Here you can view the main results of the questionnaires
Research methods
Research methods
The research project you are working on is mixed methods (it includes quantitative and qualitative methods).
Quantitative research methods are generally used on large samples. The aim is to be able to gather general information / general tendencies. It can illustrate what a situation is but not why. Our quantitative instruments are the questionnaires.
Qualitative research methods are generally used on smaller samples, due to the time that they require in order to be carried out. They pay emphasis to details and are often able to illustrate why something is the case. We could say that they put flesh on the bones of the quantitative data. Our qualitative instruments are the interviews.
The benefit of using mixed methods is that we can determine general tendencies from a large population and also have in-depth insight in to possible reasons for these tendencies.
The research analyses methods are also both quantitative and qualitative. The questionnaires will be analysed quantitatively. We will use descriptive statistics (to show averages, standard deviation which we will represent with bar charts / pie charts or similar). This can be done using a number of programmes including Excel and SPSS. A benefit of SPSS is that we can perform analyses such as correlation analyses (which we will do for motivation, in year 2, only).
Research methods you will have learnt by the end of the project
For data collection
The sample size you need depends on several things.
The research project you are working on is mixed methods (it includes quantitative and qualitative methods).
Quantitative research methods are generally used on large samples. The aim is to be able to gather general information / general tendencies. It can illustrate what a situation is but not why. Our quantitative instruments are the questionnaires.
Qualitative research methods are generally used on smaller samples, due to the time that they require in order to be carried out. They pay emphasis to details and are often able to illustrate why something is the case. We could say that they put flesh on the bones of the quantitative data. Our qualitative instruments are the interviews.
The benefit of using mixed methods is that we can determine general tendencies from a large population and also have in-depth insight in to possible reasons for these tendencies.
The research analyses methods are also both quantitative and qualitative. The questionnaires will be analysed quantitatively. We will use descriptive statistics (to show averages, standard deviation which we will represent with bar charts / pie charts or similar). This can be done using a number of programmes including Excel and SPSS. A benefit of SPSS is that we can perform analyses such as correlation analyses (which we will do for motivation, in year 2, only).
Research methods you will have learnt by the end of the project
For data collection
- Conducting interviews (qualitative)
- Administering questionnaires (quantitative)
- Transcribing interviews – writing up interview scripts, as you will have learnt, takes time and patience. Usually we transcribe in the original language. (qualitative)
- Coding interview transcripts. This is the process of looking for common phrases or themes in our data / transcripts. We kept our interviews in this project simple and so we first separated information on motivation (positive and negative) from information on anxiety (alleviating and provoking) and the looked for individual strategies / behaviours mentioned by the interviewees (qualitative – as this is lexical)
- Noting frequencies of themes / items stated from within the interview data (quantitative – as this is numerical)
- Inputting questionnaire responses into EXCEL for statistical analyses.
- Transferring data from EXCEL into SPSS and conducting descriptive statistics analysis.
- Preparing presentations of results for an informative talk
- Preparing a research study in written format (including conducting a literature review, learning to describe methods & methodology, learning to conduct analyses and present the results, describing implications)
The sample size you need depends on several things.
- The available population size – the smaller the available population, the larger the % needed (generally) as the margin of error goes down as the sample number goes up.
- Most statisticians agree that the minimum sample size to get any kind of meaningful result is 100. If your population is less than 100 then you really need to survey all of them.
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