Research Proposal Meeting

I haven't written much in the past two months because the only thing I had to do concerning my dissertation was schedule and hold my research proposal meeting.  If I weren't job hunting in that period of time, I would have considered those past couple of months as an extended break.  During this hiatus, I received some advice of how to constructively occupy the time and I took some of that advice.

Hiatus Advice

1. Submit some manuscripts to scholarly journals.  A colleague and I had been planning to submit our co-written paper to a journal for a few months, and this hiatus provided the best opportunity to finally submit it.
2. Begin another research project.  I played around with this idea, coming up with different research questions involving the same population under investigation in my dissertation.  I limited myself to brainstorming research questions and doing some preliminary literature searching.
3. Submit proposals to conferences.  In my case, the deadlines for proposals for many upcoming conferences had already passed.  I spent a little time brainstorming ideas for proposals for conferences during the 2013/14 academic year.
4. Work more on the pilot study.  I already had two opportunities to work on my pilot study since August, and I didn't want to adjust or add anything more being so close to the research proposal meeting.

I spent a great deal of my hiatus in the job hunt, and incidentally I accepted a position just the day before my research proposal meeting.  To sum, the last month was an emotionally draining one filled with anticipation.  Along the way, I received a couple other job rejections and requests for interviews.

I also spent the last month brushing up on my Spanish skills using Duolingo, a free online language  learning software program.  I did this for a number of reasons both personal and professional, and I found it more enjoyable than I expected.

One of the more useful ways of spending my hiatus time was working on my professional blog.  I took the opportunity to explore my ideas about incorporating multiliteracies into second language education, a second research interest of mine.  I wanted to practice my skills of curriculum development with this new idea as well as learn more about the development of education technology and its effects on learning and pedagogy.  This exercise actually prepared me for the job I just accepted.

Research Proposal Meeting
On my birthday, February 14, my co-chairs gave me the green light to schedule my research proposal meeting with my dissertation committee: 3 faculty from my department, 1 from another department within the College of Education, and 1 from my cognate area of Sociocultural Anthropology.  I used Doodle to schedule it, and found that March 7 was the best earliest time for everyone.

By request, I sent 4 committee members a digital copy of my proposal (the first 3 chapters of my dissertation) and 1 member a hard copy in a 3-ring binder.  They all received their copies within a week of February 14.

A series of winter storms swept passed Iowa, about one a week, leading up to my proposal meeting.  One of these storms prevented one of my co-chairs from attending the meeting, but the meeting proceeded well without her.

I spent the first 10 minutes presenting a synopsis of my research proposal, ending it with some of my concerns.  And over the next 80 minutes, I discovered that my concerns overlapped quite well with my committees.  Nobody's questions or concerns took me by surprise, and I was very happy to receive such constructive feedback.  I'm not sure how typical this is for PhD candidates as I haven't met many who like to share details about their meeting.

By the end of the meeting, I had a good idea of how to make changes to my first 3 chapters before collecting the data.  At that time, it seemed like these changes would take a few months and I could start collecting data by mid to late summer 2013.  I was surprised after reconnecting with my co-chairs that I did not have to make as many drastic changes as I was ready to make.  The best outcome for me is that it seems that I do not need to go through IRB again.

Today, I just submitted my action plan to my co-chairs.  And if all goes well, I should be able to start collecting data as soon as late spring/early summer 2013.  In the meantime, I will be starting my new job, which will most likely slow things down.  I don't mind as much now that my family and I are more financially secure.

An Interesting Tweet

This past weekend, I received a tweet (on Twitter) to participate in a study that is similar to mine.  The researcher is also a PhD candidate, but she is from a university that I just learned about from a job position announcement last week.  Although the job announcement is mostly irrelevant, I am very interested in this candidate's study.  I am not too worried about our study being too similar because our participant populations have a very low chance of overlapping.

I agreed to take participate in her survey and found that we asked roughly the same demographic questions, but the other research questions differed a little.  Although I am using survey software, my research is more like an interview.  However, at the end of taking her survey, I was asked if I would like to participate in an online interview via Skype.  I agreed and was a bit jealous that her IRB allows her to use an easier method of data collection, although there is a greater risk of losing confidentiality through Skype.

Our studies are also similar in that I assume that we would both qualify as participants in our own studies, meaning I could in mine and she in hers.  However, I am not sure if she would qualify for mine.  We are also similar, I believe, in that I assume that she has worked in the same English Language Fellowship I have.

I wonder about the ethical and other implications of interviewing a participant like me who may know the research theories and frameworks quite well.  How would this benefit or contaminate her data collection?  It is her choice to make as I felt it was my ethical duty to let her know I was conducting research on a similar inquiry.  Perhaps this is someone I can collaborate with once our dissertations are defended and our PhDs earned.  It would be interesting to compare and contrast our studies once completed.

