I read this week's Knight reading today and was surprisingly interested by it. While I had considered how important the structure of a survey was, I hadn't realized quite how systematic rigidly structured the existing frameworks are. As I had planned on using a survey as a part of my fictional research for my SHHRC proposal, I re-thought exactly how I would create my survey and, in my mind, completely revamped my research process. Unfortunately, when I returned to edit my proposal to reflect those changes, I realized that the limited space I had faced when writing it had restricted me to a very vague description of the survey to begin with, and I was unable to make any tangible changes to the proposal itself. I found this frustrating because in my mind, my process became much better, but I was unable to translate that improvement into the only non-theoretical element of my research, the proposal. I'm sure this knowledge will be valuable for the final proposal later this semester, but it annoys me that I can't employ it now.
Speaking of frustrating, anyone ever try and work with the Ministry of Education on a research project? I was hoping to gain access to the Ontario School Information System (OnSIS), a frequently cited source in much of the prior research for my proposal. According to the extremely vague guidelines to gain access to the system, I need to apply to a Local User Authority, at least one of whom "must be appointed to each publicly-funded school board". As my local school board is the TDSB, I attempted to find the LUA for them. Of course, it isn't mentioned anywhere on the TDSB website, or anywhere on the wider internet as far as I can see. I emailed some key people from the TDSB website, but of course none of them have responded. I even checked the Toronto Catholic District School Board, which proved equally unhelpful. At this point I don't know who the LUA is, I don't really know how to apply or whether I'm at all qualified to access OnSIS, and I don't even know how to access it if I was granted permission. The whole thing is just a frustrating mess.
Hi Colin,
ReplyDeleteI had similar issues with my SSHRC proposal. Due to the limited space I had trouble outlining and making clear my methodology. And I also struggled with selecting the appropriate method to ensure that my SSHRC proposal research question would be addressed thoroughly.
I used the table on page 89 and 90 in this week's reading of Knight and that was quite helpful. It outlines the benefits, drawbacks, best uses of, degree of anonymity, richness of response, time costs of doing and designing as well as cash costs of self-administered questionnaires using fixed-response or open-ended questions versus using Interviews using open-ended questions or prompts.
I ended up settling on using self-administered questionnaires to hone in my my participant sample then I planned on using Interviews to draw out more information and relevance since my mock proposal was trying to examine if an information system was successfully catering to the needs of a marginalized group.
I also didin't address in my proposal how I was going to communicate with my marginalized group since access to and identification of this group was going to be difficult and would likely be a barrier unless I had money to hire interpreters, but I guess as was mentioned in lecture you need to dream big and work out the small stuff later once you get the SSHRC funding!