Category: Research methods

The focus group I facilitated was smaller than I had planned. Main reason was that it was December and many people in my team were taking leave at that time. It was similar case in the beginning of January. I decided to have the group on in the week that I could talk with two the most experienced members of my team.

I used the prompts that I established when planning my focus group (see this blog post), however, the way the conversation went meant that I did not managed to ask all the questions I wanted. This was something I knew that could happen, as I wanted at least a part of the group to be unstructured, so I could tap into the creative side of my team. What I did not plan for, was the group to focus on mostly one aspect of my research, which was what kind of sessions and themes we can run to improve our Information Literacy teaching. It was great that I got lots of ideas from my team that can definitely help to answer my research question, however, I feel we got very excited about working on the sessions together and got a bit carried away in the conversation. On my part I think I lost my facilitator role and became a participant myself at some point, as I loved the way my colleagues approached the subject of teaching. I wanted to add to the conversation and you can see in the transcript that I talked a bit too much at times.

However, I am very pleased with some data I gathered and I think the group was successful in creating time and space for us to discuss the teaching part of our jobs. The timing of it could not be better, as our library space had just been renovated and we gained a teaching room. It is the first time we actually have the space that we can invite our students too. One of the participants said the following in the focus group:

“You’re doing this at an ideal time because this is the time now we’ve got the space and these are the sessions that we’ve all sort of been dreaming of being able to do. It’s amazing that you’re doing the PGcert and this is what you’re focusing on.” (Focus group transcript, 2023, p.8)

I am including the transcript of the focus group here. I chose to use the version with the highlights and comments I made when analysing the data. It will be deleted once I will finish the course, as it was established in the consent forms that the participants had signed.

Process of analysis

I based my analysis mostly on the Thematic analysis chapter of Matthews, B. and Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education. pp.372-385. I found this book very accessible and the examples of the charts, tables and diagrams very useful.

I started with reading the transcript a few times. I was already familiar with it, because I listened to the recording of the session a number of times already when working on transcript. I did remove some unnecessary words that we all use in speech such us ‘like’, ‘you know. ‘yeah’. I have also removed all the names of my colleagues to keep the transcript anonymous.

When reading the transcript I started adding notes (sticky notes you can do in Adobe Acrobat, first all in the same colour, just my thoughts, then colour coding them and highlighting the relevant text accordingly to establish the set of initial themes. The effects of this you can see in the transcript version I included in this blog.

The following image shows the colour-coded themes and their reflection in the transcript. Starting with simple comments, all in yellow and then adding the colours and highlights.

The above allowed me to create a chart with the quotes and their initial interpretation and creating categories. I am publishing the PDF version of my Excel file here. You can see that some of the initial themes such as ‘themes for sessions’ are not in the chart – it is because they became a part of the larger themes (Green colour – sessions in this case)

The above chart can be expressed as the following diagram:

Overarching themes that came out from the focus group:

• Teaching IL needs to be accessible and inclusive to be effective.
• Students perspective is necessary for our teaching to be relevant to them.
• Library resources are very varied and we should include all of them in teaching.
• Library offer to teach IL and especially evaluation of resources needs to be known to academics and students.

The focus group has definitely answered how we can improve our teaching of resources and include students voices parts of the research question. My participants had shown great understanding of critical pedagogy and need of our students perspective. The suggestion of asking the students what topics they would be the most interested in is a great example of this understanding.

The experience and knowledge of the local situation has shone through too. It is evident in many parts of the transcript when the participants bring examples of different courses and how we could tailor our teaching of IL to make it relatable to all of the students. This thinking about inclusivity is visible when they talk about students coming from different parts of the world, embracing students who do not want to take active part in the sessions, using various formats of library material to cater to different needs the students may have.

I found the FG findings inspiring and I have already started to plan a session that would put them in practice. The diagram I created as a part of the analysis is something I constantly refer to when planning in order to remind myself of the wide range of methods and themes that were mentioned in the group.

