One of the greatest pitfalls of sending a voluntary email questionnaire to teachers is simply the rate of return. Being a busy teacher myself who doesn't often have time to check my email during my teaching day, let alone take a survey, I know that not all of my subjects, no matter how nicely I ask, will end up completing the survey. This may result in a thin data set and a threat to coming up with credible results. One way to address this is to think carefully about timing. I don't want to send the survey, for example, over the weekend or on a Friday afternoon. Because we have an advisement period on Wednesdays and teachers might have some time during that hour, I plan on sending the survey out next Wednesday morning. I have also considered offering cookies as a bribe for completing the survey.
It may also be difficult to generalize from the data what factors encourage SLMS-teacher collaboration. My subjects are complex individuals who are unique in lots of ways (age, gender, length of career, past experiences, attitudes, etc.) while my survey, though reliable and consistent, is short, simple, and has a lot of multiple choice questions. I may not get the depth of answers that will allow me to truly find out what is going on. To combat this, I added the option of filling in"other" boxes on many of my questions, and did add a few short answer boxes as well. I am hoping that the combination of multiple choice and short answer will result in the appropriate depth for a pilot study.
Another pitfall of qualitative studies is the transferability of the results to other situations. Because I am doing a local study of one high school with unique characteristics, the findings may not be applicable to other high schools even within my own district. In my discussion of findings, I will need to be sure to include demographic information about my school so others can determine if their situations are similar enough to consider the findings useful for them.
One of the benefits of being an insider researcher is that you know the terrain and schedules of your peers. :) I've picked up a few hints from your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI think the "Other" with short text option is excellent. It's a good compromise - a way to get unique responses without requiring that someone take time to write long answers.
Transferability is always one of the issues, but in education, there are probably many salient factors that are similar across situations. So a good description will cause many readers in other situations to nod with familiarity. Balancing that with noting factors that are likely to be unique is the art and craft of what you are doing as a qualitative researcher. Just like the choice of adding "Other" + short response to your closed questions.