Research Methodology

At the commencement of the present study it had to be decided as to whether there was a hypothesis to confirm, or a question to be answered. The Collins Concise English Dictionary (1991, p. 555) describes a hypothesis as “a suggested explanation for a group of facts or phenomena, either accepted as a basis for further verification or as accepted as likely to be true”. The phenomenon in this case was the recent introduction of a Myotherapy degree which contained a high degree of procedural or task-oriented units in the curriculum. There was no hypothesis relating to the structure of the curriculum which needed be established, however, there was a question to be answered, - is there is a place for a competency-based approach to be formally integrated into the procedural or task -oriented units of a HE curriculum? It was decided that this question could best be answered by using a qualitative research process and exploring the views, experiences and perceptions of teachers and curriculum developers regarding competency-based learning programs? From the data gathered a theory could then be developed which could be grounded in the data recovered from the research

Qualitative research was selected as the most appropriate method to address the question posed in this study as it allowed for an in-depth, exploration of the attitudes and perceptions of the participants regarding competency-based education and training. It allowed the participants to express these attitudes and perceptions in a reflective written form and to elaborate on any views they had expressed at a subsequent interview. Strauss and Corbin (1990, p. 17) described qualitative research as “any kind of research that produces findings, not arrived at by means of statistical procedures or other means of quantification”. It was later described by Creswell (1998) as follows:

Qualitative research involves the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical materials – case study, personal experience, introspective, live story, interview, observational, historical, interactional and visual texts – to describe routine and problematic moments and meaning in individual’s lives (p. 2)

Qualitative research has become increasingly popular in the last two decades and has been widely accepted across most disciplines including sociology, psychology, medicine, business and economics, and anthropology (Huberman and Miles 2002). It can be described as a process of evaluation, and is in a sense a process of examination and judgement of the documents viewed, the activities observed, and the answers obtained whilst interviewing participants. The process requires the researcher to become both a participant and a learner, during which they must carefully consider their questions, test their assumptions, be reflective, and recognise their own biases as they modify or introduce new questions (Rossman and Rallis, 2003).

This study has been developmental, and is analytical, arriving at conclusions based on the data obtained from answers to questions posed to participants in a descriptive survey and subsequent in-depth interviews. It sought answers to questions regarding the views, attitudes and perceptions of competency-based education and training from a small group of participants with experience in teaching, and/or designing competency-based education and training programs, as well as others who experienced its implementation in the HE sector. In this process, the experience and reasoning of participants was augmented using a ‘grounded theory’ approach.

4.2.1 Grounded Theory

Strauss (1987, p. 5) states that ‘Grounded Theory” was developed by Glaser and Strauss in the early 1960’s during a field observational study of hospital staff’s handling of dying patients. In this approach to research, a theory is inductively derived from the collected data and is said to be to be ‘grounded in that data’. In the same text Strauss states that the theory produced by the research is grounded by:

systematically and intensively analysing data, often sentence by sentence, or phrase by phrase of the field note, interview or other document; by ‘constant comparison’, data are extensively collected and coded. The focus on analysis is not merely on collecting or ordering a mass of data, but on organising many ideas, which have emerged from the analysis of the data (p. 22).

This approach of Glaser and Strauss appears to be the most suitable means of establishing a position on whether it would be beneficial to formally integrate some form of competency-based structure into the Myotherapy Degree program.

Next, in consideration of how to seek answers to the two research questions, Patton (1990, p. 70) suggests reviewing text data including excerpts and quotations from books, published papers, official publications and reports, memoranda and correspondence, and questionnaires and surveys. He also recommends that researchers take notes to provide detailed descriptions of activities, behaviours and actions from direct observations, and transcriptions of recordings of in-depth, open- ended interviews to provide direct quotations from people about their knowledge, feelings experiences and opinions.

In reviewing these options, the researcher decided that the most suitable way to obtain data relevant to answering the research questions was to interview relevant participants using in-depth, semi structured interviews. This would allow the researcher to provide participants with the opportunity to elaborate on any theme in which they held a strong view or conviction, and give examples of any particular phenomena they had experienced. It was also considered that a modified questionnaire in the form of a ‘descriptive survey’ would be a useful tool for providing foundation data and introducing the participants to the subject matter. The answers provided in the survey were reviewed by the researcher and clarified and expanded on, by the participants at the subsequent semi-structured, in depth interview interview.

In agreement with Kirk and Miller (1986), the research consists of the four basic stages as follows:

• An invention stage in which the research question is decided and a research design developed,

• A discovery stage in which data is collected,

• An interpretative stage in which analysis and theory building occurs, and • An explanation stage in which the entire research process is packaged for

communication.

This linear approach provides a pathway by which the researcher might be guided. However, it is important to realise that the use of in-depth interviews does not always conform to a neatly ordered linear approach, because in this type of research the analytic process is a constant throughout the process.