Research Design RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

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CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This chapter addresses the methodology employed in this research. It is to provide clear information on what I did in the process of conducting the research as well as to answer the research question. Further, it would discuss seven main parts. They are research design, research setting, types of data and data sources, research participants, data collection technique, data analysis technique, and trustworthiness.

A. Research Design

The discussion in this part covers two essential points. The first point discusses a qualitative research, regarded as the basic principle underlying this research. Meanwhile, the second point elaborates document analysis as a type of qualitative research implemented in this research in order to analyze the students’ essays. The basic principle underlying this research is a qualitative method that has some fundamental characteristics as proposed by Creswell 2007; Merriam 2002; Ary, Jacobs, and Sorensen 2010. First, a qualitative research is conducted in a natural setting. A qualitative researcher accordingly attempts to collect data in a particular setting where the participants really experience the issue under the study. In that case, the researcher does not bring research participants to a lab and typically does not ask them to complete particular PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 63 research instruments Creswell, 2007. Second, in a qualitative research, a researcher becomes the main instrument to collect and subsequently to analyze data Creswell, 2007; Ary et al, 2010. Third, qualitative research involves an inductive process. A researcher, in that case, collects data in order to build concepts, hypothesis, or theories Merriam, 2002. Inductively, research findings coming from a qualitative research can be in the form of “themes, categories, concepts, te ntative hypotheses, and even substantive theory” Merriam, 2002: 5. Fourth, the result of a qualitative research is richly descriptive. The rich description covers words and pictures that a researcher uses in order to propose what she has learned about a particular phenomenon. A researcher could also use the data in the form of quotes taken from documents, field notes, and interviews in order to present the findings of his her study Ary et al, 2010. The nature of this research, intended to investigate the coherence problems in the students’ essays, was in line with the key characteristics of qualitative research as proposed by Creswell 2007; Merriam 2002; Ary et al 2010. Clearly, in this research, there were no attempts to construct a particular instrument dealing with an argumentative essay and to ask the students to complete a particular instrument. In other words, there were no attempts to control, to manipulate, as well as to affect the students’ performance in the class when they wrote their argumentative essay. Then, the characteristic of qualitative research was obviously implemented since I became the one who collected the essays and analyzed them in order to reveal the coherence problems in the essays. For that reason, I could be classified into human as a research instrument. Ary et 64 al 2010 point out that a human investigator may become the main instrument in order to gather and analyze data. Additionally, Lincoln and Guba 1985 in Ary et al 2010: 424 clearly write: Because qualitative research studies human experiences and situations, researchers need an instrument flexible enough to capture the complexity of the human experience, an instrument capable of adapting and responding to the environment. It is believed that only a human instrument is capable of this task. He or she talks with people in the setting, observes their activities, reads their documents and written records, and records this information in field notes and journals. Qualitative inquiry relies on fieldwork methods interviewing, observation, and document analysis as the principal means of collecting data, avoiding the use of paper-and- pencil tests, checklists, mechanical instruments, and highly structured observational protocols. This research also clearly implemented an inductive process as asserted by Merriam 2002. In this research, the essays were collected, analyzed, and eventually deconstructed in order to come to the emergent themes dealing with coherence problems in the stu dents’ essays. Then, a descriptive analysis was provided to the coherence problems found in the students’ essays. More specifically, the analysis provided some explanation for the problems, reviewed the related theories, and put samples of topic sentences, paragraphs in order to support the discussions of the problems. In particular, the research method employed in this research is document analysis, considered as a type of qualitative research Ary et al, 2010. Document analysis could be defined as a res earch method that is applied to “written or visual materials, for the purpose of identifying specified characteristics of the material” Ary et al, 2010: 457. Patton 2002: 4 also believes that document analysis attempts to study “excerpts, quotations, or entire passages from organizational, PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 65 clinical, or program records.” The purpose of document analysis in this research was closely related to the purposes of document analysis Ary et al, 2010; Patton, 2002. It was because this research aimed to analyze coherence problems in an entire students’ argumentative essay and see the organization of ideas in the essay. In order to have a deeper analysis toward the students’ essays, this research implemented a text-deconstruction technique Feez Joyce, 1998. The text-deconstruction technique generally aims to “investigate the structural pattern and language features of a particular model” Feez Joyce, 1998: 29-30. Specifically, the text-deconstruction is regarded as a learning cycle that involves three fundamental activities. They are text-level activities, clause-level activities, and eventually expression-level activities Feez Joyce, 1998: 29-30. Text-level activities include such activities as to sort sets of texts, to sequence jumble stages, to label stages, to set of related lexical items, conjunction, and modality. Then, clause-level activities are closely related to present and to practice activities dealing with the grammatical features of a text. Meanwhile, expression-level activities deal with decoding and spelling activities. The activities also cover handwriting, or typing practice required for the use of the text-type. Considering the fundamental activities Feez Joyce, 1998: 29-30 and the goal of this research, this research would only focus on the text-level activities and intentionally ignore the other two activities. Besides, the idea of text- deconstruction adopted in this research is completely a technique to analyze a particular written work and is not related to the text-deconstructionism point of PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 66 view. Overall, the research design elaborated in this part would become my fundamental base in discussing subsequent parts written in this chapter.

B. Research Setting