CHAPTER
III
RESEARCH
METHODOLOGY
3.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter aims to demonstrate
the method used in carrying out the study, and also to give particular emphasis
to the analysis of data. This chapter
will also deal with the issues of the research design chosen for the study as
well as the rationales for the design. Besides that, the context of study,
sample, instruments, data collection, research procedures, and data analysis
will also be discussed in this chapter.
3.2 RESEARCH DESIGN
In this research, approach used by
the researcher is a qualitative approach in nature. In this part, the
researcher will discuss briefly about the advantages and the reasons why the
researcher plans such research design. In this study, the researcher has employed
first, pilot study and second, the actual interviews which will be employed
later. Since this is a new study, it is thus essential for the researcher to
test the draft of the interview questions, so that she can identify either the
research questions are answered, or not, and to improvise the draft for the
real interview session.
There
are a few advantages identified by the researcher for employing the qualitative
design. Since the study needs the researcher to collect the data from the administrators
of the political pages, qualitative design allows the researcher to meet the
informants face to face. Meeting face to face during the interviews enables
researcher to understand what the informants are actually saying in giving
their opinions. Other advantage is qualitative design allows the researcher to
save time since informants can be met directly. Qualitative design also has a shorter turnaround time in advance. In addition, the other
reason is this approach is best suit to the research essentially because it unlocks
the door towards discovering the substances taken into consideration in the
posts in the political pages. According to Creswell (1994: 2), qualitative
study “focuses on the understanding of the social phenomenon from the
perspective of human participants in the study”. Furthermore, for qualitative
design, in reality, there are many things that cannot simply be explained
numerically which need explanation, justification and description to add more
information or to make the findings meaningful and to be understood. The
research should be descriptive and explainable to the readers with the
reflections of the formers’ studies and framework which are appropriately
chosen for the study.
Based on the
advantages, the researcher is convinced that qualitative is the best design to
answer and explains the research questions and next, to proceed with the
research qualitatively.
3.3 CONTEXT OF STUDY AND SAMPLE OF SELECTION
The research sample is crucial for
every research as it provides the evidence for the study. The context of study
selected is the six (6) political pages in the social network sites (SNS). The
six pages are: Saya Sayang Tun Mahathir, Saya Sokong Buletin Utama TV3, Saya
Boikot Buletin Utama TV3, Analisis Politik Semasa, Milo Suam, and Otai
Reformasi 2.
3.3.1 The respondents
There
are six (6) respondents for this research who are the administers of the pages.
They will be interviewed by the researcher in six separate interviews. For
pilot study, the researcher chose chatbox
as a mean to collect her data. The reasons they are chosen are they are the
administers of the pages, and they know why the posted the posts onto their
pages.
3.3.2 The context
The
above-mentioned 6 pages are chosen mainly because they are pro-government,
anti-government, and neutral (means not bias). The researcher plans to capture
the voices of these three different schools of political thoughts which will
include 6 pages in the facebook. In addition, these 6 pages are mainly themed
and based on Malaysian context and issues such as ethnicity, rights, new policy
and contributions.
3.3.3 The samples
The
researcher will print screen the posts which are related to the themes set for
the analysis of the data later. She wants to analyze samples which are themed
as: ethnicity, rights, new policy and manifestos.
3.3.4 The language of interview
Language choice is the main issue
in the interviewing sessions and the researcher needs to be aware of the
linguistic background of the respondents like what is/are the language(s) they
speak. In determining the interviews session runs smoothly, the researcher
plans to conduct it in the Malay language for the interviews. However, English
language will be taken into consideration if the respondents agree to conduct
in that particular language.
Since all the
respondents are Malaysian, the researcher considers using Malay and English language
for the interviews. In this way, they can express their thoughts freely in that
language. Research carried out by Scollon and Scollon (1981) in Trinch (46:
2003) has found that there are different cultural norms and ways of speaking
that are often misinterpreted in intercultural communication. The researcher
has to be selective in determining the language of interview that will be used
in this research to prevent any instances of misinterpretation and
misunderstanding especially when it deals with the interview transcription in
the later phase of analysis.
In
short, the above discussions include explanations on the respondents, context
of the study, the samples, and language of interviews for data collection of
this study. Reasons for the choice of the places have been stated by the
researcher in this section.
3.4 RESEARCH INSTRUMENT
The
key tool for this study is audio recordings. Audio recordings allow the data to
be archived. In the data transcription
process, the researcher can wind and rewind certain sections that are difficult
to transcribe. The recordings of the voice particularly for the interviews are done via voice recorder. Thus, the methodology
that is used to collect the data by means of voice recording is interview. In
this research, the researcher chose interview to collect the data for this
research. Through this mode, we get to know other person, learn about their
experiences, feelings and hopes that they live in (Kvale 1996:5).
There
are few interview types. They are personal, telephone, and mailed interview. This
study will employ face-to-face semi-structured interview for two main reasons
which are firstly, the interview questions will be posed directly to the respondents
and secondly, semi-structured interviews will be conducted to build rapport
among the respondents and the researcher. Kvale (1996) explains that “semi
structured live interviews” is defined as
An
interview whose purpose is to obtain descriptions of the life world of the interviewee with respect to
interpreting the meaning of the described phenomena.
(Kvale 1996: 5-6)
According to Kvale too, the
interviewer is described as a ‘traveller’ who can “illustrate the implications
of different theoretical understandings of interview research” (2006:3). The
interviewer digs a lot of information through leading questions and through the
unexpected answers from the interviewees.
3.5 DATA COLLECTION
Triangulation is taught to be very
essential in order to make the research valid and reliable. The researcher
plans to collect the data through observations, documents (print screen of the
posts), and in-depth-interview to collect the data.
Observation
will allow the researcher to sort out the themes for her data collection, and
next, to have background information of what actually the issues being posted
in the pages. In addition, she can observe the language used in the posts in
the pages since this study will study on (im)politeness linguistics area. In-depth
interviews are also planned to be conducted as the approach to gather the data at the length of 60 to 120
minutes for each interview which the total time of interviews will enable the
researcher to collect rich data that will be sufficient for the analysis of
data.
3.6 RESEARCH PROCEDURES
The research procedures are shown in the following diagram:
3.7
DATA ANALYSIS
Data
analysis will begin once the data collections are completed by the researcher.
After collecting the data in the form of interviews, the researcher will transcribe
the interviews carefully. The interviews will be transcribed carefully so that
there will be no missing data when the transcribing take place later. At this
stage, the researcher will try to identify patterns that emerged from the data
collected. At the same time the researcher will attempt to relate the
interviews to the literature. The transcribed data will be analysed accordingly following the framework set
for this study.
3.8 CONCLUSION
To
recapitulate, in this chapter, the researcher has presented the research design, the context of study, sample, instruments,
data collection, research procedures, and data analysis
References
Cresswell,
J., W.,1994. Research Design Qualitative
and Quantitative Approaches. California. Sage Publications.
Kvale S. 1996. Interviews:
An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Sage Publication.
Trinch, S., L., 2003. Latinas Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence.
Volume 17 of Impact, Studies in
Language and Society. Volume 17. Benjamins Publishing
Company.
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