Methods
How are you going to investigate your question?
It is important here to distinguish between data collection methods and approaches to research design (Rose, McKinley, Briggs Baffoe-Djan, 2020). Both are part of research methodology, but research design refers to the methodological structure of a study, which informs the research approach. Common research designs include, surveys, case studies, experiments, action research, field research, corpus research and ethnographies.
Data collection refers to the actual methods used to gather data for analysis. Common data collection research methods include questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, tests, language elicitation tasks, corpora and observations.
Approaches to Research Design
“Research designs do not dictate how data are collected but rather provide the framework and philosophy within which a researcher collects the data. For example, survey research, which involves the widespread examination of the prevalence of a particular construct within a population, is often paired with questionnaires as a data collection method but could equally make use of data collection techniques such as document analysis, depending on its appropriateness to the topic. Field research, which involves a researcher exploring in-context phenomena, could make use of a combination of data collection methods such as interviews, observations and questionnaires” (Rose, McKinley, Briggs Baffoe-Djan, 2020, pp. 2-3)
You might use, for example, one the following data collection methods: experiment, interviews, observation, documents & accounts, or surveys & questionnaires More Information.
- In a questionnaire. you might use a Likert Scale.
- You probably cannot study everyone, so you have to sample: Sampling (and Dörnyei, 2007, pp 125-128).
- You will need to write about your methods: Writing The Methods Section.
- You might want to combine methods – Mixed Methods (and Dörnyei, 2007, Section 7)
Other methods include: Matched Guise Technique, Discourse Completion Task, Critical Incident Technique, Critical Discourse Analysis, Ethnography, Virtual Ethnography, Corpus Analysis, Multimodality, Conversation Analysis and Narrative Analysis. More Information.
Data Collection Methods
Data collection refers to the actual methods used to gather data for analysis. Common data collection research methods include questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, tests, language elicitation tasks, corpora and observations.
How are you going to collect your data?
- You might use Google Forms.
- Microsoft have something similar – Microsoft Forms.
- This is a similar survey using another platform – JISC Online Surveys.
- Many institutions have licences for Qualtrics.
- You can also use Survey Monkey, but the free version is rather limited.
A good survey at Miller & Salkind (2002, Part 5)
Two useful articles here about online research: Barchard-Williams; Salmons.