In the group we touched upon the subject of our teaching often depending on what we are asked to do by the tutors, which can be restrictive. One of the solutions we discussed was focusing on the library teaching offer in the course committees. This will be implemented as soon as possible. We are working on a number of sessions at the moment and once they are ready we will be discussing the best way of promoting them. We need to take into account when is the best time for different kinds of sessions too. When teaching evaluation of information sources would benefit the students most.

By the time I started planning my focus group I had done lots of reading on my research topic (see this category in my blog , especially readings on evaluating sources of information), had analysed themes in the questionnaire responses (more details in my blog post here), and had read about the interviews and focus groups too (for example blogs A and B ).

Despite all of the above, I still was a bit comprehensive when working on the FG preparations. It was going to be the first time I carried out primary research. Additionally, the focus group participants were going to be the senior members of my team. On one hand I knew it is great to have good and experienced librarians on board, as one of the focus group principles is involving people who have knowledge about your research topic. (Matthews and Ross, 2010). On the other, I thought that I may find it difficult to steer the conversation, so we stay on track with my plan. I tried not to worry too much and focus on the positive side of having a chance to talk about very important subject with my creative and experienced colleagues. Additionally, the FG was planned to be a semi-structured event, so I was prepared it may go differently to what I though it was going to be.

I limited the time of the FG to 20-25 minutes maximum in order to be able to analyse the data it was going to generate. Even if I do not manage to go through of all of the planned themes I still should have a good set of material to analyse and be able to find some answers to my research question.

My FG plan was based mainly on the reading I did on my topic and the questionnaire’s findings. Most of the themes I chose appeared in both, the reading and the questionnaire. I wrote them down to become my prompts helping with asking questions and making sure I cover the most important aspects of my topic in the FG. I also wanted to use this opportunity to ask more about my participants’ experience of teaching and ideas for sessions. This is going to be a less structured part of the FG. I hope to bring the subject of sustainability into the discussion too, as i left it out of the questionnaire.

My prompts for the FG:

• remind the participants of the research topic and ask them what they think could do at Wimbledon to improve teaching about IL. I think it will provide a good starting point and allow us to discuss some issues that came up in the questionnaire.
• make sure to ask about involving students’s voices and critical pedagogy – this was clear in the answers to the questionnaire that we value students’ perspective and want their input in the sessions. And this reflected what many librarians see as a very important aspect of our teaching that needs to be looked into and improved (Paterson and Gamtso, 2023; Reale, 2012; Ruthven 2019).
• both my readings (Chin and Lin, 2011, Faix, 2014) and the questionnaire answers talk about the importance of closer relationship between library and faculty. Is there anything that we could do to work on it together?
• I am planning to work on a session that would be based on sustainable information literacy principles. What are your thought on this subject? Is there anything you can think of now that would be useful for my plans?
  

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.

Reading chapters D2 Working with data and D4 Thematic analysis from Matthews, B. and Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education

D2 Working with data pp. 320-341

This chapter follows talks about the steps needed to analyse your data. 

The advice on how we can familiarise ourselves with data is relevant to both of my data sets. 

First step: Read your data (transcript, research notes) and get a feel of what information is there 

Second step: Write memos to yourself as you read. Notes can contain the following information: 

• something you may need to come back to (missing info, inconsistency) 
• interesting comments, answers and points that you want to come back to later 
• starting your analysis: what you wany to do, what questions to ask, tables you want create, relationships you want to explore. 

Other things to consider: 

Is data complete and accurately recorded ?	It is in my case. I have all the text from the questionnaires in clear format. Recording of my focus group was clear and I have a good transcript of it. All the data that could lead to identification of the participants have been removed.
Organising your data	It will include coding open questions (I will need to read about it more). In terms of my questionnaires I think of finding main themes, colour-coding them and highlighting the text relevant to each theme. I will not have that much data to work with here, compering to the transcript of my focus group (FG).
Creating an Index	The example of an indexed semi-structured interview on the page 333 will be very useful for me in analysing transcript from my FG. This provide a basis for coding.

