Working with and analysing the data gathered with the questionnaire

I used MS Forms for my questionnaire and it proved to be the right choice. It provided a very nice, ‘clean’ looking questionnaire, gave enough space for responses to the open-ended questions and it made it easy to get all the responses collated in an Excel file.

I am providing all the data from the questionnaire here. It was gathered anonymously, and with five people responding, I think it provides enough confidentiality. Once I finish the PgCert course, I will be deleting the data from the blog and my device, as agreed in the consent forms.

To start with, I created the wordclouds using my data. In the first one I used all the text from the responses, and in the second one I chose to use the words, phrases and sentences that directly related to my research question (teaching, improvement, resources evaluation, critical thinking and information literacy). Probably as I could expect. the second cloud provides the vocabulary that is more useful for me (commonly used words like use, see, just, need and want almost disappeared from the cloud). Information, academic, support, engage/d, library, resources and literacy are the words that stand out more when I used more focused text. It has also picked up more words describing different types of resources (books, e-books, journals, dissertations). What was also very interesting to me was an appearance of words like colleagues, collections and online in the second cloud – all very important when we think of teaching with and about the library resources.

This exercise allowed me to get to know my data better and I could start using it for finding themes that I can later use in my focus group. It was an interesting process, although, I recognise the fact that the software I used was not ideal. It could not handle phrases, so it separated ‘special collections’ and ‘critical thinking’ for example. I used the wordclouds simply as a visual aid to thinking about my data. and I feel it fulfilled its role.

Then, I gathered all the answers in the Word document. That made the text easier to read and handle. I read the data a number of times and established main themes recurring in it. I colour-coded them and highlighted the relevant text to each of the themes. These themes created the base for building my focus group plan. They helped me to establish what are the most meaningful and important aspects of my research for the people I work with.

The themes I found in my questionnaire data:

1. How we perceive ourselves as librarians and what we think of our teaching
2. Our students’ attitudes and experiences regarding the library and resources
3. How we run our sessions. What tools and methods we use in teaching.
4. Working with other faculty colleagues.
5. Other useful opinions and observations.

Then I created a spreadsheet to record the themes and subthemes in more organised and focused way. This further narrow down the area of discussion for my focus group.

Questionnaire findings that will inform my focus group:

1. It is clear from the data I got that we all think that we do lots of good quality teaching on resources and IL, however we are not doing enough of it. (4 out of 5 participants pointed this).
2. We use wide range of methods already that work for us and the students (variety of sources used in sessions, using software to support interactions in the classrooms), however, we still experience a low attendance or students engagement in the sessions. We see the need for working closer with the academics from other departments and going to the classrooms to make our teaching more closely related to what students are currently researching. It would be interesting to ask in the focus group how we can do it in our library space.
3. We need students perspective to be effective in our sessions. (3 participants mentioned it). This touches upon inclusivity and critical pedagogy part of my research question – including students voices in teaching. Another interesting theme to explore in the focus group to help to answer my question.
4. The conversation about our IL teaching is very timely for our team (2 participants talk more about it). We have new teaching space and all the collections finally in place ready to be explored. To address low students engagement we need to cooperate and find ways to bring them in.

There are some other interesting themes in the questionnaire that help answering my research question. I will be addressing it in the summary of this project. However, the questionnaire was mainly design to help me with organising a focus group and the above themes were chosen as the most relevant to our local team and purpose of my project.