Methodologies

Afternoon all

Now that you have all written an introduction the next step is to outline your methodologies. The reason for doing this is to ensure that you have an awareness of how you are collecting your data and how you intend to analyse it, whilst ensuring it remains comparable, reliable and ethical. The more thorough the methodology, the higher your mark for AO2 will be.

Start off by writing your methodology in note form, taking into account the following:

• Explain what kind of data you will collect (be as specific as possible) and how it will help you to test the hypothesis  - e.g. I will collect three transcripts showing a dialogue between the caregiver and child in child-led tasks - this will allow me to see how the caregiver uses interrogatives and how/whether that technique structures the task and the child's responses

• Under the relevant sub-headings, deal with the three key factors to show your sophisticated considerations of the problems and how to solve them - ethicality, comparability, reliability - reliability will be the most important factor in such a small-scale investigation and ethicality may not be an issue in public data - say so if this is the case

Below is an example for how to address each factor:

1. Ethicality - I will get full, informed consent from the caregiver and all participants over the age of consent (using initial verbal consent and then a form explaining the use of the data and the participant's right to withdraw their permission) and ensure that the recordings do not impact on the child's usual activities by having the caregiver record when the activity is already decided upon. If your data is in the public domain (i.e. TV/YouTube) just use this section to outline that
2. Comparability - I will ensure that the same caregiver and child are used, that all the dialogues are child-led as far as it is possible to ascertain this, that (where other participants are involved) any uncomparable sections of data are disregarded, that the context is the same as far as possible (home environment - although time of the day and day of the week will vary due to necessity of getting child-led dialogues, and the age of the child will need consideration as they develop so quickly at this age); 
3. Reliability - longer transcripts and more of them are desirable (3 transcripts of >3 minutes seems a reasonable amount of data for an investigation of this size), as averages will be less affected by anomalies, but the small amount of data means the effect of possible anomalies will need to be considered, especially when comparing the transcripts rather than using averages across them, and contextual factors will need close consideration when trying to determine how reliable each piece of data is.

• If you need to establish a protocol for what you will include in your testing and what you won't, draft one now, although it might go in your final analysis rather than your methodology

• Please let me know if you will need to ask someone's permission to record natural speech or access private data e.g. someone's letters or diaries, or someone's Facebook data if the expectation is that only friends will see it etc.

• You will need to get me to check your methodology and any letters/forms for permission before you collect your data. Post the methodology on your blogs and email me a version of it at the end of the lesson. As with your introduction, this will not be the marked draft, I will take that in after you have collected the data so it is accurate; this one is just for me to check you have made good choices and considered problems and issues.

For an exemplar methodology, please click here.

Please put your introductions and methodologies together in one document and hand them in at the end of the lesson. I will mark these together as they give me a clear picture of your investigation as a whole project - any issues let me know!