ASSIGNMENT
Overview
Developing meaningful research questions is important for the qualitative researcher. Since individual interviews are the focal point of qualitative research at Liberty University School of Education, it is imperative that beginning researchers learn how to write, ask, record, and transcribe interview questions. For this assignment, you will be focusing on just the development of the interview questions.
Instructions
To provide background information for this assignment, the qualitative researcher, before starting the research, must develop the problem statement, the purpose statement, and then the research questions that will guide the study. So, if the topic for a hypothetical research project is “Doctoral Support Sources,” then a problem statement could be, “The problem is that doctoral students do not utilize the various sources of support available to them.” With the problem in mind, the researcher would then develop a purpose statement for the proposed research. The purpose statement could be, “The purpose of this case study is to understand the sources of support available to doctoral students at Liberty University.” Next, the researcher should develop research questions. A research question for this proposed study could be, “What are the sources of support utilized by Liberty University doctoral students?” Knowing that the interview is the central component of qualitative research, the researcher would also start to develop interview questions that will ultimately answer the research questions. While all of these steps are vital to qualitative research, for EDUC 817, we will focus on just qualitative data collection and analysis. Thus, we will start your introduction to qualitative data collection by developing good interview questions.
For this assignment, you will be developing five good, open-ended (NO yes/no questions) interview questions. The topic of these questions should focus on asking your classmate about support sources/resources they found to be especially helpful during the doctoral program process. These questions will be used in a peer interview in Module 4: Week 4.
