Today our topic of discussion is – Research Methods
Research Methods
In this section of methodological inquiry, I clarify the methods I chose to engage with my research community which is ‘the young children’. The method section will be described by providing the context of the site where the research was conducted, followed by a presentation of the sampling, data collection, data analysis and evaluation procedures used in this study.
Site of research
In this research I have observed six (6) children in their natural environment. Three (3) of them were girls and the rest three (3) were boys. Five of them live in Dhaka city which is the capital of Bangladesh and one boy named Mro (name made up for this research) lives in Sonargaon which is a part of Dhaka division. For the
convenience of data collection and transportation, children were all selected mainly from Dhaka, though they all lived in separate areas. My research sites were the participants’ homes, mainly but sometimes we went somewhere out together to bring friendly changes in the observation process.
As the participants were from different families and different environments, the chances of collecting diverse data for my research were higher. Because of my own work schedule and other commitments, it was not possible to maintain fixed timings to visit the participants.
Thus, observational sessions were scheduled according to feasibility of both parties. I used the snowball sampling technique as a way to locate research community insiders. The snowball technique produces a study sample through the process of referrals after the initial contact has been made with the primary participant. In this way my one participant helped me to select another.
A participant girl named Ikra lives in Banani which is one of the crowded areas of Dhaka city; with Dhaka’s congested traffic it took me almost one and half hours to reach their house every time. After a few visits, the family got comfortable with what I was trying to do and I was welcome to stay there as long as I wanted to.
The child was jolly and fun loving, so it was quite easy to interact with her. The surrounding environment was homely which helped me to work without any serious distractions.
Simran is another child who lived in the same apartment where Ikra lives. I always tried to visit her on the same day with the other child (if my observation hours permitted me to), but it was not possible all the time.
The child had a different sleeping schedule and she did not always feel interested to interact (or be present in front of me) with me. Most of her attention was towards what her other two sisters and the young home assistant girl (11or 12 years old) was doing in the other rooms. Thus, working with Simran was not as smooth as it
could have been (which is normal if participants are too young in any research study). Besides, her mother never wanted me to stay longer or I can say for any extra minutes after my observation period was over, mostly because she had to go out for some household works or for the girls’ coaching classes (or maybe she did not want any extra person staying for so long), which bounded me with a sense of ‘time shortage’.
Though she never told me directly to leave early, she expressed that in her facial expressions or by saying that the girls’ should get ready now as they have to go somewhere.
Fuko is the child who was closest to me, he loved me, enjoyed my staying period. Data collection was fun with him all the time.
Sometimes I visited his place and sometimes he came to mine. He enjoyed spending time with my two children, which benefitted me to get a natural environment to observe the child when he was too involved in playing with them.
Sunny another participant boy, assisted me in this journey. I visited their house to collect data which were 15 minutes away from my house. Though his mother was a bit formal all the time, I did not face any problems in collecting data because she never interfered with my work and always kept herself busy in her household work.
Sunny, I must say is one amazing participant as he was too active, doing so many things at a time and most of all kept talking throughout the whole time period. As the research purpose was to collect data on child meaning acquisition process,
I was benefitted by the child talking a lot and getting involved in many activities. It helped me to explore the way he wanted to express something. Mro is the child who lived with his parents and grandparents at Sonargaon. He is the only child of his parents and even the only baby at home. So he was taken care of by almost
all of the family members sincerely. His mother started to show him word books when he started speaking single words. I visited Sonargaon at least 2/3 times per month, and I used to set my observation schedule with him accordingly.
Their family was known to us for many years, so there were no disturbances or discomforts while working with this child. Even his family also tried to help me by giving as much information as possible.
Anna is my own daughter, so I didn’t have to make out time for her exclusively. It might look like, data might be biased as I took my own daughter as a participant, but I personally experienced that she was proven to be beneficial for my data collection process.
As I spent enough time with her I had chances to compare her language development with the other participant children very easily. She sometimes gave me clues about what I can focus on next time when I meet the other children. Even her relationship with her brother ‘K’ helped me to see how she expressed her feelings and make meanings out of contexts while she played or shared things with him.
