CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 3.1 INTRODUCTION
3.2 RESEARCH DESIGN
A descriptive research design was used to explore the views of principals, teachers and SGB members about changes in the management practices in their schools. The study of the participants’ views assumes a similarity between the views of the principals and those of the teachers and SGB members in a particular school with regard to their experiences of management changes in the school. One of the reasons for this assumption is that the school role players, that is, the principals, teachers and
together and were therefore in a good position to assess whether change had taken place or not. But it is conceded that their experiences might have differed and that they might have had different expectations at the outset which would have informed their experiences of the process and their evaluation of the Imbewu intervention. To put it in another way, it is likely that some differences in testimony will have been encountered. These might have been regarded as a form of bias which in turn might threaten the validity of their responses. To deal with this threat, various methods were used to limit the effect of this on validity and reliability as discussed in section 3.4.2.4. The most important of these methods is triangulation.
The research was carried it out in three stages. During the first stage, between April and August 2002, I undertook research in order to get general responses from a larger sample about characteristics of the IP and changes in the school management practices as a result of participating in the IP. I used a questionnaire as the research instrument during this stage. I will discuss this in greater detail in section 3.4.1.
During the second stage, between February and July 2005, I used qualitative interviews using a small sample. During this stage the research was guided by an interview schedule/guide which examined in depth the views of participants from one cluster of five schools. I will discuss this in greater detail in section 3.4.2.
In the third stage, in October to November 2005, I analysed school documents including chequebooks, receipt books, cash analysis books, minutes of staff meetings, SGB meetings, and finance committee meetings in the five schools in order to corroborate the information given by the principals. Further discussion of this will be done in section 3.4.3.
The questionnaire is used in quantitative research while the interviews and analysis of documents mentioned above are typical of qualitative research. Therefore, although the qualitative approach was the main design involving interviews and the analysis of documents, the quantitative approach was also used in the form of questionnaires. A brief description of both quantitative and qualitative approaches to research will be given below.
3.2.1 Quantitative research
As mention earlier a descriptive design was used. Descriptive research can be divided into two broad categories representing quantitative and qualitative approaches (Mason
& Bramble, 1989). Quantitative descriptive research involves identifying the characteristics of phenomena or exploring possible correlations among two or more variables. In this study a descriptive survey was used to acquire information about the characteristics, opinions and experiences of principals and teachers about the IP. The ultimate goal was to learn about a large population by surveying a sample of that population. In the survey in this study I posed a series of questions to willing participants, summarised their responses with percentages, frequency counts and then drew inferences about the population from the responses of the sample (Leedy &
Ormrod, 2005). Hence, only simple statistics were used. However, the main purpose was triangulation and not to generalise. In other words, I wanted to identify certain characteristics and explore the views of a larger sample of principals and teachers about the IP before focussing on qualitative interviewing of a small sample from the same population.
3.2.2 Qualitative research
Qualitative research covers an array of interpretive techniques which seek to describe, decode, translate and otherwise come to terms with the meaning of certain or more naturally occurring phenomena (Mason & Bramble, 1989: 36). Qualitative research views human behaviour as a product of how people interpret the world. Hitchcock and Hughes (1995) argue that qualitative researchers emphasise the importance of discovering meanings and interpretations of events and actions. They recognise that what goes on in schools and classrooms is made up of complex layers of meanings, interpretations, values and attitudes which necessitates description of actions, ideas, values and meanings through the eyes of participants. Qualitative researchers assume that people act on the basis of their interpretation of experience, hence they are interested in what participants experience and how they interpret these experiences (McMillan & Schumacher, 2001; Hitchcock & Hughes, 1995). This means that the principals, teachers and SGB members who participated in the IP would be expected
activities. The focus of this study therefore was to capture this process of interpretation. As Babbie and Mouton (2001) suggest, in order to achieve this, the study should focus on the views and interpretations of the participants. They argue that the ideal situation is for the qualitative researcher to study events as they occur, rather than having to reconstruct them in retrospect.
In this study, it was necessary to reconstruct certain IP activities such as training, monitoring and evaluation in retrospect. This was because the study was undertaken after these activities had been completed by the participants. The participants were therefore requested to reconstruct what had taken place some time before. Such reconstruction could only be achieved through self-reporting, which entailed the use of questionnaires but mainly qualitative interviews. I therefore had to ask participants questions that prompted them to provide an indication of change that they had experienced. Babbie and Mouton (2001) view such questions as attempting to ascertain causality ‘after the fact’. They concede that the information gathered in this way is not as reliable as information gathered through systematic and independent observations. This was one of the limitations of this study which will be discussed in section 3.7.