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Thursday, June 28, 2012

Drafting my Research Design

My data will come from official UN documents. Through the months, I have been mapping the relevant documents and seen some samples of them. Before I officially embark on my formal data collection... I had to be more clear about my research method. After a week of extensive reading I think I have come to understand my research structure a bit better. Here is the line of thought of my research:



I also found a Krippendorff's book on content analysis really helpful. It gives me the academic/theoretical support of what I want to do. Here is a conceptual process of my research methodology:

Krippendorff identifies that in content analysis, there are three types of units: 
  1. Sampling unit -  units of selection; what documents are going to be sampled and analysed? (i.e. CPD, evaluation report)
  2. Coding unit - units of description; what is going to be coded/measured/analysed? (i.e. textual presence of risk management, mentions of programme success)
  3. Context unit - units that delineate the scope for coders in recording the coding units; what context is the coding unit coded? (i.e. the logframe is a context unit, textual presence of risk management is the coding unit)
The examples above are working definitions of my units of analysis, I still have to work on clarifying them.

As for my sampling, it is clear that I'm using relevance sampling:
"Relevance sampling is non-probabilistic. In using this form of sampling, an analyst proceeds by following a conceptual hierarchy, systematically lowering the number of units that need to be considered for an analysis. The resulting units of text are not meant to be representative of a population of texts; rather, they are the population of relevant texts." (Krippendorff, 2004)
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References:
GRAY, D. E. 2009. Doing research in the real world, London, SAGE.
KRIPPENDORFF, K. 2004. Content analysis : an introduction to its methodology, Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage.
KRIPPENDORFF, K. & BOCK, M. A. 2009. The content analysis reader, Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage Publications.


1 comment:

  1. Your research design is looking solid. :)
    I think the components of the content analysis makes good sense, I hope it will be helpful to you in your research.

    Let the data collection begin... hehehe

    ReplyDelete