For example, if she did not want to share a toy or a cookie with her brother, she hid it under her or simply sat on top of it. Later when she saw broken cookie, she expressed her amusement also. So for me, I was not biased towards her, but she added features to my data. Moreover, unlike studying specific developmental areas (like the verb, tense, noun, etc.)
meaning acquisition process needs to be studied keeping in mind that it will end up by expressing what is seen but is not told. It needs to be explored as we know children are expressing meaning, but we don’t know how. And natural setting and friendly environment ensure the success of the inquiry.
My participating children lived in separate areas, belonged to different social and family environments, had separate opinions about toys or other things, or even spent time in their own ways; but what I realized is that despite of their personal differences in my sessions
with them did not differ much in its basic forms. Like how should I approach to their homes, to them and be comfortable both with the environment and the children.
There was no separate room for the children as they were too young to stay alone (this is normal in Bangladesh perspective).
Children do not stay in a single room for a long time, so whenever I went to any of the houses, I used the living room, master bed, guest room or even the veranda also for spending time with them. My focus was only on keeping the participants comfortable and not letting them be aware of the fact that they are being observed by someone.
As Ikra had an elder brother, she used to play with the same toys as her brother, like blocks, cars, broken part of cars etc. Sunny also played with his elder sister’s toys, like musical doll, tea-set, plush toy etc. He had few cars and balls of his own.
In both of the cases the children shared toys as they had older siblings. But Mro and Fuko being the only child had toys of their own choice (or to be more specific as their parents bought them). As they are both boys they had toy cars mainly. If seen carefully it could be realized that children who had sibling(s) had the mentality to share toys and games, but single child had a world of their own.
I had the feeling that the environment was happy and sound for all of them, moreover children of this age group do not get bothered by these issues. But again, children with siblings spent better time as they get play mates. Even they had more vocabularies and language use than the others.
The child Fuko had less vocabularies and he even started talking late as he spent the whole day with the maids. That means surrounding environment and interactions with others are very much important for child’s natural language
As I have mentioned earlier, we had most of our observation sessions at home, but sometimes we went out(me, my children, the participant and his/her mother) to a park, for shopping, to have some snack somewhere only to have a different atmosphere for a change.
That helped me to observe how the child copes up or reacts in a new environment, because I believe that anything monotonous cannot result out in good. Moreover, changes always refresh human mind.
This study is a longitudinal cohort study in nature to study the developmental process over a long period of time. Longitudinal observation research data are collected from the sa me subjects repeatedly over a period of time and the changes are recorded.
I’ve seen most of t he participating children almost from the time they’ve just started talking and continued until they have been able to make sense on their own.
Data collection and sampling
Qualitative data collection methods are important for impact evaluation as they provide information useful to understand the process behind observed results and assess changes in people’s perceptions. Creswell (1994)
places the most common procedures for collecting qualitative data in four categories: observations, interviews, documents, and audiovisual material. And the researcher typically has some kind of framework (may be sub-purposes) that determines and guides the nature of the data collection.
For richness of data and triangulation of findings, I used multiple methods for data collection. Triangulation of methods helps validate the findings by comparing the data from different sources (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017). Triangulation is a strategy that adds rigor, breadth, complexity, richness, and depth to any inquiry (Flick, 2009).
Observations
This research used the “overt’ direct ‘unstructured’ observation as (a) the subject and individuals in the environment knew the purpose of the observation and (b) it looked at natural occurrences and provided qualitative data.
Williams (2007) captured the essence of observation by saying that, an observer of an approached group (the participants) must engage in observing at a level that is more than mere looking. One should put in a constant and conscious effort to capture what is unfolding in front of him/her.
Some questions that helped to do so are like:
a. Who are my participants?
b. How is the setting constructed?
c. How am I interacting with them?
d. What can I do to look beyond the superficial meanings of interactions?
e. How can I get what I am intended to find out?
used the observational method mainly since it is one of the primary forms grounded theory data collection; moreover, it helps to understand phenomenon in their own settings as they occur on their own terms and naturally (Dearing, Waters & Rogers, 2005).
