Scenario 1: Researching overseas students

Question

A 3rd year undergraduate psychology student wants to do a qualitative project on how overseas students adjust to the higher educational system in Britain and asks for your advice. She is from Poland and moved to the UK to study. She has decided to use thematic analysis but has not made up her mind about whether to use interviews or qualitative surveys to collect the data.

1) The fact that she is Polish…

Is certainly going to give her a biased perspective, and she has to be very careful not to let it contaminate her reading and interpretation of the interviews
Means that she is going to be more empathetic to her participants
Means she needs to think about how her experiences as an overseas student have informed her perspective and analysis and account for how that has influenced her research in her write up of the research
She can only speak to Polish students because she can only understand their perspective

2) If she conducted interviews...

She should develop an interview schedule in advance and stick to it completely
She should try and respond to what the interviewee says to create more information
She should ignore any signs of participant distress
She should conduct at least 50 interviews

3) What would be one of the practical advantages of using qualitative surveys rather than interviews?

It would provide her with richer data
It would allow her to collect a much larger sample
She could conduct the survey online and not have to transcribe her data
It would be great for controlling extraneous variables

4) When using thematic analysis to analyse her data at first she identified mainly ‘semantic’ codes. Semantic codes...

Capture the surface meaning of the data
Capture a more conceptual/researcher-driven interpretation of the data
Are more objective than other types of codes
Are the most difficult codes to construct

5) If she is successful in her research, she should be able to...

Provide us with a rich detailed description, showing us the different facets and complexity of the participants’ experience
Repeat the research at another time in another setting and get precisely the same outcome
Generalize her findings to the wider population of overseas students
Predict which type of overseas students is likely to succeed in their studies

Answer 1

Means she needs to think about how her experiences as an overseas student have informed her perspective and analysis and account for how that has influenced her research in her write up of the research

She should try and respond to what the interviewee says to create more information

She could conduct the survey online and not have to transcribe her data

Capture the surface meaning of the data

Provide us with a rich detailed description, showing us the different facets and complexity of the participants’ experience