almost always recommend interviews or focus groups for qualitative data collection. Unless the participants are extremely invested in the research and potential findings, who is going to take the time to provide the thick, rich description you’re looking for in qualitative research (and in the open-ended questions)?

So much of the issues with the survey relate to the questions and ambiguity found in so many of them. What you can do here is to design the survey keeping in mind your audience (in terms of the language/terms used), then test it on a small sample of individuals to see if they find any ambiguity, find the length too long, etc. Then, refine it further before it’s ready for prime time. Surveys are tricky to design and design well, but there are many resources that you can use to guide you through the pitfalls, best practices, etc. Remember, the tool must be reliable or your data and data analysis won’t be valid/credible.

Overall, I had a difficult time following your discussion. Additionally, one of the few themes that appeared a few times was the length of the survey. There are other issues that should be discussed above and beyond length and the fact that it was boring given the similar structure to many of the questions.

From previous weeks: The formatting and writing issues remain at an unacceptable level. These issues must be resolved before the comp exam as you’ll lose significant points for issues like the ones corrected below. Remember, all papers must be in APA format (yours is not). I made many comments and corrections below to indicate where the bulk of the issues lie. Notice how I deleted the gaps in the paper as well.

As always, if you have any questions at all about the feedback, please email me anytime.

Grade: 70

Completes some required parts of the assignment; demonstrates some understanding of readings; writing is somewhat clear, effective, and scholarly; and has many errors in grammar, mechanics, and APA formatting.

Kelly Grattan 3.5/5 6.5.16

What did you think of the length of each survey instrument? Was there a point at which you began to feel tired or paid less attention to the items?

The survey instrument that is presented in this case is a questionnaire. The questions of the survey aim at collecting information about a program in the educational setting. In my opinion, as concerns the length the survey, I think that it is a very long survey . On the online webpage, the survey goes to the length of three pages. One page of each question is in itself very long. The length of the survey instrument has been made particularly long due to the fact that the survey asked too many questions some of which can be considered irrelevant or some of which could be incorporated in other or brought together and this has led to redundancy and some level of repetition in the survey.

There sure was a point in the survey where I got bored, and this resulted in a very low level of concentration. The boredom and lack of concentration were first as a result of the length of the survey. The fact that it was too long became too tiring for me going from one page to another and somewhere in the middle of the survey I lost concentration. The presence of a lot of redundancy and repetition in the survey question also resulted to boredom for me. Another major reason why I ended up losing concentration and getting bored was due to the structure of the question air . Most of the questions except the last one were closed-ended and particularly matrix questions. This led to the creation of monotony, which led me to answer the questions in a pattern since the answer choices were almost the same for all questions (Walliman, 2011).

What did you think of the open-ended questions? Were they clear? Did they seem leading? Did they seem concise or too wordy?

In my opinion, I can describe the open-ended question as being very clear and also non-leading. The questions we clear since they each question focuses on one particular theme at a

time and also non-leading because the statement presented offers options for all possible answers that a respondent could give. The statements to be answered are very straightforward and with very minimal irrelevant wording and for this reason the survey lacks wordiness. However at some point, I thought that some of the questions were irrelevant and somehow repetitive. For example “I feel I can trust fellow students who are working on their coursework” which I find irrelevant since they are without the objectives of the survey. The question I feel like students who are working on their coursework are like family and I feel like I can rely on other students who are working on their coursework for support display some repetition.

Did you prefer completing the closed questions (or multiple-choice questions) or the open-ended questions? Why?

I preferred answering the open-ended question because they came me room and the opportunity to be more flexible in my way of answering the questions. They gave me the chance to think about what was being asked and did not limit the choices that I was going to give. I had a chance to be honest with my opinion and not only provide a small statement answer for example on whether I agreed or not but also gave me the chance to give reasons on reasons for my stand. This enabled me to offer better insight into why I took a particular stand. I felt like I did not express myself adequately due to the presence of too many closed-ended questions in the survey.

Which methodology do you believe is most useful in the examination of each variable/construct? Why?

The variables need to be a measure of their level of reliability and the level of validity. In this case particularly, I feel that the methods that could be most applicable are logical validity

and content validity. Logical validity can be utilized to measure the validity of the variables by determining whether or not the information collected by the instruments on the various variables

met the performance that was intended . Content validity could be used to gauge whether the content collected had valid representation or if it met the set objectives. To be able to gauge the reliability it is important to measure the accuracy of the instruments used in collecting the data (Bryman & Bell, 2011).

How might this experience influence you when designing your research?

The survey questions presented in the questionnaire provide a couple of lessons for me when designing my questionnaire for research. The first lesson that it provides is in relation to the length of the questionnaire. I found myself being bored and losing concentration due to the length of the questionnaire and this provided the lesson that the length of the questionnaire is very important to consider. The questionnaire I would design would, therefore, be of considerable length ensuring the relevance is maintained, objectives achieved and also not too long since it can be tiring. This experience has also provided me with a lesson on question design. The questionnaire had a lot closed-ended questions and particularly matrix questions which for me acted as a limit to the collection of insightful information and also created monotony leading to boredom. For the design of my questionnaire, I would make it interesting by mixing up the various structures of questions. The closed-ended ones would be at the beginning to create interest while the open-ended ones follow with a few matrix question incorporated in the middle. I would also pretest it to ensure relevance of all the questions.

References

Bryman, A., & Bell, E. (2011). Business research methods. Cambridge New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Walliman, N. (2011). Research methods the basics. London: Routledge.

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