Accordingly, Observation often supplements more structured techniques such as interviewing individuals and groups because this allows the researcher to distinguish between what subjects say and what they do. I systematically observed, meaning making process of the participating children as in particular,
I was interested in finding patterns and the ways in which the children acquire meaning. A good observation should be maintained with high ethical and moral standards and observational researcher should try to understand a phenomena in its own settings and in its natural terms too (Dearing, Waters & Rogers, 2005).
I would go to their respective houses and stay for as much quality time as I could avail to observe the children. One of the key concerns I had during my research planning stage, was the notion of privacy which went along with ethical issues.
Couples of the observant children were well known to me, so their parents did not want me to share some of their family or household conditions with others that were visible to me during my stay at their places. Privacy is an issue which is vital if a researcher is using direct observation as data collection process.
So, their request about keeping things in me along with the children’s actual names was a genuine demand and not a problem at all. During the whole period I wrote down the features or necessary data in short but understable forms in my copies that I made out for all the children separately.
Later, at my free time I transcribed them in detail. Meaning acquisition is not like verb acquisition or acquisition of any grammatical feature that could be recorded continuously with a tape recorder or any video recording system. It is a gradual process that occurs slowly and
children do not keep doing things or say something constantly to express meaning. Children are not likely to sit in one place, they ran all over the house and I had to be very careful about hiding the recorder from their eye sights, as whenever they saw the recorder they wanted to take it, listen and record rhymes, songs and non-sense sounds for fun.
Few acts of smartness (like opening a box, judging a toy car, trying to fix a doll’s head, speaking to someone’s photograph, telling rhymes etc.) have been recorded occasionally. Moreover, children go through the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ too, which means changing behaviour only because they are being studied.
On some days, I could conduct almost five hour long observations and interactions with a particular child (if needed). But on some days simply nothing would happen; that specific child might not cooperate for being pre-occupied with some other plans (like playing with a new toy, going to neighbours’ places to play etc.).
But that was completely alright as children’s such ignorant attitude are also part of their meaning making process. I would sit, talk to the parents, look at children’s art work or write some of my journal entries; even watch the child silently if he remained at home.
Those are afew countable instances as I always took appointments from parents before visiting them. Sometimes I felt eager to wrap up for the day and go home. These are part of any field research, especially if the participants are young children and the task is to pursue them to spend time with you.
Along with fulfilling the goal of reaching a representative sample size for my research, I tried to gain knowledge that would assist me in my journey of understanding the semantic acquisition process of children living in Bangladesh. Overall, I would say, my biggest concern during this entire process of exploration was probably finding participants of the required age group and make the family members allow me to observe them over time.
Finding children, selecting them, their convenience and willingness to talk to me, fixing schedules with them, and their availability were all factors in deciding the participants of this research. Appropriate research participants could only help making the storyline and pathway for any research.
Interviews
I also interviewed the participating children’s parents and/or caregivers, as they spent the maximum time with the children. They have seen me spending time with the children for this long and are used to my work patterns and what I am interested in.
I guided them with some semi structured interview questions and let them express their understanding, thinking and experiences. As almost all the mothers were house wives, I had to pre-schedule the interview time with them according to their convenience.
After the consent of the clients (oral consents), the interviews were audio-taped. I transcribed of the interviews myself. Transcriptions resulted in 30(in general) single spaced transcribed pages. The interviews lasted anywhere between 30 minutes to 50 minutes.
Interviews with them helped to find new perspective and concepts emerged from the conversations.I tried not to keep my interviewing parents waiting as this might make them eager to finish the interview as soon as possible.
This is not a paid project and I did not have to pay my participants. But, to make the children friendly and spend time willingly to me, I loved taking chocolates, toys, stickers, colour pencils and other stuff for them. Throughout the entire data collection process, my toughest challenge had been engaging young participants to share their time and patience with me.
