Hi, my school wants me to attach the list of the respondent’s company name, but i am hesitating because i told them that it is againts the research ethics. Before i conduct survey, i wrote them that it will be confidential and anonymous and that i willl not gather company names and email. Please tell me what should i do?
I need some suggestions for questionnaire development. I am having a qualitative analysis for my research and I feel that pictures would give a better and efficient response from my respondent’s end. Please help!
I guess you are trying to extract a user’s emotional response by applying this technique. I would suggest to use real pictures of real people to extract a real emotion instead of using those ubiquitous smiley faces/emojis. And also incorporate a variety of options (wide range of emotions) to have precise answers. Hope it helps.
One thing which can help here is having a collage of pictures for one option. You can have multiple pictures of different people from different races, ages and gender to express one emotion. This would ensure that your answer doesn’t gets biased and your target respondents choose a right answer by looking at the emotions and not other things like beautiful face, features etc. This solution is actually adopted by NFO Worldgroup. So, it is an acceptable method and would help you in collecting efficient data.
While using pictorial techniques, it is really important to make sure you don’t end up making a mistake I did during my PhD. I too took help of pictures in my questionnaire. My research area was related to children’s receptiveness towards animal abuse. So I showed them various violent videos on animal abuse and then asked them to fill in the questionnaire accordingly. I used stock photos in my questionnaire. I had the least idea that my supervisor would declare my data invalid because he felt the images I used were having a biased effect. Children usually have an irrational thinking ability and would willfully pick a picture which they would find attractive. I tried to prove my point for long but didn’t have any luck. And, I had to perform the whole data collection from scratch. Just make sure you use pictures which have a neutral influence. Your target respondents shouldn’t get influenced by pictures and give efficient answers.
This is exactly what my consultant explained to me when I got my questionnaire professionally designed from http://www.regentediting.com. These guys have years of expertise in this area. I was apprehensive about this idea of collating diverse images into one. But, this actually saved my research and even my supervisor appreciated my technique. You should definitely adopt it if you are going for pictorial responses in your questionnaire.
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Tony 12:23 pm on September 1, 2017 Permalink |
If your respondents are not comfortable in disclosing their organisations’ names, then you just cannot share either this or any sort of information with your committee. As per the ethical rules, I guess you must have sent a ‘consent to participate’ form to all of your respondents, which ensures that the information shared by each of them will be kept confidential. If the names are disclosed then that will raise an ethical issue, which is also not acceptable. Try to convince your school or the authority that it must be kept confidential, you may also show that consent form (if already signed by the respondents )to them in justification.