Coding:

“As you are indexing you will probably more aware of aspects of your data that you want to explore further and to subject to a more rigorous analysis. (…) You should also have your research questions in mind and be looking for statements, stories, experiences and opinions in the data that may help you to understand and address your research questions.” (p.334)

This chapter provides a very clear example of the codes and the initial coding of the text on the page 335. I will come back to it once I start working with my transcript.

I consider using charts and tables for further coding and analysis of the data. It will provide my data with more structure. In the text of this chapters the authors give a few examples of this kind of approach to data. I think that that one with the codes across the top and data sources will be the easiest to adapt to my research purposes.

D4 Thematic analysis, pp.372-385.

It was the most useful chapter so far for me. I like how it is edited with the checklist and examples for each step of the thematic analysis with visual aids (diagrams and tables). I printed it and will have it at hand when analysing my focus group.

I think the following checklist for carrying out thematic analysis will help me to stay on track. It may be that with my data of only two other librarians taking part in the focus group my not need so many steps, however I start with trying to follow the whole list.

When I started reading more about research methods, the interviews and focus groups seemed the most relevant to my research. Then when I read about the questionnaires it made me think they could provide me with some material that could help me design the interviews. 

I think using a questionnaire would let me see what my colleagues think about our teaching and what ideas they have for the improvements, before meeting them for the next part of the research.  

Some reading on questionnaires I have done for this project (and how it affected my questionnaire design process): 

1. Matthews, B. and Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education.

It is a quite in-depth chapter on questionnaires that was helpful to me, especially when talking about using open questions “which allow the respondent to answer the question in their own way.” (p. 202). 

I am thinking of using a questionnaire to collect qualitative data and from what I have read it looks like open questions will be suitable to use in my questionnaire. 

The following was a great help when I was designing my questionnaire: 

Thinking about your research topic and designing a questionnaire to gather data: 

1. What do you want to know?  
2. Who will be able to answer the questions?
3. Will they understand the questions? 
4. How will they answer the questions? 
5. Will they be able to give the answers they want to give?” (p.206) 

Ad.1 What do my colleagues think about our teaching? Are we doing well? Are we doing enough? What and how could we improve? What teaching methods and sessions work well? What is their experience of teaching Information Skills/Literacy? 

Ad.2 and 3. I will be working with librarians from my team. They are all very well placed to understand and answer my questions. 

Ad.4 I plan to have a few open-ended questions and use MS Forms to create an online questionnaire. 

Ad.5 I will make sure my questionnaire to be anonymous and I will not know who said what. I think that this should free my participants to say what they really want to say. The last question will be for them to add anything they think they did not have a chance to say when replying to the previous questions. 

This chapter has also provided a useful checklist. I underlined the points that were most useful to me: 

2. INTRAC, Simister, N., Lunin, L. (2017) Surveys and questionnaires. Available at: https://www.intrac.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Surveys-and-questionnaires.pdf (Accessed: Jan 10, 2024). 

This is a very concise document that I started with when searching for information about questionnaires. It helped me to understand well the difference between an open and closed questions and ways of structuring them, by providing good examples: 

Additionally, it taught me that the questionnaires can be used: 

• At any time within a project or programme cycle 
• To supply baseline information 
• To support ongoing decision-making 
• To assess what has changed (after the project ends). 

The first three points are very relevant to my project and confirmed that my decision of using questionnaires to help me with the further part of the data collection can be justified.

3.  Peterson, R.A. (2000) Constructing effective questionnaires. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. Pp. 45-60 

I focused my reading on the Constructing and Wording Questions chapter.  

As with the many other readings that I have done for this part of my project, this book provides lots of information on questionnaires used in quantitative research and treats the subject in a very detailed way. For this project I am going to use a very short questionnaire, just to touch the base with my team, so what I read was very informative, but only a few paragraphs were very useful to me. 