As a whole, the journey was of harmony and participation. For me, talking and listening to my participants, was a journey in reflexivity and humbleness, I wanted to know and understand, what my participants’ thoughts could reflect on the semantic acquisition process of a child’s life. I felt my knowledge and
teachings of higher education only helped me realize that there was a vast of unknowns out there in my research participants that was beyond the bookish and everyday knowledge. And I wanted to know some of it through this journey. I wanted to explore, understand and perhaps assist in co-constructing and the thought and meaning making process of the little angels in the form of participants.
Sometimes I would audio record my journal notes reflecting on the thoughts that would occupy me about the research, the participants, my own privileges and perceived biases. And sometimes I would record an audio note right after I would be done with an interview or a day’s observation schedule to capture the details that would not show up on the written transcripts later on.
For example, the reactions of the participants, disturbances that occurred (sometimes) during the session or any other incidents that had a direct influence on the data collection process; these audio journals are part of the research project also.
Wolcott (1995) noted the importance of such journaling by saying that, “what you do record, record in sufficient detail, that should the need arise, you would be able to report directly from your notes” (p. 99-100). Observations and interviews in turn have their own sets of quality and process that need to be followed for a good and productive outcome.
A researcher must familiarize him/herself with the pertinent literature on the study that is about to commence before starting interviews to collect data. This helps the researcher (in my case, me) to formulate questions that need to be asked. Some general questions that helped me prepare included-
(a) What are the objectives of the study?
(b) What would be the best way to conduct it? (c)Who would be my research participants?
(d) How would I interview them (why, where, when)?
(e) How would I portray myself to my interviewee?
Such questions helped me prepare my conversation with the participants by assisting me in creating a semi structured guide with topics that I wanted to use during the discussion. In this research, answers varied almost for each of the questions as they were asked (to parents or caregivers) to represent the young children’s individual developments.
Moreover, as their semantic development level were different, despite of a semi structured question paper prepared beforehand, many more related questions also came up(depending on observations), which is an expected attribute of such interviews.
Thus, I did not make an extremely structured interview schedule that helped me keep the rooms for in-depth probing in response to my participant’s answers. For me it was more like a list of questions, broken into categories depending on the topic I want to explore.
As a good interview contains both structured and unstructured questions, equally an interview guide and a schedule helped well. Some examples include the following:
1. Have you ever thought of meaning acquisition as a part of child development?
2. Did you notice your child’s meaning making process on purpose?
3. Do the changes of child’s speech development mean anything to you?
I used Bengali language as the medium to ask questions for comfort and ease of competence as both of us decided it beforehand. Standard interviewing rules include proper and formal introduction, greetings, perhaps shaking hands (depending on local practices),
and some warm up conversations, such as the weather (more Eurocentric), or health (Eastern), or something neutral (e.g. Sports) (Alsaawi, 2014). Because of social and religious norms of Bangladesh, people prefer to give ‘Salam’ (a religious greeting for the Muslim community) and I simply go behind this norm before starting the interviews; and few minutes of warm up conversations followed by.
I mentioned earlier that I had to introduce my objectives briefly to the guardians of the selected children before I started working with them. For the brief interview I would generally wait for the mother (usually) to be done with the household chores and come and talk to me freely.
They usually kept themselves free as I always took an appointment with them on their chosen time. We talked mostly sitting in the living room, but if any disturbances occurred, we shifted to the master bed room. This is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote specifically about the abrupt ending of interviews.
Today, I interviewed Sunny’s mother. It was going alright, but when we were almost half way of the conversation, Sunny entered the room and started asking questions (what were we doing, why do I have phone in my hand etc.). Then his mother asked him not to disturb anymore, he agreed to that and stopped talking.
But he did not leave the room and started making sounds with things and talking alone. We took a small break, his mother made him understand that we were doing something important and he left the room. Then we continued again.
So, my experiences of the interviews were varied and provided me with a lot of learning opportunities. In my opinion, the most important thing I did during an interview was I was listening well. Listening helped me ask for clarifications, probed for more details, and encouraged the interviewee to share personal insights and experiences.
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