Email Interviews

I have learned an interesting detail about conducting asynchronous online interviews.  Last year, I read through the literature on online interviews to learn that the most common method of asynchronous online interviews was via email.  Many studies have used this approach to collect all or some of their interview data.  However, the Internal Review Board at the University of Iowa acknowledges that email is not a secure method of data collection.  Therefore I run the risk of losing confidentiality through this process.  The literature also mentions this risk; nonetheless, the researchers were able to conduct email interviews.  However, the IRB does not advise this method, and I am not too surprised.  Although I agree that email is not the most secure method of collecting interview data, the risk is not much lower with other methods.  And the University of Iowa's IRB is known to be more cautious than most others.  The main issue here is not contacting participants or sending them questions via email; it is the receipt of written responses.  It is my responsibility to provide my participants with a secure method of answering my interview questions.

My alternative plan is to use a web survey software program supported by the University of Iowa.  This program is widely used by researchers, so I assume that IRB will find this a safer alternative to email.  Although this plan will consume a little bit more of my time, I will be building research skills associated with the utility of web survey software programs.  Perhaps it will end up saving me time at the end of the data collection process.  The lesson I learned is that even though most of the literature reports mostly positive results of a certain data collection method, it may no longer or may not be the safest or best possible way.

Another Pilot Interview

Yesterday, I conducted a very rough pilot interview for mainly one purpose: to get a sense of how long it would take to have a respondent answer all the questions in one sitting.  It was very rough because the respondent did not match my target population well.  He would have been disqualified for two reasons.  First, I know him (too) well.  Second, he had lived in the target country before and had family/friend living there.  Because of these two reasons, I already knew about 1/3 of his answers well and about another 1/4 could not be answered, thus the interview probably went faster than with someone who fit the target population description better.

Anyway, I learned that the fastest a one-sitting interview would probably take is 45 minutes.  I would estimate that it would take at least 90 minutes with a fully qualified participant.  My pilot study from last summer, showed me that about half of the participants elaborated or expanded upon their answers, thus adding 50-100% more to the allotted time.  So a very rough estimate would be 45-90 minutes for uncooperative or reserved interviewees and 90-180 minutes for cooperative and/or talkative interviewees.

Fortunately for me, I do not plan to ask all the interview questions to the respondents in one sitting.  The only way this would happen is if the respondent prefers to get it all done in one sitting and that I have at least 3 hours of my own free time.  I do not expect this to happen often if at all.

I prefer to do a hybrid of synchronous (web-conferencing) and asynchronous (email) interviews.  My pilot respondent yesterday told me he would have preferred to answer all by email, which would help me in terms of not transcribing any audio recordings.  But I do like to engage in a little spontaneous conversation about the topic, especially when talking about concepts that can lead to ambiguous answers.  From this interview, I learned that I should give my participants the option to do more web-conferencing or more emailing.

However, I'm not confident enough yet, so I plan to conduct a few more interviews using both formats so I can find my level of confidence.

Online Interviews

Today I have been reading more in depth about conducting interviews online, and I was quite happy to discover that some of the protocols I used based on my common sense as a researcher are supported by what I am reading.  The purpose of today's post is to share what I am learning about online interviews.

As with most interactions online, there are two types of interviews: asynchronous and synchronous.  The most common example of asynchronous interviews online are email exchanges.  The easiest example of synchronous interviews online to image are Skype or Google Hangout meetings, although web conferences are used more in research.

When I decided to incorporate online methodologies into my study, I imagined the synchronous interviews as the main source of data collection.  This imagination came from taking several qualitative research courses and applying traditional face-to-face protocols to online research.  Although I planned to use emails to help establish rapport and set up the synchronous interviews, I did not think about relying more on emails to collect my interview data...until today.

Looking at my interview questions, there are a few that would be difficult to answer spontaneously in a synchronous interview.  My respondents would answer better if they were given more time to think through their response, and the response itself would be quite lengthy, or so I hope.  I had intended on reserving those few questions for email, but I plan to revisit my research questions to analyze which ones do not call for synchronous interviews.

I still want to do synchronous interviews because my topic covers a lot of fuzzy concepts that I want to be able to clarify for my respondents, and I also want them to clarify their thoughts and opinions as well.  I feel that emails would be a bit pestering if I asked them to clarify, and then to elaborate, and then to elaborate more.  My pilot data has shown me that a few respondents prefer to give short answers, especially in the beginning of the interview.

