Research Instruments RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

C. Research Instruments

There were two instruments employed in this qualitative research, namely document analysis and interview. Both instruments were used in order to gather descriptive data and functioned as the primary sources of data in this research. Therefore, they were significant to the research finding in answering this research problems formulated in the first chapter, namely how the 2007 national English final test for vocational high schools meets the criteria of face validity, and how its reading section meets the criteria of content validity. The intended documents were national final examination year 2007 for vocational high school, syllabus, Competency-based Curriculum, and test specifications. Ary et al. 2002: 434 state that interview is one of the instruments that most qualitative researchers use due to its advantage. Within interviews, the researcher is able to obtain people‟s opinions, beliefs, and feelings about particular topic or situation in their own words. In other words, interview can provide some information that cannot be obtained from observation, or instead it can verify the observation. Interviews were conducted by the researcher to five lecturers and ten students of English education study program of Sanata Dharma University in order to gather descriptive data to answer the first research problem, namely how the national final examination year 2007 for vocational high schools meets the criteria of face validity. In reference to Ary et al. 2002: 435, documents were significantly used in this qualitative research. They note that in order to obtain the wanted comprehension of the phenomenon being observed, printed documents might be used by a qualitative researcher. The documents that were used are of those which Bogdan and Biklen 2003: 127 have called as official documents. They state that qualitative researchers are now beginning to make use of such documents as their primary sources. Therefore, in this research, the researcher was interested in the documents themselves and used the interviews as supplementary instrument. The researcher‟s analysis of the documents functioned to answer the second research problem, namely how the national final examination year 2007 for vocational high schools meets the criteria of content validity.

D. Data Gathering Techniques