high school student’s relationship through the utilization of teacher candidates’ sample

 high school student’s relationship through the utilization of teacher candidates’ sample

Research Methodology

Introduction

Methodology chapters outline essential aspects that are related to the current research study. The research question is outlined and justified based on empirical and theoretical evidence explored in the literature review section. This section also describes the designs to meet the objectives of the study. The population used in the study is also well elaborated and rationale behind the sample size. Data collection, strategic approaches used in the collection of data, and the instruments used are also widely explored in the section. Results analytical strategies used in the study are also in detail analyzed critically. The chapter also explores in detail issues surrounding validity, reliability, and the ethical considerations of the respondents. Lastly, the generalizability of the research results is also discussed in the study.

The study intends to explore the high school student’s relationship through the utilization of teacher candidates’ sample. The topic requires an in-depth consideration of the teacher-students experiences of the environmental and situational elements that constitute the concepts of care within a school setting. As such, the study will aim to uncover how students who have graduated from high school and joined teacher colleges perceive and define caring teachers while they attended high school. Accordingly, the methods employed address the study’s objectives: to explore college students’ understanding of teacher care and their attitude toward various approaches; to compare students’ current knowledge of care and relationships to Noddings’s model and to identify the similarities and differences between school students’ perception of teachers’ practices of care and Noddings’s care theory. I decided to interview teacher candidate students because I have immediate access to them, and it will save me resources.

Methodology and Design

A qualitative research design will be used in the study. The approach is critically developed to explore the high school student’s attitudes towards their teacher’s relationality and teaching. The results examined will be based on the context of Noddings’s theory. Purposive sampling will be developed based on the assumption that, the few years after high school has given the teacher candidates some time to reflect on their feelings and a wider perspective on their former teachers in comparison to current secondary students, and they are readily available to me as the researcher. Additionally, the choice of the sample focused on the teacher candidates’ voices and attitudes to gain an insightful understanding of their school learning encounters, focusing on the aspect of teacher care to address the study’s research questions (Van Manen, 1990).

A phenomenological inquiry is different from most alternative approaches because it is not asking about things like beliefs or dispositions, both of which assume that the world is fundamentally separate from the perceiving subject.  That separateness is what would allow a question to have a “belief” about the things of the world. Instead, phenomenology understands the elements of the world – phenomena – to be partially produced by intentionality, a directedness of consciousness (Mayoh & Onwuegbuzie, 2015). Teacher care or student-teacher relationships as such are not objects in the world, analogous to rocks or planets, and so a research methodology capable of tackling this kind of thing, produced by intentionality, is required. Phenomenological inquiry, therefore, needs to access the worldly things and the intentionality of an agent at once, not separately. Methodologically, this required two steps: a description and a phenomenological reduction. According to Katsirikou & Lin (2017), phenomenology entails an in-depth analysis of the study of structures experienced from a personal point interview. Firstly, the act of description helps bracket prior knowledge about teacher care so that the phenomenon can show up as itself for examination. Secondly, the phenomenological reduction is a contemplative practice through which phenomenologists liberate themselves from being captives of their minds. It helps free them from the reifications of the personal attitude and gains their own opinions of explaining real and virtual objects (Smith, 2001). The approach enables the researcher and understands and distinguishes the positive and negative attitudes expressed by the respondents.

Population and Sample Size

The aim of the study is to have an unbiased representative sample that credible and fair that can be generalized. In line with the studies conducted by King, Harrocks, and Brooks (2018) and Seidman (2006), a total of 10 participants will be selected from students enrolled in a teaching program, i.e., teacher candidates who are endowed with experience and mature, but young enough to be manageable. Purposive sampling method will be used in the study to ensure the respondents have the much-required information (Palinkas et al., 2015).

To avoid gender bias, the participants will be of both genders, i.e., five females and five males. The teacher candidate choice participants will be the most appropriate sample. The respondents will have experience both as a student in secondary school and as a teacher candidate. Initially, I will send a general email to all the students in the college to request their participation in the research interview (the email is attached in the appendix). I will acquire the mass email address that contains all the students’ emails from the dean’s office. It will make it easy for me to send the same request email to all the students in the college at once. However, since the study only requires 10 participants, the first fifty students will be shortlisted.

Based on the gender consideration, ten respondents will be randomly picked from the fifty selected students. However, the forty students exempted from the research interview will be asked open questions on teacher caring experiences to help select the participants to set aside for replacement of the selected students if any of them fails to show up or complete the interview process. Willingness, attitude, and availability of the respondents during the interview will be used to select the required sample. The in-depth understanding, regarding the question, asked, and the level of student-teacher experience will be explored and facilitate the selection of an informative example of ten participants.

Although students in high school might seem more appropriate for this research, teacher candidates were more relevant based on their advanced level of maturity, experience in the field of teaching, and researcher ease of access to them compared to students. Current undergraduates in teaching programs have had the opportunity to enlarge their conceptions of care such that they’re less likely to confuse an ‘easy’ teacher with a ‘caring’ one. College students have more exposure, and therefore, they are in a better position to respond to research interviews with exactness than high school students. Teacher-care experiences are brief, and students may judge them negatively; therefore, it would be necessary to interview students who have had additional teacher-care incidences at the secondary level.

Upon selection, I will rely on specific email addresses of the ten participants as a mode of communication and personal contacts for instant notification when necessary. I will be the contact person and will use an email account for communication. This will ease communication, provide immediate feedback, and offer a chance for participants to ask clarification questions or provide additional information on their experience.

I will acquire authorization from my dean in the College of Education to conduct personal interviews within the school environment but on an individual basis as opposed to assembling all the participants (Cook-Sather, 2002). This comports with other phenomenological studies conducted in colleges to avoid wasting the students’ time. I will conduct in-depth semi-structured interviews to gather insights on the phenomenon of teacher care and the student’s experiences with caring teachers. The study will be conducted through open-ended questions and the answers recorded for clarification purposes. A combination of both writing and audio documented approaches will be used to gather the information from the respondents.

Participants’ information is vital for references; however, confidentiality and anonymity should remain intact. Qualtrics will be used to collect demographic data of the participants, i.e., names, age, type of high school attended, gender, race, and current academic level. This information will be useful to distinguish the participants and is essential in determining a teacher-student relationship, especially for students of different races. Besides, some demographic info is crucial in determining the teacher-student experience at the secondary level. However, the attributes will not be a factor in the selection criteria. Qualtrics is a secure platform, and therefore, the information shared through the platform will be confidential and secure. It will be the responsibility of the participants to find a device, be it a smartphone or a computer to access the software to input their demographic details as requested.

Data Collection and Analysis

Primary data will be generated via individual interviews of the study participants. These interviews will be semi-structured, which means they will entail opening with general questions regarding the students’ encounters with the secondary school level learning process, particularly the caring teacher phenomena. The interview questions will proceed flexibly and fluidly, depending on specific student responses (Van Manen, 1990). I will use a semi-structured interview to avoid unnecessary problems and guide the respondent through the interview process. However, this interview process will allow clarification questions to acquire essential information that requires more details (Roulston, 2013). The interview questions to be used in the research process are attached in the appendix.

The interviews will allow room for the participants to provide excellent details on the questions asked and point out some recommendations that can help solve the issue of caring among teachers. I derived the interview questions from research on teacher caring aspects and personal exposure to teacher caring. Additionally, of course, the problems have borrowed some concepts from Nodding’s ethics of caring. Although the caring element is a universal concept among all students, the questions will give me a chance to make some follow-ups on the clarification information. The questions relate to the phenomenon of interest in that they explore all aspects of caring in a teacher-student bond in a bid to understand the impact of caring at the secondary level.

In Husserl’s phenomenological studies and logical investigations (Smith, 2001), it is hard, if not impossible, to control participants’ biases. Morse and Richards (2002) indicate that phenomenological research designs adopt a descriptive form and enable the study participant to experience what is happening as a way to maintain consistency with the use of the phenomenology interviewing methodology. Phenomenology interviews rely on the respondent’s memory and reflections to explore their experiences through the use of descriptive and structural questioning. The expressive form of research designs describes situation or phenomenon and aims to make predictions accurately; however, it does not determine cause and effect as in experimental research (Kafle, 2011). Therefore, I will conduct a face-to-face interview with all the study participants, lasting approximately one hour for each student. The conversation will be recorded using a digital audio radio device followed by a transcription. Open-ended (descriptive) questions are valued as they allow more comprehensive and in-depth responses as opposed to correlational studies and systematic reviews (King, Horrocks & Brooks, 2018). As part of the interview, I will ask the participants on their views about the caring levels required to establish a comfortable environment in learning

The hermeneutic phenomenological approach and framework will be used in the analysis of the data collected from the interviews with the primary intention of identifying themes as well as finding life-world themes in their reflections (Van Manen, 1990). The life-world existential relating to the phenomenon of teacher care within this study will be uncovered by identifying the thematic statements in the transcriptions. Through listening to and reading the study participants’ transcripts, I will be in a position to identify the portions of the interview that are relevant to the teacher care concept at a secondary school level. It is from the conversations that the research themes will be annotated (Van Manen, 1990; Smith et al., 2009).