One of the bigger surprises in the reading was to discover that I was on the right track with building rapport.  To help my respondents in the pilot study become more comfortable with me, I shared my professional website with them to let them know who I am and that I was legitimate in that I was who I said I was, a PhD candidate collecting data for his dissertation.  In addition to that, the literature said I should also make myself more personable or easier to relate to.  In one way, I am in that my teaching experience is similar to my participants' experience and we've lived in the same cultural context in terms of national borders.  The literature further states that the researcher should share family information, which is something that I used to have on my professional site, but I took it off because I'm applying for jobs now and that doesn't seem appropriate.

Based on my pilot study, I feel that conducting online interviews comes natural to me.  And I hope that I can contribute to the social sciences by sharing my experiences and findings from this and future research.  I feel that acquiring these research skills adds to my value as a researcher in addition to the knowledge gained from answering my research questions.

Interviews & Blogs

Earlier this week, I received constructive feedback on Chapter 3 of my research proposal from one of my co-chairs.  Since then, I have made most changes.  Yesterday, I started on rewriting the interview questions and writing a list of features to look in blogs, and I just completed both this morning.

For the past two years, I've had the same interview questions.  Last year, I piloted the questions when I was a visiting professor at the International University of Japan.  I wrote about it here.  Because I thought the interview questions tested well, I felt no need to change them.  However, I have modified most of my secondary research questions, and that was enough to make the old interviewing procedures irrelevant.  I was able to use about two-thirds of those questions, but they were reordered to better fit the new research questions.

I am quite happy with the new interview questions and protocol.  The most noticeable change is that I now have about 5 pages of interview questions for one or two meetings.  Before I had planned to meet with my participants at least 3 times over a 6-month period with a different set of 2-3 pages of interview questions each.  I intend to pilot this new set of questions on a friend who fit my description of a participant, but the only the purpose of this pilot is to see how long the interview could last.

I also wrote up a list of features to look for in a blog written by potential participants of my study.  I feel like I'm charting new territory here as there has been very little written about blog data collection and analysis.  There is a great overlap between the blog analysis and the interview questions, and I hope that will strengthen the validity of my study.

While writing this blog analysis guide, I realized that with the potential blog data of my dissertation, I may have a few studies or even more papers based on the data alone.  I could see this helping me with my research agenda.  Speaking of research agenda, data from my ongoing pilot study has revealed another area of interest strongly linked to my current study.  This has prompted me to keep a more centralized document concerning my research agenda.  At the moment, I have a Word doc, a Google doc, and scraps of paper with ideas for future study.  If I have this many ideas now, I can't image how many I will have when I near completion of my current study.

Returning to the Literature

Last week, I completed my latest revisions to Chapter 1, just one week after doing the same for Chapter 3.  So what about Chapter 2?  That's what I'm working on now.  Chapter 2 is basically the literature review for one's dissertation and is usually the longest chapter.  It's also the chapter that continues to be revised through the entire dissertation process, especially for those like me who have chosen to use a grounded theory approach. 

I have spent the last few days reorganizing Chapter 2 to better fit my arguments in Chapter 1 and my methodology in Chapter 3.  This alone took several hours of outlining, cutting and pasting, and then revising the outlines.  With notes added, but no content added, this nearly doubled my page length.  After removing redundancies and making all my notes single-spaced, the pages returned to the original length of around 45 pages.

Only yesterday did I start adding new content and making concepts and my writing clearer.  I probably added as much as I deleted.  During this process I used a different font for the first draft and another font for the second draft.  Once the entire first draft was revised, resorted, and partially removed, I gave the whole document the same font, a smaller font, which reduced the number of pages to around 40 pages.

This is the minimum number of pages as I anticipate adding more content than I delete.  There are two giant gaps in the literature that must be filled.  The original chapter 2 made no mention of South Korea, which is now a vital target site for my data collection.  Also, the first draft made no mention of online research, which now dominates my research methodology.  Before I can write about these areas, I need to read about them in as much depth as the rest of the contents of the chapter.  Fortunately, my literature searching and selecting skills have improved where I believe I have an ample amount to read for the next several weeks.

When these two areas are added, I may have 10-20 new pages.  But more content will be added to sections already included in chapter 2 as I have collected other resources over the past 6 months.  Some of these came from other classes, such as language planning and sociocultural anthropology, and others came from just keeping updated with several authors, journals, and issues.  Interestingly, Twitter has been a valuable tool to keep updated.  On my Twitter account, I follow journals, authors, and special interest groups in my research interest areas.  I would guess that I learn about a valuable resource to include in my study about once or twice a month.  This is a new sensation for me as it feels like the literature seeks me rather than the other way around.

Although reading doesn't feel as active or fulfilling as writing, I enjoy coming back to certain concepts or issues because, at this point, the literature is now reinforcing the feeling that I am on the right track.