What challenges, issues, concerns, and successes did you experience this week on your research project? This past week has been pretty crazy, so I'm looking forward to some free time over spring break to get things done.   I have been working on my interview questions, however, and I've run into some difficulties.  I'm not sure how many questions to have and some of the wording is illuding me.  Do I make my interview questions short and succinct but have a lot of them? Or, do I include multiple ideas in longer questions? hmm.

Finding Sources and My Constant Nemesis - Time

• What challenges, issues, concerns, and successes did you experience this week on your research project?  

This week I was trying to balance working on my Lit Review and all the work that goes into planning, preparing, implementing, videotaping, and observations associated with student teaching.  It was a big week, and I didn't do quite so well with the balancing act.

I start off my lit review a week or so back by looking for articles.  I had a path in mind, and found a good amount (though not very recent) of sources concerning the information seeking behavior of the Millennial generation.  As I went through the material, I started to focus my study in a little more.  I had started out wanting to see what a group of 20-something Math tutors were doing to plan out careers etc, but decided to focus in on decision making regarding graduate school.  This led me to a couple of articles on seeking information on graduate schools/programs, but not quite as much as I had hoped for.

I will be continuing to look for more relevant sources as my project goes on.  

Analyzing Data

• What methods will you use to analyze your data?

I will be collecting my data via face to face interviews and email correspondence.  Then, I will be coding the responses and comments and using a series of concept maps and charts to compare and contrast the results.  I find Bryman's 4 stages of qualitative analysis to be laid out in a manner that will help guide my analysis.  I will be doing a lot of highlighting and mapping as I go through all my notes and plan to ultimately end with a table created on with google docs that summarizes the results.

• What experience (formal or informal) have you already had with these data analysis methods?

I have very little experience with data analysis in this format.  I have analyzed parts of a text etc, but very limited experience analyzing actual human responses.  

• What questions or concerns do you have about these methods?

One of my biggest concerns is working to find relationships or answers to specific questions/theories I may have in my head while analyzing data and not simply letting the data speak for itself.  Perhaps I am used to the manipulation involved in literary analysis - where two people may interpret a poem or story very differently, and find ways to support both arguments.  I need to remember that I am not looking for a specific result - I will find results after the responses are in and analyze the data as it is.

Ethics

What role will you play as a researcher in relation to your subjects/participants? I will be an involved party in the course of my research.  I will act as interviewer.  These seven participants are my peers and I have a friendly though not personal relationship with them.  I feel that this will make the interview process easier, but it is not without some concerns. What ethical considerations and concerns seem most relevant to your research project? I think concerns of anonymity are probably most relevant to my project.  The questions that I will be asking are not of a very personal nature, but there may be answers the research subjects would rather not have others know.  Because this is a small group of colleagues who are friendly with each other, some may feel comfortable sharing and discussing the interviews with each other and some may not.   What is the best way of addressing these? I will clearly outline the terms of confidentiality to each subject.  Interviews will take place one on one, away from others, or over private email correspondence.  I will make it clear that I will not be using names or other identifiers, and that all data will be kept confidential and only discussed on class assignments - not on facebook or other sites.  Throughout the data collection, I will check in with each subject to make sure that they are feeling comfortable with how the research is going.