I decided to initially collect data by asking two questions to the Stage 1 group:
What is research?
How can research take place?
Participants in the study wrote or drew down their responses on a piece of paper, which they put in a hat. I then went round and got students to take a response back out of the hat so that each student had a response that wasn’t their own. I asked students to read the response in their hand and to say whether they agreed, disagreed or would add anything to it.
The oral comments the students made in this session really added to my understanding of how they understood ‘research’. I hadn’t planned how to record these, as I had’t counted on the conversation being so rich, so I made notes as accurately as I could in my note book, writing down quotations from the students.
If I was to do this again I would try and get someone else to take notes on the conversation – perhaps a colleague. Perhaps the note taking could be done in a visual mind map, or done collaboratively with the students. That way we could have also got consensus that the note-taking accurately represented the conversation.
As it was I did the best I could in the situation. As I’ll be doing thematic analysis, I’m hoping the exact words I wrote down won’t effect the data too much. These were my notes:
