commit to user 60
and provide information about the event. For the purpose of this study, the data were obtained directly from research participants and were in the form of
interview transcripts, audio recordings, field notes and documents.
1. Respondent
The respondents of this Study were teachers selected through purposive sampling. The participants of research are eligible units of the population from
which data would be collected. Parahoo 1997:218 defines population as “the total of units from which data can be collected”, such as individuals, artifacts,
events and organization. The participants of research must meet certain criteria in order to be included in a study. Burns and Grove 2003:234 define eligibility
criteria as a “list of characteristics that required for membership in the target population”. In this context, participants who qualified to participate in a
phenomenological research are: a. Participants who have experiences relating to the phenomenon to be
researched. b. Those who are verbally fluent and able to communicate their feelings,
thoughts, and perceptions in relation to the researched phenomenon. c. Those who have the same language as the researcher, since this will obviate
the possible lost of semantic nuances owing to the need to translate from one language to another
d. Participants who express willingness to be open to the researcher Kruger 1988:150
commit to user 61
Therefore, the participants of this study met the above requirements. In addition, they were teachers in the following fields: English language, English
education, literature or linguistics. Table 3.1 shows the teacher s’ biographical
information which include their names, designation, age, gender, highest educational qualification, years of experience and department.
Table 3.1:Biographical information of the participants
Participant Pseudonym
P1 P2
P3 P4
P5 P6
P7 P8
P9
Designation Lecturer
√ √
√ √
√ √
√ √
Age 30
30 40
NA 34
60 34
62 50
Highest educational qualification
MA MA
MA MA
M A
MA MA
PhD M
A Years of Experience
2.12 4
13 31
7 26
7 26
15 Department
English √
√ √
√ √
√ √
√
Pseudonyms were assigned to the teachers: T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, T6, T7, T8, and T9 in order to protect their identity, maintain confidentiality and anonymity of
information. DC means declined to participate in the research study. NA stands for not available. “M” is for “Male”, “F” for “Female”, “BA” for “Bachelor of
Art”, “MA” for “Masters” and “PhD” for “doctoral”. The qualification of the teachers ranges from masters degrees to Ph.D obtained from Indonesian and
foreign universities. The majority of the participants teach at least one language skill in addition to their mainstreams.
The total number of the participants 9 was considered normal because the main was the quality of data obtained rather than the number of the participants
sampled. Five of the participants were female and four were male. In phenomenological study, the number of participants is small and flexible and
depending on data saturation -the point at which no new information or theme
commit to user 62
emerges. However, LoBiondo-Wood and Haber 1998 argues that the results
based on a small sample under 10 tend to be unstable, Johnson and Christensen
2000 recommend in-depth interviews with up to10 people as ideal for phenomenological research. Boyd 2001 contends that two to 10 participants or
research subjects as sufficient to reach saturation, while Creswell 1998:65 113 considers “long interviews with up to 10 people” for a phenomenological study.
The participants were selected using purposive sampling. Purposive sampling is a non-probability sampling mainly used in qualitative research.
According to the Streubert-Speziale and Carpenter 2003:67, purposive sampling is used most commonly in phenomenological inquiry. The main idea behind
purposive sampling is that the research process is one of “discovery” rather than testing of hypotheses. The researcher specifies the characteristics of a population
of interest and then tries to locate individuals who possess those characteristics Johnson and Christensen, 2000:175. Similarly, Creswell 2003:185 states that
“The idea behind qualitative research is to select participants that will best help the researcher to understand the research question.” It is believed that
phenomenology is well suited for purposive sampling because this type of sampling permits the selection of participants whose qualities or experiences help
in understanding the phenomenon being investigated. Johnson and Christensen 2000:176 point out that purposive sampling has
the same limitations as many nonrandom sampling methods. The ability to generalize from a sample to a population based on a single research study may be
severely limited. According to Johnson et al 2004, generalizability is typically
commit to user 63
not the major purpose of qualitative research. Therefore, cautions must be applied in generalizing the findings of this study beyond the specific sample. Nonetheless,
the sample may not be a representative of all English departments but at least it can fairly be a representative of English teachers at this university and could
therefore be generalized to similar teaching contexts.
2. Events
