The quantitative part of the study collected data through a survey, which consisted of a self-administered questionnaire with unsupervised administration, distributed via Internet, in English language.
The questionnaire consisted of six sections. After an introduction, which explained participants on the purpose of the survey and gave basic instructions, there was the first set of questions about instructors’ profile. These questions that asked about instructors’ personal and professional characteristics were split in two sections, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the questionnaire. At the beginning it was asked about instructor’s area of science and media use habits. At the end, the questions were about gender, age and years of experience in teaching. The purpose of these profile questions was collecting data that could be tested as possible influences to instructors’ attitudes.
The second set of questions asked about students’ media use and multitasking in class. The first question of this set asked whether the instructor normally see this behavior in class, serving as filter, that is, the ones who do not see the behavior in their classes would go directly to the end of the questionnaire. The other questions of the set asked about prevalence of the behavior in percentage of the students and class time, with the purpose of comparing the perception of instructors with the results of other studies on media use prevalence of students in class.
The third and fourth sets of questions were about implicit attitudes, corresponding to the cognitive and affective spheres; and fifth set consisted of behavioral attitudes. The questions belonging to these sections were displayed to respondents in random order. These inquiries consisted mostly of statements representing these components of attitudes taken from the interviews of the qualitative phase, so the distributions in a larger sample could be established in the quantitative phase.
Finally, there was an optional open question, where instructors could write remarks about their experience and perception about students’ media use and multitasking in class, if they wished; followed by the closure questions that corresponded to the second set of instructors’ profile, already mentioned in detail. The questionnaire can be consulted in Appendix C.
3.2.2 Pre-test
The survey questionnaire was pre tested and adjusted in the period from July 16th to August 20th. The first two versions of the questionnaire, which were pre-tested, were built and administered on the free online program Surveyplanet.com.
Two university instructors tested the first version of the questionnaire. After their feedback, adjustments such as wording of questions, values of scales, and complementation of information, were made. The second version of the questionnaire was tested by another university instructor, which led to further clarification of terms used in questions and rearrangement of order of questions.
The third version of the questionnaire was built on the online program Unipark, due to the wider possibilities of tools to organize the survey layout and filtering. One more instructor tested this version. Afterwards, the survey was considered sufficient to be sent to the study sample.
In the data set, the case corresponding to the tester was eliminated in order to not interfere in the results.
3.2.3 Data collection
The survey was administered via the online survey program Unipark, between August 29th and September 13th. The respondents for the survey were acquired through a convenience sample, so that contacts of university instructors were gathered from personal contacts and retrieved from university webpages in Germany and Brazil. The survey link was sent to the contacts in an invitation email, explaining the purpose of the survey and the study. Moreover, it was asked the contacts to forward the link to their contacts, classifying also as a snowball sample.
3.2.4 Validity and generalizability
Procedures to ensure quality of the quantitative phase were taken in consideration. The interviews conducted in the qualitative phase allowed the researcher to get close to the subject, thus obtaining the aspects that are important to them as well as the language they use, so the wording of the survey questions would be clear to respondents. Furthermore, the versions of the instrument of data collection were pre- tested by and discussed with experts, who have given feedback and allowed the instrument to be adjusted. Besides this, once data was collected in the quantitative phase, a factor analysis was conducted to confirm the variables were measuring the dimensions the researcher had proposed. Through these procedures it was sought to achieve validity.
Since previous similar investigations were not found, the main idea was to have an initial input from the instructors’ perspective on students’ media use and multitasking during classes. Therefore, generalizability was not a goal in this study. Moreover, in order to generalize results, a very comprehensive sample of university instructors would be necessary. As a convenience sample was adopted, the results cannot be considered definite, but can serve the purpose of contributing to the discussion and animating studies in this direction, as Bryman (2012) clarifies about the adoption of a convenience sample “The data will not allow definitive findings to be generated, because of the problem of generalization, but they could provide a springboard for further research or allow links to be forged with existing findings in an area” (p. 202).
4 Findings
As this study consists of two phases of data collection, firstly the findings of the qualitative stage will be presented, also specifying to which extent it informed the quantitative phase. In the sequence, the results of the quantitative phase are communicated and analyzed.