In my study, I plan on conducting interviews with the participants of both control and experimental groups, in order to determine exactly how these Arabic Defense Language courses differ, if at all, in terms of creating a more positive and fruitful education experience. The tangible results of my qualitative study will be the transcripts and recordings of the interviews conducted with these participants, all of which will have unique language used to express their satisfaction (or lack thereof) with the intervention or control portion of the study. With that in mind, I believe that the primary method of data analysis used for my study will be a concept chart.
I plan on using a concept chart to track the number of times specific words are uttered in an interview. Since the effects of the intervention on student satisfaction and overall comfort, there is no strict qualitative scale that will accurately convey the straightforward feelings sought by the researchers from the participants. With that in mind, the interviews will be reviewed after conducting all of them to look for common words relating to students' reactions to the intervention. "Good," "bad," "great," "comfortable," "difficult," "easy," "understandable," "incomprehensible," "effortless," "manageable," and the like are all words that will be examined in terms of how to describe the process as a whole. The frequency of these words will then be placed into the concept chart, with size of concept relating to how often the words were used to describe the intervention.
Reporting Plan
Once the concept chart is made, I will have the list of words most frequently used to describe the intervention (or the control class, as need be). The concept chart itself will be a tremendously helpful barometer to determine which words carry the most emphasis, and offer the closest thing to a consensus among the participants regarding the efficacy of the intervention. These words will be divided among four categories: Group, Word, Frequency Used and Quality (Good, Bad, Neutral). The first category indicates whether the participant who stated the word was in the Control (C) or Intervention (I) group - if the same words are uttered in either group, they will be distinguished by C or I group and counted individually. The second category identifies the word itself (e.g. "good," "comfortable"), and the third category indicates how many times it was said within either control or intervention group. Finally, the word will be categorized by quality; the context of the word will be identified as "Good" (positive), "Bad," (negative), or "Neutral" (indifferent to the intervention).
The pivot table, subsequently, will be organized in descending order of these categories. In the final table, each group will be given separate sections on the table, with each word arranged in order of frequency (high to low). The frequency will be listed next to them, with the final column denoting the quality of the word. This method of reporting the data should yield a fairly accurate representation of the participants' thoughts toward each group. As the feelings of the participants toward the education experience the intervention provides is the primary research objective of this study, these descriptive terms, analyzed and reported in this way, should yield the results we desire.
References
Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research & evaluation methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications.
Shank, G. D. (2006). Qualitative research: A personal skills approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall.
Schram, T. H. (2006). Conceptualizing and proposing qualitative research. Upper Saddle River,
N.J.: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall
