Blogs
Dealing with the risk of over-interpreting or under-interpreting qualitative data- the grounded theory approach
08/09/2022
What is the real reason that makes us happy? It’s not our salary or our business’ balance sheet numbers, it’s our environment, our relationships, and other personal or professional reasons. Now, identifying and analyzing this data is qualitative data basically. Now, what is the guarantee that the gathered data is correct? Suppose even if we interview some person, what is the guarantee that the person has provided us with the correct data? That is the risk of over-interpreting or under-interpreting qualitative data. In this blog, we will deal with the risk of over-interpreting or under-interpreting qualitative data by using a... read more
Collecting qualitative data using interviews for PhD research – A complete guide
11/08/2022
Have identified disciplinary orientations and design for the investigation, a researcher gathers information that will address the fundamental research question. Interviews are very common from data collection incase study research. Interviews are individual or groups allow the researcher to attain rich, personalized information (Mason, 2002). To conduct successful interviews, the researchers should follow several guidelines. First, the researcher should identify key participants in the situation whose knowledge and opinions may provide important insights regarding the research questions. Participants may be interviewed individually or in groups. Individual interviews yield significant amounts of information from an individual’s perspective, but may be quite... read more
Starting a PhD in the Pandemic: Challenges and Benefits
27/05/2022
Scholars who embark on their journey towards earning a doctorate know that they are about to undertake a mammoth task. At the best of times, starting a PhD can be quite a demanding and, at times, overwhelming academic commitment. However, when a pandemic is added to the equation, things undeniably get even more difficult. The experience of starting or pursuing a PhD in the pandemic is largely unprecedented, although it can be safely stated that it affects scholars and their daily lives in many disruptive ways. Apart from causing emotional stress and anxiety, the COVID situation can also throw up... read more
Knowledge, Research Questions and Research Paradigm
29/01/2021
The research question thus posed the objective for exploring and discovering processes that led to knowledge creation. Knowledge by itself is a difficult construct which is viewed from various disciplinary perspectives such as philosophy, cognitive psychology, sociology can pose a myriad and often conflicting variety of definitions. Broadly there are western philosophies which posit separations of reality of physical word from the individual while there are eastern that stress upon knowledge to be occurring to the whole personality and character rather than in separated components of body and mind. According to the interpretive approach knowledge is personal and constructed through... read more
Doing Literature Review for PhD, Deriving Research Gap and Setting up Research Objective
15/10/2020
Information about Likert scale in designing survey questionnaire for PhD research
03/09/2020
The Likert Scale( frequently known as agree-disagree scale) was first published by physiologist Rensis Likert in 1932. The technique presents respondents with a series of attitude dimensions ( a battery), for each of which they are asked whether, and how strongly, they agree or disagree, using one of the numbers of the positions on a five-point scale. With face-to-face interviewer-administered scale batteries, the responses may be shown on a card whilst the interviewer reads out each of the statements in turn. With telephone interviewing, the respondent may sometimes be asked to remember what the response categories are, but preferably be... read more
A PhD defence Scenario- What happens in the PhD final thesis defence presentation
20/06/2020
What does oral defence look like? Although the format and roles may vary from institution to institution and from advisor to advisor, most follow common procedures. Here is a scenario that represents a typical oral defence: 1. You arrive about 30 minutes early to arrange the room properly. 2. Your advisor facilitates the meeting, usually opening with introductions. He or she introduces committee members, guests and the outside reader. You then introduce any family or friends who are present. 3. Your advisor explains the purpose of oral defence and procedures to be followed in conducting a defence. Keep in... read more
Why Pilot Questionnaires? Reliability and Validity Testing for PhD Research
27/03/2020
There are two keys tests for a questionnaire: reliability and validity. A questionnaire is reliable if it provides a consistent distribution of responses from the same survey universe. The validity of the questionnaire is whether or not it is measuring what we want it to measure Testing a questionnaire directly for reliability is very difficult. It can be administered twice to the same of test respondents to determine whether or not they give consistent correct answers.However,the time between the two interviews cannot usually be very long ,both because the respondent’s answer may in fact change over time and because, to... read more
Secondary Research: Know How to Use Existing Information to Conduct a New Study
28/11/2019
Research, aiming to discover solutions to issues/problems in a specific field, includes two major categories: primary and secondary research. While primary research involves data collection via self-conducted approaches, secondary research includes data collected from previous studies. Primary research is valuable as it fills a gap in the information and provides specific answers to the chosen research question. However, due to its nature, cost involved, and time consumed to perform the study, primary research is not commonly used by the researchers. Instead, they opt secondary research method. Secondary research ( desk research), involving the use of existing data, summarizes & collates... read more
Penning Down a Technical Paper: Know How to Structure the Epitome of your Research
30/10/2019
The ability to convey the significant idea of a study is the key to success in the research journey. However, due to reasons such as writers’ block, inadequate knowledge about the writing guidelines, etc. scholars often fail to pour out their thoughts in a technical paper. Although writing a technical paper is a painstaking process, it isn’t too complicated once you are aware of how and what needs to be included in the paper. A technical paper must reconstruct the investigation process and give an in-depth understanding of the research concept to the reader. Typically, a technical paper should be... read more
