Research Methodology - Dissertation Example

The researcher must stand back, and not direct the interview, because to insert oneself into the interview would insert the researcher’s agenda into the issue, and the researcher might interpret the themes accordingly. There are alternate interpretations of the interview responses, and the interview should proceed in a manner which encourages this. Because respondents should answer in a way that develops his or her own perspective, the interviews should be unstructured. Nonetheless, the interviews are semi-structured, because this study has an exploratory nature.           

To develop the research interests of the study, open-ended questions were asked.  These open-ended questions were not a strict questionnaire, however. Rather, they were simply used to tease out the key topics and served as a reminder not to miss these topics. In the beginning of the interviews, the interviewees were given a general idea of what the focus would be. That said, the interviewees were encouraged to direct the conversation’s flow, and I would intervene only when I wanted to more about the issue. The only other time that I intervened was when the topic of conversation had gotten too far off of the focus of the interview. The questions were open-ended as much as possible. As the interview reached its’ close, I double-checked the question list to make sure that there was nothing important missing from the interview, and, if this was the case, I probed the interviewee further. Throughout my data collection period, I constantly added new questions to incorporate issues brought up in previous interviews.

Recruitment of respondents. Ten people were recruited from the users of internet. I did not attempt to cover all ethnic groups, which is beyond the scope of the project. Instead, I chose a particular group of people as the target of my study. To achieve the best results, they met the following two requirements:

1. They still maintain their distinctive cultural identities as ethnic people, surrounded in the sea of host countries’ mainstream culture.