The Brief
I created the brief myself for my Ph.D. thesis. From my own experience as a researcher, I knew that Mixed Methods Research was difficult to execute and could be better taught by the TEFL curriculum.
The study investigated TEFL faculty members’ and Ph.D. candidates’ research approach preferences, and the extent to which the curriculum and the professors of the Research Methodology course met them.
Thus:
- The product was the TEFL curriculum, as taught by faculty members
- The users were the Ph.D. candidates and postdoc researchers
Mixed Methods
My doctoral research projects and dissertation were all conducted using Mixed Methods Research, giving me a wealth of experience of and expertise in this in-demand approach.
The TEFL Curriculum project used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. This was because the study broke new ground, and thus I had to devise my own research instruments in the first phase before deploying them in the second.
Interviews
For the study's first phase I gathered participants' viewpoints on the TEFL Curriculum by conducting over 50 semi-structured interviews, each lasting 20-30 minutes.
The 11 structured questions were informed by the pilot study and provided baseline data on research preferences. During each interview I also followed up on interesting observations with unstructured questions, which influenced the study by revealing new aspects of the user experience.
Each interview was transcribed and analysed with Grounded-Theory approach. This allowed theories to be extracted from the data, which I used to devise a questionnaire for the second phase.
Surveys
I personally devised and administered two online surveys with a combined total of over 250 participants. Both were completed within a month.
The questionnaire consisted of 30 Likert-scale items which I derived from the earlier interview data and pre-existing studies. The items had five underlying dimensions, each linked to one or more research questions.
I used SPSS to enter the survey results for validity and reliability testing. The results were the basis of the nine recommendations I made for improving the user experience of the TEFL Curriculum.