Qualitative Research Questions

Introduction

There are several features essential to a research thesis and dissertation. One of these sections is the research questions which is very crucial as without it, the research fails to have direction. As one of the most important pieces of the research design research question fundamentally defines what the researcher wants to learn or understand. Maxwell (2005) asserts that research questions serve a multiplicity of purposes including helping to focus the study and offering vital guidance relating to how a certain study should be conducted as different questions require different methods of inquiry. More importantly, research questions play a significant role in communicating to the reader of a thesis the goal of the research. According to Cresswell (2007), a single study can have many research questions, though they all connect to answering the broad objective of that study. In this paper, the ‘research questions’ section is the area of discussion. To help deliver the point of how this section is dealt with in research, a discussion of five hypothetical questions based on the following research topic will be discussed.

Topic: How the negative attitudes of teachers, fellow students, and the society, in general, affects the lives of students with special needs.

Problem statement

People with disabilities have faced a lot of challenges in their various places of residence in the society for decades, where some of these problems include discrimination in various social places like schools and places of work leading to the cropping of various problems such as self-pity and loss of esteem (James, 2008). Unfortunately, such problems lead to other sophisticated ones that affect their social lives and academic performance of schools, and more importantly, their livelihood after school.

Research Questions

This paper addresses the following five study questions:

1. What is the nature of the correlation between the attitudes of teachers and academic performance of students with special needs?
2. What factors contribute to the negative or positive attitudes of teachers towards students with special needs?
3. What role does the society play in impacting positively to the academic and social developments of students with special needs?
4. What could be done to turn around the situation in favor of students with special needs?
5. Does gender affiliation of teachers create disparity as far as their attitudes to students with special needs are concerned?

The following is a discussion of each of the above questions and the methodology that can be used in addressing each of them.

Question 1: What is the nature of the correlation between the attitudes of teachers and academic performance of students with special needs?

The above question aims at identifying the type of correlation that exist between attitudes of teachers (negative and positive) and academic performance of students with special needs. To be able to tell the nature of the correlation between the above two variables, a mixed methodology would be most viable. According to Maxwell 2005), the mixed method is a rational design and method of inquiry that applies both the quantitative and qualitative research perspectives due to the necessity of acquiring quantitative (numerical) and textual evidence of a research question. As such, self-administered questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and focus groups discussion schedules would be best suited for collecting data. Questionnaires structure with prompts aimed at acquiring information of how respondents think about the link between negative attitudes of teachers and poor academic performance of special needs students and the vice versa would be administered. To reach for more information, interviews with semi-structured questions would be conducted. After that, the qualitative data would be coded and analyzed. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) would be used to obtain frequency distributions and bivariate correlation tables (Maxwell, 2005).

Apparently, there would be a possible positive correlation between positive attitudes of teachers towards students with special needs and their better academic performances. That is because the negative attitudes could compromise the attention of the teachers to these students limiting them to satisfying their learning needs as found by James (2008).

Question 2: What factors contribute to the negative or positive attitudes of teachers towards students with special needs?

This study question would be seeking to obtain information on the contributors of the positive as well as negative attitudes of teachers towards students with special needs. Plainly, this study questions would require no numerical information and as such could be best answered using qualitative research approaches and tools. Semi-structured interviews would be the best-suited tools for acquiring enough information with regards to factors that cause the positive/negative attitudes for teachers towards students with special needs (Maxwell, 2007). The reason for choosing the semi-structured interviews over the other types of interviews is because, unlike the others, it incorporates both open and closed-ended types of inquiries. The most suitable sample for such an interview would probably be 50 respondents. After completing the inquiries, the factors contributed by the respondents would be tabulated. Among the possible factors that contribute to the negative attitudes of teachers towards students with special needs would include the following. First is insufficient knowledge of these special students especially for teachers without certifications of teaching in special schools. Second might be the discouragement due to the slow learning capabilities of most of them, the low compensations compared to the complicated nature of teaching these students (Avramidis, Bayliss & Burden, 2000)

Question 3: What role does the society play in impacting positively to the academic and social developments of students with special needs?

The society plays a very vital role in enhancing the development of students/children with special needs (James, 2008). This question could be answered better qualitatively using interviews or focus group discussions. However, due to the complexity of the question, a focus group discussion comprising of academic stakes like teachers, parents, and the affected group, students. As such, the tool for inquiry might be the focus group discussion schedule. In such a discussion, the researcher would pose the questions one by one and the focus group would discuss each as the researcher takes notes of the important points of the discussion. After this, he would pick up the important roles mentioned in the discussion. The best size of the focus group would be 30. The most probable roles that, might be mentioned would include encouraging, funding special schools and offering jobs to graduates of special schools just to mention a few (Beacham & Rouse, 2012).

Question 4: What can be done to turn around the situation in favor of students with special needs?

This study question would be seeking to build knowledge to the society including all people within the environments where students with special needs exist on how they could help these students lead a normal living equal to that of their counterparts in regular schools (James, 2008). A qualitative inquiry via interview could be conducted with special education teachers and some students with special needs. Special education teachers understand the challenges these students face and could help guide and advice on what should be done to create a better learning and socializing environment with students with disabilities. Similarly, these students are aware and conscious of the problem they face and could also contribute to the making better of their learning environment.

Once the contributions of the two groups of the sample have been gathered, the researcher would make a report including the recommendations of what could be done.

Question 5: Does gender affiliation of teachers create disparity as far as their attitudes to students with special needs are concerned?

As much as teachers could have negative attitudes towards students with disabilities in their classes, female teachers could show much of this negative attitudes than the males or the vice versa (Avramidis, Bayliss & Burden, 2000). This study question would be seeking to find out whether differences exist between female and male teachers with regards to their attitudes towards students with special needs. In such a case, the null hypothesis could be set on the assumption that there is no significant difference between female and male teachers as far as their attitudes towards students with special needs are concerned. A quantitative method of inquiry would be better suited for providing an answer to this question. The best sample for such a study would be made up of students with special needs and would inquire about their perception of whether male teachers treat them better than their female teachers or the vice versa. Analysis of their responses would be done through P-value analysis using SPSS. A p-value of less than 0.05 would force the researcher to reject the above null hypothesis while a p-value of greater than 0.05 would force him to accept the null hypothesis (Creswell, 2007). However, it is likely that the researcher would confirm the null hypothesis in concomitance to some prior researches such as that of Avramidis, Bayliss, and Burden (2000); Beacham and Rouse (2012).

References

Avramidis, E., Bayliss, P., & Burden, R. (2000). Student teachers’ attitudes towards the inclusion of children with special educational needs in the ordinary school. Teaching and teacher education, 16(3), 277-293.

Beacham, N., & Rouse, M. (2012). Student teachers' attitudes and beliefs about inclusion and inclusive practice. Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs, 12(1), 3-11.DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-3802.2010.01194.x

Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry & research design: Choosing among five approaches. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

James, A. (2008). School success for children with special needs: Everything you need to know to help your child learn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Maxwell, J. A. (2005). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach. Applied social research methods series, v. 41. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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