Week 7

Tuesday, 22/2/2011

            Today, there were 3 groups presenting on research methodologies. The first group was Aminah’s and Dixie’s group. They presented about ethnographic research. The word ‘ethnographic’ itself implies that it is a study of the cultural and patterns and perspectives of respondents in their natural settings. In my understanding, ethnographic research requires the researcher to be immersed in the respondents’ setting that he wants to observe. It is a time-consuming research and an exploratory research. As compared to other quantitative research, its purpose is to find relationship or explain theories, but for ethnographic, it is finding new knowledge or information about the cultures or way of life of particular respondents.

            The second group presented on survey research, which is my favourite J. It is a method that is used to ask people to tell about themselves – usually attitudes, perceptions and checklists. But one common problem exists in survey research is in terms of its threats – external factors, internal factors and characteristics of data collector. These threats should be minimized as much as possible to ensure validity and reliability of the findings obtained.

            The third group was my group. Marina and I presented on phenomenology research. Phenomenology research is conducted to know the meaning, structure or essence of the lived experience of a particular person/group of people regarding a particular phenomenon. It describes how the respondent would feel when experiencing a particular phenomenon by conducting in-depth interview to gain access to individual’s life. One example of a phenomenon that can be used in phenomenology research is reflected in the lived experience of online educators – they are to describe their experiences being online educators; their challenges, the advantages and so on. Doing this presentation made me to read further and understand what phenomenology is. Finding a suitable example of the research methodology is a practice for us to identify what is the type of research the researchers employ in their studies.

Week 5

Tuesday, 8/2/2011

            Dr. Izaham continued presenting on qualitative methods and then proceeded to explain about qualitative methods. Qualitative methods include case studies, ethnographic research, historical and phenomenology research. Frankly, I do not really prefer to do qualitative research because I do not know how to categorize the data into specific themes. I do not know how to synthesize a bulk of information into smaller parts. However, I still do interviews to triangulate the statistical data that I gathered from questionnaires. In the future, I hope that I can do qualitative research to gain knowledge on dividing the verbal information.

Today there was only one group presenting on the topic causal comparative, which is the continuation from the last class. It is a complex method for me because I always have difficulties to differentiate between correlational, experimental and causal comparative research. Based on their presentation, what I understand that as the name causal comparative suggests, it is to find cause-and-effect relationship. Compared to correlation, it is just to find any relationship exists between the variables. In causal comparative study, the researcher cannot manipulate the independent variable as it will harm the respondents if we manipulate their diet. It is a useful thing to me because I get to hear about one thing twice as the presenters today presented the same thing as Dr. Izaham did.

Week 4

Tuesday, 25/1/2011

            Two groups presented on the quantitative methodologies today. The first group presented on Correlational Research. I always had the perception that correlational research can also prove one variable causes the other. After listening to them, I realize that correlational research only proves the degree of relationship that exists between the variables, and we cannot say that one causes the other. The entire scatter plot thing helps to understand whether there is a correlation or no correlation exists. We use correlation coefficient to find the relationships. It was just that the example of research that they provided was not up-to-date as it is in the 1960s. Although the topic was interesting, but the findings and the methods employed might not be relevant to our situation now.

            The second group presented on the experimental research. Experimental research is best used to test cause-and-effect relationships. Usually in experimental research, we conduct pre- and post-test to gather the results. In experimental research, we can have independent and dependent variables and manipulate the variable to know whether the result is caused by the variable/intervention or not.

            After the presentations, Dr. Izaham continued his lecture on quantitative methods. This time, he also covered on the topic of survey method, which is the one that I am interested to do. Survey is also called a descriptive research, where it is common in education field. Survey can be longitudinal or cross-sectional. As it is concerned in finding the answer to the question ‘what is’, it is the most favourable method to be employed in education. The survey can be conducted by distributing questionnaires, having checklists or scales. Since it is quite easy to do, I am planning to use survey for my research.

Week 3

Tuesday, 18/1/2011

            Last week, Dr. Izaham cancelled the class because he had to attend to something. For this week, we continued to the most initial and basic part of research – the research methodologies. This is important because every researcher needs to know what type of research they want to do and what kind of methodology they want to employ.

            There are two types of research methodology – quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative research concerns with analytical analysis from verbal data or document analysis. Both methods are reliable, but it is dependent on the researcher what type of research is suitable to investigate the topic the researcher wants to cover. When Dr. Izaham lectured about quantitative methodology, it has somehow refreshed my memory about what I had learned before. The way Dr. Izaham put it was more comprehensible and easier for me to understand as he gave examples to illustrate what he said. The lecture was presented in a way that compared quantitative and qualitative research that enables me to differentiate both of them.

            Quantitative research methodologies can be done through 5 ways – experimental, correlational, causal-comparative, single subject, and survey. These methodologies are great to test theories or relationship, as they are very rich in numbers. For my research proposal, I would like to do quantitative research, but so far, I am still not confident to employ experimental, correlational or causal-comparative because I am not quite sure how to analyze the data. I have the perception that these methodologies are very difficult to do and very complex. Therefore, to be on safer side, I think I would go for survey research which is not that complex. But still, it is still too early to decide on the methodologies because we have not discussed about data analysis yet. Maybe after I have understood how to analyze the data, I will be interested to do research using those methodologies.

Week 1

Tuesday, 4/1/2011

            This was the first class of the semester as a Masters student. I felt quite nervous because the classmates were all new to me. But thank God, knowing that Dr. Izaham will be the instructor for this course made me felt a bit calm as he had taught me twice during my degree before. I am glad at least I see familiar faces in the class.

            As for the first class, after a short ice-breaking session, Dr. Izaham explained what the course is all about. As its name suggests, I know that this is a research class, where we need to learn all terms and things related to research. I had had this course during my degree, but I am sure that this class will cover more in-depth about research methodology. The assignments for this course include article review, group presentations, test, and the biggest portion of marks will be on the Research Proposal. We had a little introductory lecture on what research is all about. As mentioned by Dr. Izaham, research is a diligent search that uses scientific investigation and study to discover facts. We do research when we want have identified a problem and wanting to find the solution for it. Or maybe we want to test some theories or maybe we are just curious to know about something which is pertinent and contribute to the respective field.

            Overall, I am glad that we have this course at the first semester because it will be very helpful for us in doing our dissertation later on. This exposure to research methodology will aid me to understand more about how to analyze the data as well as the methodologies used in research. I hope I can gain as much knowledge and information as possible from this class and I am looking forward for Dr. Izaham’s lecture next week!