Los actores que propician el cambio gradual de las instituciones

The data collection process was carried out in two stages, namely the first phase: Quantitative research questionnaire and the second phase: Qualitative research interview.

4.7.1 The first phase: Quantitative research questionnaire

The first phase of the study comprises the questionnaire administration to preschool teachers in one of the states in Malaysia. The statistics I received from Education State Department at the time of the fieldwork showed 501 preschools in 10 districts. However, when I contacted the officer who was in charged for the Preschool department, I was told that some of the

preschools have more than one class. Therefore, I considered the second list and distributed 550 questionnaire. In the initial plan, it was intended to send the questionnaire through mailboxes in which official documents were usually sent to schools. However, I realized that using schools mailboxes would take longer for the questionnaire to reach the schools. Therefore I contacted each of the officers in each district and I personally submitted the questionnaire to them. In some cases, I had to travel for longer distance to each District Education Office (DEO). After waiting for two weeks the response rate was still minimal.

This was the point of time that I decided to change my design from sequential to concurrent design. The nature of sequential design needed me to collect the quantitative data and analyse them first and only then I could proceed to the qualitative data. The limited time was a great challenge that I had to face as I was not able to conduct the interview until the quantitative data collection was completed. After discussing these issues with my supervisors, I completely changed the strategy so that I could seek a higher response rate. However, I also realised that bias is a larger concern than the return rate, because if the returned responses are biased, the data base will be inadequate regardless of the return rate (Creswell, 2012).

After changing my design, I contacted each of the officers to seek their permission to administer the questionnaire during the meeting or workshop at the respective DEOs which were compulsory attended by all preschool teachers. Many of the officers were co-operative, helpful and allowed me to spend 15-20 minutes administering and collecting the questionnaire before they started their meeting or workshop. However, in order for me to administer the questionnaire, I had to adhere to their time-table as the meeting or workshop would take place once a month. As I had to travel to 10 DEOs, I have to carefully plan my schedule so that it would not overlap with their schedule. In some cases two districts had the meeting and workshops at the same date so I divided the time appropriately to attend both. Simultaneously the interview arrangement also happened and I had to arrange the schedule for the interview accordingly. Apart from this, there were some unforeseen constraints in the fieldwork

challenges as explained further in section 4.7.4.

4.7.2 The second phase: Qualitative research interview

One of the aims in conducting the semi-structured interview in study was to understand the teachers’ attitudes by exploring the factors that influenced their attitude. While the

questionnaire was aimed at exploring their general attitudes towards the introduction of IE at the preschool level, the interview was to seek and yield their attitudes in more detail and in a deeper understanding.

Before the participants returned the questionnaire, I requested them to fill in the last section to indicate their willingness to be interviewed on a voluntary basis. If the participant willingly desired to be interviewed, they had to complete details of their contact number. The researcher contacted them after the meeting or session ended in order to arrange an appointment for the interview session. At first 20 participants agreed to be interviewed. However, two of them decided to withdraw from the interview because of personal reasons such as they were too busy and no longer interested in the study. Afterwards, I contacted the willing participants in order to arrange an appointment for the interview session.

18 participants from 10 different districts who volunteered to be interviewed were contacted to inquire about a convenient time and place to conduct the interview. Malay language was used to allow good rapport and comfort with the participants. The researcher also informed the participants of the research aims and the right to privacy, anonymity and confidentiality. A digital voice recorder was used to record interviewsfor which participants had given their consent before the interview. The data was transferred to a computer at the University of Leeds.

4.7.3 Practical constraints on data generation

In this section, I provide a detailed account of the challenges I encountered during the process of the fieldwork such as:

a) Although originally the intention was to adopt the sequential explanatory design, during the fieldwork, the researcher decided to change to convergent (concurrent) parallel design. According to Creswell (2012), this design is used when the researcher uses the concurrent timing to implement the quantitative and qualitative strands during the same phase of the research process (see Figure 7).

Figure 7. Convergent/concurrent parallel design (Creswell, 2012)

The decision was made by the researcher after discussing with the supervisors. This happened because of the response rate for mailed questionnaire was very low and the time was limited (three months). Even though the researcher used several strategies to encourage high return rates, the number was not very promising. The strategy used was;1) Mail out the original questionnaire; 2) Follow it up two weeks later with a second questionnaire to the individuals who have not responded and ;3) After another two weeks, send a postcard to the non-respondents, reminding them to complete the questionnaire (Creswell, 2012). Therefore, the sampling strategy was changed as already explained above in section 4.5.2.

Quantitative Data Collection and Analysis Qualitative Data Collection and Analysis Compare or relate _{Interpretation}

b) Although the official letter was sent to the State Education Department and DEO officers about my study, I had to explain to the whole school system the purpose of my study and my presence in their school. I also have to carefully explain to all teachers participating in my study so that they would not be influenced by any misconception from the school principals or DEO officers about the nature of my study.

c) Dealing with the DEO officers (the gatekeeper) was challenging because they were constantly busy with so many activities. Although most of the DEO officers were helpful, some of them were unreachable that they promised to contact schools but it did not happen. In some cases, some of them forgot the arrangement which they made with the researcher.

d) The participants were not always able to commit themselves to the interview session though they initially agreed to become the participants. There were some cases, the interview session have to be rescheduled a few times due to many reasons such as they have to attend school meeting, they forgot about the interview session and they have to fetch their own children from school.

e) The interviews also were conducted at various locations according to the preference of the participants. Some of the schools and the public places were a long distance which was time consuming and expensive. However, the challenging part was holding the interview sessions at public places such as a garden, a mosque and a public library (meeting area) because of the noise level and frequent interruptions by other people such as librarians and the public.