Organizational Research: Establishment of Public-Private Partnerships for a Community College - Coursework Example

 Organizational Research: Module 3 Paper Student Name Institution Name Problem statement Public-private partnerships are among the potential strategies that can be used to empower communities. When communities are empowered, they are able to raise their collective voices, strengthen governance, create awareness, and attain other basic rights. In most cases, governments establish community colleges, which are meant to educate and empower rural residents. As the current situation is, efforts for establishing public-private partnerships have concentrated in urban and developed areas. This has left rural areas to depend on fully government funded projects and community colleges, which are poorly managed or strictly privatized projects, which exploit them more with their commercial interests. These extreme approaches to the management of community colleges have dented the objectives of the community colleges in empowering rural residents. It is, therefore, significant to evaluate the possibility of establishing public-private partnerships for community colleges in rural areas. Methodology One of the major steps of research is the way the researcher will collect data, the design he or she will use to approach the study and the analysis of the data to prove or disapprove the hypotheses and research objectives. This is what is referred to as research methodology, and it involves the way the research will go about testing the hypotheses, fulfilling the objectives and answering research questions, if any. In this study, descriptive research design will be used where the research phenomena will be described critically and high degree of plausibility will be targeted. The researcher will further use random sampling procedure, where the sample size will be determined using Krejcie & Morgan (1970) sampling table. This study will consider using both qualitative and quantitative research approaches. Quantitative research is a scientific approach, which requires that available data should be quantifiable, measurable and statistical. Most of the data collected through questionnaires is quantitative in nature and fits into this approach. Qualitative approach is mainly concerned with analyzing interpretative data obtained from interviews, texts and observations (Chava & Nachmais, 2008). This study will be concerned with establishing public-private partnerships for a community college in a rural area, and one of the instruments of qualitative data collection will be interviews. When considering using interviews, it was important to analyze their strengths in this study. In a bid to obtain information and in-depth understanding of the public-private partnership in funding and running community colleges in rural area, it was clear than interviews would be the best instrument. The interviews enable the interviewee to paint a clear picture of events and will enable the researcher to obtain more information than it would have collected using other tools (Creswell, 2003). Moreover, they will enable probing and posing of follow-up questions so as to obtain exhaustive answers. Interviews will, therefore, enable the researcher to tailor the questions to the respondent in order to get rich information needed for the topic of focus. In fact, this will be done through closed-ended questions. The researcher will also be able to gain useful insights of respondent’s experiences with private, public or a public private partnership, and hence come up with the best recommendations. Interviews will, in this case, enable the researcher to write a clear report on the experiences of the respondents with different forms of management of community colleges. The other advantage of interviews in this study was that the instruments provide quick turnaround, and thereby have the highest measurement of validity and reliability (Creswell, 2003). Since high response rates are attained, interviews are useful for exploring and confirming research findings. Interviews were also selected because they provide access to different groups of people. This study will be depended on views of different classes of people such as financiers, community school beneficiaries and experts in project management. They are, therefore, the best tools for collecting different information from different people because they can be customized based on the target information and target respondents. In this study, therefore, some questions will be constructed so as to obtain responses based on opinions of the respondent. These questions will, for example, be in the form of Likert scale, and the data collected will be qualitative and will be analyzed qualitatively, or through interpretation. It is important to note that in this study the choice of conceptual framework, research questions, sample to be used, case definitions and tools of data collection will partly involve reduction of the anticipated data (Chava & Nachmais, 2008). This way, qualitative research approach will come in handy in conceptualizing, collecting, and analyzing the data in this study. On the other hand, quantitative approach will also be used because the study will also collect quantitative data especially the one dealing with funding of the community school projects. Funding is one of the variables of the study that is best measured than interpreted qualitatively. Qualitative research is characterized by distinct logical steps with remarkable feature of objectivity (Chava & Nachmais, 2008). In order to measure some attributes of the study, the researcher will have to rely on questionnaires, and this is the reason as to why some data will be quantitative in nature and will call for quantitative research approach. Questionnaires are instruments of data collection, which are effective for reaching large number of people easily and efficiently. The tools are easy to work with because the researcher will only require identifying the group and posting them with questions. Since some target respondents in this study are project managers and financial experts, it will be easy and time saving to post the questionnaires. In the questionnaires, the study will only require to pose closed-ended questions, which are easy to create, code, and interpret. Moreover, questionnaires will be preferred because they are easy to standardize as every respondent in this study will be required to respond to the same question in the same way. This way, the researcher will be sure that every respondent targeted by the questionnaire in the selected sample will answer the same questions. This makes questionnaire a highly reliable method of research. Questionnaires will also be preferred because they are effective tools for collecting data in highly sensitive areas. For example, in this study, the area of the best person to manage the projects, the best form of management and funding procedure are relatively sensitive and required confidentiality and anonymity provided by questionnaires (Creswell, 2003). This way, questionnaires will increase chances of respondents giving sincere and honest responses without feeling intimidated by the presence of the researcher. From the foregoing data collection methodology, therefore, the study will employ both qualitative and quantitative data analysis, given the kind of data that will be collected (Creswell, 2003). Qualitative data analysis will involve, open, axial and selective coding of obtained data. Quantitative data analysis will involve carrying out descriptive and some inferential statistics so as to test the hypotheses of the study. In this study, other methods of data collection contemplated were focus group discussion and observations. They were found to be inappropriate because of the nature of the study and the anticipated data. For example, as this study required in-depth data, focus group discussions are not sufficiently in-depth in their approach. Focus group discussion is an instrument of qualitative data collection which seeks to find out respondents opinions, perceptions, and attitudes towards a topic of interest (Chava & Nachmais, 2008). They are also limited in collecting data from institutional setting such as schools, companies and administrative offices, which are the main target of this study. Focus group discussions are also expensive and not appropriate where topics of discussion elicit strong oppositions from the target groups. Observations on the other hand were found not to be appropriate because the researcher can not be objective in their setting. Observations as instruments of research are used in observational research, a type of correlational and non-experimental research in which a researcher observes ongoing behavior. This study required objective data so as to make objective conclusions and recommendations based on the significance of the issue. Moreover, this being a study which is meant to be implemented by the concerned stakeholders, informed consent from the participants and this is not provided by the method. The setting for observation is limited and captures a limited number of participants. This was a limitation given that this study will require capturing a wide setting where enough information will be collected for analysis. The participants in this study, based on the objectives of the study will constitute a sample of 44 participants sampled from a total population of 50 and selected at 95% confidence level. The people to be involved include respondents from the rural area where community colleges have ever been established. It will also include respondents from the interested private sector, and participants from the public sector. The participants must have been or are interested in investing, participating or being involved in the community college projects. All these participants will provide an insight on; the past experiences with purely public project management of community colleges in rural areas, purely private project management of community colleges in rural areas, the limitations of these two extreme strategies and contemplate any benefit and possibility of establishing a public-private partnership to manage the projects. References Chava, N. F. & Nachmais, D. (2008). Research methods in the Social Sciences: Seventh Edition New York, NY: Worth Publishers. Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Krejcie, R. & Morgan, D. (1970). Determining Sample Size for Research Activities. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 30, 607-610. Read More