I found some helpful material here for construction of my questionnaire. For example the following quotes: 

“Five useful and easy-to-apply criteria are that questions be brief, relevant, unambiguous, specific, and objective.” (p. 50) 

“Constructing effective questions is a delicate endeavor [.] (…) The formulation of a question will always influence if, and how, it is answered. In many instances, there is no correct or unequivocal way to ask a question, although positively worded questions generally tend to be less confusing than negatively worded questions.” (p.59) 

Matthews, B. and Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education. Extract pp.234-251. 

This chapter was very helpful when I was deciding between using individual interviews or focus groups for my project. It provided a very clear definition and purpose of focus groups that made it clear to me that it will be beneficial to use it as a research method. .  

It defined focus group as follow: 

“Essentially, a focus group is a qualitative data collection method which is an adaptation of the interview technique. The change is that the focus group (as the name implies) departs from the one-to-one interview and becomes a group interview. ” (p.235)

Focus group 

A data collection method that usually: 

• brings together a group of between 5 and 13 people; 
• who have something in common, which is connected to the research topic; 
• to take part in a discussion on that topic, which is facilitated by the researcher.” (p.235) 

In my project, I will not have many people in my group. It is a small-scale local project, and the participants are my team colleagues. We are a small team, and I am planning to involve as many librarians as possible in the group, but it may be that there are only a few of us available at the time I carry out the focus group. In general, we have only two full-time and three part-time librarians, with one of us working in term time only. However, these are going to be people that we have a lot of things in common and their opinion will be crucial for continuing my research after finishing the PgCert course. 

What also convinced me that a focus group is suitable for what I am planning to do, was the following: 

“Focus groups are an appropriate method of data collection to use when the researcher is interested in gathering qualitative data about people’s experiences, ideas and understandings.” (p.236)  

This is exactly what I need for my research project. I want my colleagues’ opinions on what we do to support our students in learning about resources and how we can improve it. I think in our day-to-day work we do not have time to share our experience as well as I think we should. I work with amazing and experienced librarians, and their input will help us build a better learning environment for our students. Focus group will give us time to meet and discuss things in a bit more formal way and that can help us to generate new ideas and plan improvements to our teaching together. 

This chapter explains a number of different ways of how focus groups are used. This convinced me further that this is going to be a useful method to use in my research project. I am most interested in my focus group to be a consultation (to find out what my colleagues think about my research), an exploration (to generate ideas for sessions, student support in my area of research) and a ‘checking back’ tool (as a follow up to the questionnaires that I am also planning to use). 

This chapter had also helped me with planning the focus group. It gives advice on creating a topic guide (a set of questions, key points or prompts) that helps to ensure that the discussion stays focused on the research topic. That is something that I plan to do for my focus group. 

When I started to read about research methods, I got overwhelmed by the sheer volume of resources that are available to us on the subject. To organise the resources, I created a Padlet https://artslondon.padlet.org/kidzi1/research-methods-gathering-information-and-resources-needed–86jbde4hbrcs69hq, and I put books, articles and other resources that I found useful there.  

This helped me to see where I could start with my research. I found The M&E Universe resources, that link to was shared with us in the second workshop, very useful as a starting point. The short, 2-3 pages long description of each method allowed me to judge what methods would be most useful for what I wanted to do.  

Once I knew that I would like to work with questionnaires and interviews (or small focus group), I had reached for more in-depth books.  

The following books provided me with lots of guidance:  

Bell, J. and Waters, S. (2018) Doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers. London: McGraw-Hill Education. 

I like the way the book is edited, with very clear layout of each chapter. I looked closer at and used information from two chapters, on interviews and surveys (still very useful for learning about questionnaires). In the mentioned Padlet I included the document with the most important excerpts from each chapter. I learnt about different kinds of interviews (structured, semi-structured for example), issues surrounding recording of the interview and ‘our old enemy’ – bias. 

Matthews, B. and Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education.   

This is another very well designed and user-friendly book that helped me to work on designing a focus group and will inform the data analysis at later stage of my project. I talk more about this reading in my blog about focus group preparations.