Research Method Research Subjects Studied

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CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY

This chapter is divided into six sections. The first is research method; the second is research subject studied; the third is research instrument; the fourth is data gathering technique; the fifth is data analysis technique, and the sixth is research procedure.

A. Research Method

The writer engaged in a qualitative research in conducting this research. Qualitative method is meant to provide verbal descriptions portraying phenomena; unstructured data sources which lead into exploration of the topic; inductive logic and the need to find explanations from perceived relationship. In particular, qualitative methods are useful in constructing explanations Krathwohl, 1998. This qualitative research aimed to explore a holistic picture and in-depth understanding of a phenomenon. The result of using this method was in narrative description and interpretation. By this method, initial incursion into the social setting led to further more informed exploration as themes and focuses emerge Holliday, 2002. In investigating collocation translation of Indonesian into English in thesis abstracts, the writer analyzed the phenomena of how the collocations were employed in translation into the second language, namely English. This research focused on English collocation from translated academic text. 33 To analyze the phenomena of translation in academic context, the writer engaged in document analysis. Document or content analysis is a research method that is applied to written or visual materials for the purpose of identifying specified characteristics or phenomena of the material. The materials analyzed by the writer were thesis abstracts of economic faculty that had been translated into English. These were fixed products since the theses had been submitted and input in library data base system during September 2007. The purpose of document analysis in this research was to analyze verbs and collocations that were translated from Indonesian into English.

B. Research Subjects Studied

This research investigated twenty undergraduate thesis abstracts of the Economic Faculty students of Sanata Dharma University. Thesis abstracts were selected since it is an important part of the research product in an academic community. Thesis abstracts were chosen as a condensed version of the whole research. Therefore, an abstract represents the content of complete paper. The Economic Faculty was chosen as the faculty which has the most students compared to the other faculties. Therefore, the variation of participants was higher. Ary et al. 2002: 163 defined sample in a research as “the small group that is observed.” Thus, in order to simplify the population, the writer chose the most representative groups in which he chose one setting out of all theses that had been submitted to library. The samples that were chosen in this research were theses that had been submitted and input to the library data base 34 during September 2007. In the mentioned period, the theses consisted of twenty subjects in total. Due to the mentioned time setting, the writer of the subject studied came from different academic years. All the writers of the subject studied were L2 learners; that is that they were not English native speakers. They were from various academic performances high, average, and low. Therefore, their language competences were also various. Yet the variation of language competences was considered insignificant in this research.

C. Research Instruments