Study on the Internet - Assignment Example

PhD is most likely a level that a researcher must examine any subject of choice in details, for a number of years in his or her course. In this sense, it was decided to study the matter of sample size in PhD studies’ context. The two major concerns of this study were to find out the number of participants who make use of qualitative interviews in their PhD studies, and if this numbers differ depending on the procedural approach. The method of the study A PhD database content analysis was carried out on the “Index To Theses: A comprehensive listing of theses with abstracts accepted for higher degrees by universities in Great Britain and Ireland since 1716”.

This research was performed between the third of August, and twenty forth of August, 2009 (Mason, 2010). In the collection, 532,646 abstracts were used to discover PhD studies, indicating that they had utilized qualitative interviews to collect information. To find out any dissimilarity between diverse research techniques, a classification of 26 varying qualitative research techniques from different disciplines were used. The methodological traditions were classified into four groups, namely: discovery of regularities, reflection, language characteristics, and comprehension of action or text meaning (Gravetter & Forzano, 2011).

The researchers used a “standard search” with a number of parameters applied: if “any field” entailed “insert methodology”; if “any field” entailed interviews”; and if “Degrees” entailed PhD. The study looked solely at the use of individual to individual personal interviewing, meaning that focus groups were excluded from this analysis. The outstanding studies were collected using samples. A search on the abstracts was carried out and the following details were recorded on each: category of qualitative research; the methods used; and the number of interviewees who participated (Mason, 2010).

Findings The findings by the authors indicated that in general, the range of the participant numbers used was between 95 and 1. Of the 560 studies examined, the mean and median were 31 and 28 respectively, perhaps suggesting that the central dispersion measures were consistent in general. It was clear that some approaches used interviews in their methodologies than others. Out of the 26 qualitative methods, 9 returned over 10 studies. The most popular techniques utilized in PhD studies as per this analysis were: life history, grounded theory method, discourse analysis, case study, phenomenology, content analysis, hermeneutics, action research, and symbolic interactionism.

Case study projects were the most frequently utilized interviews; 1,401, while the grounded theory accounted for 429, with an inclusion criteria of 41%. On the other hand, qualitative evaluation accounted for the highest mean in the number of participants at 42, while ethnography communication recorded the lowest at 34. Discussion The most popular sample sizes were 30 and 20. Forty, ten, and twenty five followed the sequence. The considerable high proportion of studies using the multiples of ten to act as their sample stands out as the most vital finding of this analysis (Rubin & Babbie, 2009).

There is no hypothesis-driven or logical reason why samples that end with any single integer would prevail than another in qualitative PhD researches that uses interviews. If the directing concept for qualitative resea