The themes and sub-themes will be extracted using thematic analysis as described by Braun and Clarke (2006). It provides six steps that guide the analysis, which includes; familiarizing oneself with the data, generating codes, identifying themes, reviewing themes, defining themes, and finally, writing up the themes. The thematic analysis will identify essential patterns in the responses and use the themes to address the research issue. I will read the transcripts, analyze every response, and combine them to come up with concepts that prove essential to the research. As such, the themes and subthemes will be extracted upon analysis of the data from the participants. This method of extracting themes provides flexible ways of analyzing data and allows different methodological backgrounds used by researchers. It works through assigning preliminary codes to the data as a way to describe the content under research Braun and Clarke (2006). The codes are useful when dealing with volumes of unstructured data collected from research participants. The codes will help in analysis through relating concepts collected from the respondents. It works through generating a codebook which will contain the set of codes to be used and the standards to apply each code. Currently, there exist several software tools that help extract codes such as ATLAS.ti, Dedoose, among others. I will use ATLAS.ti to derive codes from assigning to the themes and sub-themes (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

I will transcribe the interview questions and response for future reference and clarification, storage for results evidence, and can also be used by other researchers as a reference. Through transcription of the participants’ interviews and the subsequent reviewing of their reflections, I will be in a position to come up with themes and sub-themes to be used in the research. In general, the methods used to collect and analyze data are geared towards reviewing the teacher-student relationship at the secondary level, i.e., the effect of teacher caring among students at high school. The descriptive method and narrative analysis used in the research will guide the data collection and the analysis process. The methods will help distinguish the positive and negative attitudes from the participant’s responses (Giorgi, 2012).

Ethical Considerations

According to Walker (2007), the two main ethical principles applicable to the phenomenological approach are beneficence and non-maleficence, which dictate that others should cause no harm despite situation circumstances. In the ensuing research, the intentions of dealing with the subjects are harmless. However, I will appreciate that the discussion may be traumatic, troubling, and stressing, and thus may be harmful to the participants. Any respondent with such experience will be advised to withdraw from the research.

Furthermore, study candidates will be informed of the purpose of the study before being recruited to participate in the study. First, I seek permission at the college to collect data and then obtain the students’ consent to be interviewed and inform them that the dialogue will be recorded, which will help in gathering and interpreting the discussion data accurately. The study participants will be coded to conceal their identity and avoid bias in the data analysis. Additionally, I will be conscious of the time requested for interviewing participants, and each interview will be scheduled to take approximately one hour. I will be mindful by assessing the participants for any signs of distress while discussing sensitive matters, considering that previous experiences may cause participants to feel stressed or troubled. Privacy will also be upheld by keeping the respondents anonymous throughout the study.

Reliability, Validity, and Trustworthiness

Several methods used in data collection and analysis, including descriptive, phenomenological reduction, narrative, and thematic analysis, are well thought and researched to ascertain their reliability in the research. The selection criteria of the 10 participants, both genders, will be done in an open way to avoid biases in the selection process. While facilitating the interviews, I will ask questions directed to extract responses that relate to teacher caring and incidents that they have previously encountered. However, I will ensure the participants are free to speak out their minds. This will create an atmosphere that makes the participants feel free and comfortable to give reliable accounts of their experiences with their teachers in high school.

Validity and reliability in phenomenological research are essential because they make dependable knowledge claims and help the studies gain acceptability in the world. Since I will rely on the in-depth accounts of the participants in the subject matter to derive the generalizations, the validity and reliability of the data will be determined by colleagues who are close friends to ascertain the validity of the interview interpretations. This will help make a judgment using verified data and exact. It would be demotivating to ask creditability questions to the respondents during the interview; however, clarification questions will be pivotal in determining the truthfulness of the responses.

Phenomenological research designs are flexible since their results are gathered from respondents with personal perspectives concerning a particular phenomenon, which makes the study replicable (Giorgi, 2012). Since phenomenology research cannot avoid biased responses, l will analyze the research finding’s credibility through a personal view of incidents and experience of caring occasions. The responses will also be verified through requesting at least two colleagues to review the findings as well as seeking alternative explanations, which, according to Levy (2016), can help ascertain the credibility of the data. I will apply techniques of clarification, recounting to the respondent their secondary school lived experience attitude and focusing their attention during the interviewing process (Seidman, 2006). Additionally, I will include some exact quotes from respondents in the research findings to ensure the quintessence of meaning in this study.

Palinkas, L. A., Horwitz, S. M., Green, C. A., Wisdom, J. P., Duan, N., & Hoagwood, K. (2015). Purposeful sampling for qualitative data collection and analysis in mixed method implementation research. Administration and policy in mental health and mental health services research, 42(5), 533-544.

Katsirikou, A., & Lin, C. S. (2017). Revealing the “essence” of things: Using phenomenology in LIS research. Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries, 2(4), 469-478.