Instruments and Data Gathering Technique

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D. Research Bias

On the other hand, the results of this research may have a research bias because the participants came from different cities and schools. These different backgrounds may influence their opinions about the curriculum implementation. However, Curriculum 2013 was implemented by all of the national schools in all educational level. As long as the researcher did not generalize the opinions to the curriculum implementation, the researcher could avoid from the bias.

E. Instruments and Data Gathering Technique

The researcher gathered the data by interviewing some Senior High School English teachers from different schools, who had already implemented, or is still implementing Curriculum 2013. The purpose of the interview is to know the teachers’ perception on the implementation of the Curriculum 2013. According to Ary, Jacobs, and Sorensen 2010, in qualitative studies, the human investigator is the primary instrument for the gathering and analyzing data. In order to conduct the research instrument, the researcher used human as research instrument as the main instrument. The concept of human as the research instrument is to emphasize the unique role that qualitative researchers play in their inquiry. Because qualitative research studies human experiences and situations, the researcher needed a flexible instrument 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. 30 By using human as the main instrument, the researcher has the flexibility to figure out human perception. The data gathering or data collection was an open-ended interview. Ary, Jacobs and Sorensen 2010 state that interview is one of the most widely used and basic methods for obtaining qualitative data. Interview was used to gather data from people about opinions, beliefs, experiences people have and the meaning they made, rather than testing hypothesis and feelings about situations in their own words. The advantage of conducting interviews is that interviews provide data that cannot be obtained through observation. The background of the participants, or in Seidman 1991 term is called the context, is urgent in conducting interviews. The urgency of recognizing the context of interviews is that it provides access to the context of the participants’ behavior and, thus, provides a way for researchers to understand the meaning of that behavior Seidman, 1991, pp. 3-4. Another advantage of conducting interviews is that interviews are powerful way to gain insight into educational issues through understanding the experience of the individuals whose lives constitute education Seidman, 1991. Understanding the experiences of individuals is the strength of an interview as a method of qualitative research, mainly because those experiences are conducted through stories during the interviews. Telling stories, according to Seidman 1991 is essentially a meaning-making process in which people select details of their experiences from their stream of consciousness. Henceforth, conducting 31 interviews give the researchers a chance to get deep and refine information by which they can develop their argumentation upon rich resources. Before conducting the interview, the researcher wrote down several questions to be used in interviewing the participants. Therefore, the interview which was used by the researcher was a semi-structured interview, in which the researcher prepared some questions to be asked to the participants. Meanwhile, there would be several questions which were made spontaneously, in the middle of the interview. The researcher used semi-structured interview to gain various answer from the participants. Merriam 2009 stated that “semi-structured interview was guided by a list of questions or issues to be explored, so that this format allowed the researcher to respond to the situation at hand, to the several point of views of the respondent, and to new ideas on the topic ” p. 90. Furthermore, the use of semi structured interview was useful for obtaining information to test a specific hypothesis that the researcher had in mind Frankel, Wallen, Hyn, 2015, p. 449.

F. Data Analysis Techniques