Freshmen And Senior Participation At University Level Courses

Focus groups are in-depth interviews undertaken with a group of about eight to twelve people. They involve interaction between the participants. The aim of focus group research is to learn and understand what people think about a topic at length and in detail.

This method is applicable to my study because it allows the group of students the freedom to share their experiences, understanding and beliefs of the topic being presented. Focus groups are an asset to my research design because these groups work best for topics people could talk about with one another in their daily lives but do not. Focus groups are not always appropriate for highly sensitive and personal topics to be shared with strangers. However, for the purposes of my research the racially sensitive issues will be open to discussion because the focus group will only have African American students (Merriam,

Facilitating focus groups, interviews, allowed us to strengthen our qualitative research skills. As an outsider, the qualitative process was the most enjoyable to me. I was able to learn their way of living, strengths and challenges of their community. The process of creating the pretest and posttest surveys collectively was a challenge, yet another beneficially learning experience. I realized effective surveys take time to develop and need to be reviewed by multiple people. Developing poorly constructed questionaries’ is highly possible if no one takes the time to actually

Being an undergraduate as an adult is strange. It’s at once unnerving and inspiring. It’s not a unilateral experience, but there are commonalities between adult students; there are a lot of them.

Flexible and inexpensive, focus groups consist of six to ten participants (Hartman, 2004, p. 408). Additionally, a moderator guides the discussion among its panel members that allows researchers to observe real-time verbal responses and nonverbal cues (Hartman, 2004, p. 402; Cooper & Schindler, 2014, p. 160). Focus groups moderators also have the ability to introduce new ideas to gain a greater understanding of concerns from respondents (Hartman, 2004, p. 402). However, a concern with focus group is the lack of anonymity due to the face-to-face participation.

One of the strategies not used in this study we the use of group interviews or focus groups. The authors point this fact out in their study indicating that while the results from such interviews would likely add to the evidence of their study, because of the scope of the study this method would need to wait to be utilized in later studies. Limiting the number of uncontrolled variables and not overwhelming the study with multiple research methods that may or may not add to the value of the results at this point seems beneficial and allows room for future

This article represents a focus group type of qualitative research. According to Qualitative Research Consultants Association (2015), in focus group qualitative research, a group of individuals who share a need, life circumstance, or habit relevant to the research issue(s) at hand are led in a discussion by a modulator. The focus group discussions often include between two to ten respondents, and are often held face to face. They can also be conducted remotely through videoconferencing, teleconferencing, or

The researcher “drew on the experience of 21 participants” although a small sample it is adequate to gaining rich data (Moule & Goodman, 2009), But “focus groups lasting approximately 1

Astin, A. W. (1984). Student involvement: A developmental theory for higher education. Journal of college student personnel, 25(4),

I was not surprised by the data presented in this lesson because our district’s data is worse. 50% of our students fail at all levels in high school. 80% of those who pass need remedial courses in College.

Each interview and focus group audio was transcribed within 24 hours by a research assistant. Data analysis was conducted using the Statistical package for social science to analyze the data set collected from the

The focus group interview has problems of its own in that desire to conform may impel certain participants to offer similar response, whilst others would decline. This may particularly have been the situation in this case, where a large group of participants was invovled. There are issues of anonymity, as well as with participants possibly aiming to please particularly if a professor were present. The setting may also be obtrusive and intimidating. And last but not least there is the issue of objectivity where the entire proceedings are interpreted by and processed through the mind of the researcher.

Furthermore, it provides data of a broad scope of experiences in a short time span. The particular mechanisms of a focus group can open discussions and issues that would other wise not be brought up in other methods, such as interviews. A focus group is advantageous as both the content and the interactions in the group can be used as data in the analysis. For content it gives a variety of opinions and provides analysis of similarities and differences that are discussed, as well as immediate discussion material where one can go deeper into the reasons for these differences.

For this part of the reflection regarding what I would do differently and on my improvement goals, I have decided to write about how I could improve on “Establishing and maintaining expectations for student participation”.

Carson et al (2001, p.114) refers to focus groups as “A research technique that collects data through group interaction on a topic or topics”. They also suggest that the central distinctive characteristic of focus groups is group interaction, which generates a mass of data, which would be