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Interviews allow collection of data from participants unable or unlikely to complete questionnaires, such as those who are reading, writing and ability to express them is marginal.
An interview involves two people, the interviewee and the interviewer. In this study, the interview involved the researcher and the participants (teachers). Before conducting the interview, the researcher had to prepare for the interview. Some of the areas in which the interviewer has to prepare, are; the selection of participants, setting questions, organise a venue for the interview, checking date and time. During the interview, the researcher had to thank the participants for being willing to participate in the research study, explain the procedure of the interview and explain the purpose of the study. Teachers were asked the same questions during the interview. During the interview, the researcher clarified questions to avoid short answers and unclear answers. The aim of this study is to gather rich information about teachers‟ experiences of teaching Accounting in Grade 12 in the context of curriculum changes. Hence, the interviewer has to be well prepared in this study. Neuman (2006) concurs that in qualitative research study, interviews generate a large amount of data.
Audio taping was used to record the interviews with the participants. This helped the researcher to transcribed information accurately. Two audio taping devices were used to make sure the data Department of Educations not get lost. Interviews were installed in the computers and laptops with passwords to ensure safety of the information.
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interview. There are different methods to analyse data in a qualitative study, which include:
content analysis, grounded theory analysis, thematic analysis, deductive and inductive data analysis (Henning, 2005). There are several stages in analysis data after data is collected through interviews; generating natural units of meaning, classifying, categorizing and ordering these units of meaning, structuring narratives to describe the interview contents and interpreting the interview data.
Cohen et al., (2007) stated that the researcher can choose any qualitative research analysis as long as it fit the purpose. The concept of fit to purpose means that a researcher understands what she or he wants to achieve (Bertram & Christensen, 2014). Another influence to choose the correct data analysis method is to check the number of participants involved in the research study (Cohen et al., 2007). According to Macmillan and Schumacher (2010), the qualitative data analysis focuses on a small number of participants while it provides detailed and a rich data. The researcher in this study analysed and interpreted teachers‟ experiences of teaching Grade 12 Accounting in the context of curriculum changes. The researcher used content analysis to analyse data in this study. The researcher also listened to audio tapes to transcribe them and code. According to De Vos (2002, p.340-341), there are eight steps a researcher can use to analyse data.
1. The researcher carefully read through all the transcriptions, making notes of ideas that came to mind.
2. The researcher select one interview and read it to try to get meaning in the information, writing down thoughts coming to mind.
3. After going through the transcripts, the researcher arranged the similar topics in groups by forming columns labelled major topics; unique topics,; and leftovers.
4. The researcher then abbreviates the topics as codes and wrote the codes next to the appropriate segment of the text. The researcher then observed the organisation of data to check if new categories or codes emerged.
5. The researcher found the most descriptive wording for the topics and converted them into categories. The aim was to reduce the total list of categories by grouping topics together that relate to each other. Lines drawn between the categories indicated the inter-relationships of categories.
6. A final decision was then made on the abbreviation of each category and the codes were arranged alphabetically.
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7. The data material belonging to each category was put together in one place and preliminary analysis performed.
8. Recoding of the data was done if necessary.
In this study, the researcher took all tape recorders and began to open five folders for the five interviews which took place. Each folder was labelled with teachers‟ names (pseudonyms), which were; Beauty, Zama, Zuzeka, Senzo and Brian. The next step was to employ content analysis in analysing data in this study. Cohen et al., (2007) defined content analysis as the process of summarizing and reporting written data. Content analysis analyses large amount of information such as documents and interview transcripts. The main procedure for content analysis is to classify many words of texts into fewer categories (Cohen et al., 2007). The researcher listened to the interview transcripts several times to have a clear understanding of teachers‟ feelings. The researcher has to interact well with the participants feelings on the interviews. The researcher listened to each interview slowly to record all tones and responses for the entire interview. The researcher transcribed all the tapes word for word, including pauses and tones. Interview transcripts were fully transcribed verbatim. Listening to interview transcripts several times helped the researcher to understand participants‟
experiences and develop themes. At this stage, the researcher replayed interview transcripts to familiarise herself with the data.
Themes or codes were developed after the researcher has listened to the interview transcripts.
Themes or codes with similar ideas were grouped together and those who were different were also grouped together. After the themes were developed, the researcher listened to the audio tapes inter-relating them to the interview transcripts to check if themes developed were corrects. Accuracy of interpretation was the main concern of the researcher, hence replaying interviews was done several times. Transcribing five interviews was very helpful to the researcher because teachers‟ experiences were not the same and this contributed to develop more themes and more data. Coding and codes were also used. According to Alshenqeeti (2014), there are two ways of coding: (1) generating meaningful data units and (2) classifying and ordering these units according to their meanings. Both these ways were used in this study analysing teachers‟ experiences into units and classify units according to their different meanings. Coding in this study was used to identify categories of data. Since this was recorded interviews, many categories were developed which later helped the researcher to
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develop final themes. Teachers‟ experiences and feelings were grouped together to develop categories with meaningful information.
McMillan and Schumacher (2010) stated there two approaches to analyse data in qualitative research: inductive and deductive analysis. The inductive analysis approach can be defined as a process of organising data into categories and identifying patterns, while Deductive starts with theoretical framework or conceptual framework to analyse data (Bertram &
Christiansen, 2014). This study also employed inductive analysis approach where data that was related to one another was grouped together in categories. After all the themes were developed, the researcher had to check if they all answers the research question which: what are teachers‟ experiences of teaching Accounting Grade 12 in the context of curriculum changes?.