Approach and Analysis - writing up resarch methodology help

Hi everyone.

I have two questions and I am slightly confused around writing up research methodology.

If I was doing a semi -structured questionnaire to address 'perceptions of parents regarding care services'. would that be a qualitative survey approach or just a survey?

Secondly how would I best analysis /what would be my data analysis method for a semi-structured questionnaire?
I was thinking thematic but when i look it up that is preferred for interviews instead. I think content analysis is more appropriate for quantitative questionnaire.

Any suggestions?

Well... it depends on what you ask them. If you ask closed-ended questions (i.e. yes/no questions), you can survey a LARGE number of people and do quantitative analysis to see how many people respond a particular way.

But if you ask open ended questions, this is what we call a QUALITATIVE SURVEY INTERVIEW. You can use grounded theory to analyze the data.

I hope this helps. Google the terms I wrote above, and see what you learn. Come back and ask more questions if you think we can help some more.

:-)

thanks kevin! Actully perhaps if i give you more details , that would help.

i have googled qulaitative survey interview, it seems to describe one to one /face to face interviews.
the thing is i am deaf, so doing a face to face interview would be a palaver, if you think about recodring people and getting it transcribed and the cost to meet that.. talk about expensive.

so, at the moment my write up is looking like il be doing and im going to call it '' qualitative self -report survery'' and yes its mainly open ended questions.

its not grounded theory that would be appropriate. im looking at 'perceptions of a physiotherapists role among parents' il go for thematic???

Oh... well, that is something different. I learned about the QSI when I read John Cresswell's (2008) Educational Research Methods (a text about research methods). The QSI is a set of open ended questions that you distribute, and each respondent writes a few sentences as the answer.

Then, you can use the "constant comparison" method from Grounded Theory to analyze the responses.

That is a lot to learn about, but you can do it! However, it might not even be the right approach. It's just what I thought about...


Sure, you can gather data about their perceptions by asking them to fill out the QSI. Then, use grounded theory's constant comparison to search for the THEMES that you find in the data. Ideas expressed by many different physiotherapists, Ideas that seem especially meaningful, etc.

I hope that helps you! Look online for the text by Cresswell. :-)