Interfaz gráfica

After writing the participants’ profiles based on their answers in the interviews, I asked them to read their profiles. My purpose for doing this was to confirm that my recordings of their answers were accurate and to make sure that what is written in those profiles clearly represents what they have said in the interviews. The participants gave their approval to the profiles and no changes were required.

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Guba (1981) suggests some criteria that should be addressed by qualitative researchers to establish the trustworthiness of a research project. Those criteria are: credibility (internal validity), transferability (external validity), dependability (reliability), and confirmability (objectivity). I will talk about each one of these criteria and my

strategies to meet them.

Credibility (internal validity): Lincoln and Guba (1985) point out that ensuring credibility is one of the essential elements in establishing trustworthiness. Credibility, or internal validity, according to Merriam (2001), deals with the question of “how research findings match reality” (p. 201). To ensure internal validity, I discussed my findings and interpretations with the participants. The participants pointed out that the findings and interpretations represent their perceptions.

Another way to ensure the internal validity is by following a random sampling approach when recruiting the participants for my study. Preece (1994) claims that random sampling helps in distributing any unknown effects evenly among the participants.

Researchers who use a random sampling approach, according to Bouma and Atkinson (1995), can claim that their participants and subjects could be considered as a

representative sample of a larger community.

Member checks are considered by some researchers (for example, Guba & Lincoln, 1989) to be very important to increase the credibility of a study. After

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read those transcripts to confirm their answers and to make sure that what had been written clearly represented their own perceptions.

Transferability (external validity): The external validity, according to Merriam (2001), deals with “the extent to which the findings of one study can be applied to other situations” (p. 207). To ensure transferability, I tried provid as thick descriptions about the data collection and data analysis processes as possible, as I have been doing in this chapter. Such detailed information, hopefully, can enable any researcher to decide if the findings of the current study can be transferred to his/her context of research or not.

Dependability (reliability): According to Silverman (1993), one way to achieve dependability, or reliability, in interviews is to have a highly structured interview (the words and the sequence of the questions are the same for all the interviewees). To ensure reliability, the same wording and sequence of questions were followed in the present study although the participants were allowed to bring up any points they thought were relevant, as typically is the case in semi-structured interviews. Merriam (2001) points out that there are some traditions to make sure that the findings are reliable. The first one is the investigator’s position. To make my findings reliable, I followed the suggestions provided by Merriam (2001) by providing the theoretical background, information about the participants, the reasons for choosing them in this study, and information about the sampling method. The second one is an audit trail. I described how I collected the data from the participants, how the findings were analyzed, and how the findings were categorized.

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for confirmability, researchers are required to make available full details of the data on which they are basing their claims or interpretations. (p. 178)

To achieve confirmability, I provided many excerpts from the participants’ interviews while talking about their perceptions of academic writing and of the issue of plagiarism to support the findings of the study. Those excerpts were written in Arabic and in English.

3.3.9. Researcher bias

For the purpose of avoiding any bias that could take place, I followed several procedures. For example, I recorded and transcribed all the interviews with the participants. I also member checked the findings and the interpretations with the

interviewees. Moreover, I tried to make the questions in the interviews open-ended ones. In addition, I did not express my opinions regarding any issue during the interview. Finally, my expectations regarding the outcomes of the interviews before conducting the interviews were the same for all the interviewees.

3.3.10. Ethical considerations

For the purpose of ensuring that my dissertation meets the ethical standards of scientific research and because “qualitative researchers are guests in the private spaces of the world” (Stake, 2000, p. 447), several strategies were followed. In order to protect the identity of the participants, for example, pseudonyms were used to refer to each one of them. The participants were assured that the collected data would be protected in a safe place.

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I also tried to report and to discuss the findings without taking any participants’ responses out of context. The cited quotes in my dissertation project are as spoken by the interviewees and transcribed from the audiotapes. In addition, this study follows the rules of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the university in which I pursued my doctoral degree. The informed consent form, approved by the IRB borad and signed by the participants, is available in Appendix D.

3.5. Chapter summary

In this chapter, I have provided a general overview of the methodology employed in my dissertation project to elicit the needed information to answer the research

questions. I first provided the philosophical orientation to my dissertation project, which is social constructionism. After that, I showed that qualitative research is the most suitable approach for this type of research. Then, I discussed why conducting interviews is the most suitable method for this project. I also talked about the type of questions the participants were asked during the interviews.

After that, I explained the data collection procedure in detail. Next, I talked about the piloting of the interview, the procedures of coding, and the transcription of the participants’ interviews. Later, I gave some details about the students whom I interviewed. In addition, I talked about the reason that made me send the interview transcripts to the participants.

I also stated how I established trustworthiness. I then described the methods I employed to avoid any bias that could take place by me (the researcher). Finally, for the

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purpose of ensuring that my dissertation project meets the ethical standards of scientific research, I talked about the strategies I followed to achieve that.

The biographical profiles of the participants in the current study will be presented in the following chapter.

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CHAPTER IV

BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILES OF THE PARTICIPANTS

4.1. Introduction

In this chapter, I will introduce the participants and to protect their identities, pseudonyms will be used. The information provided in this chapter was taken from the data the participants provided during the interviews. The introductions will include information about the participants’ backgrounds (for example, their educational degrees, cities they came from in Saudi Arabia, their work experience, and their length of stay in the U.S.) and their experiences with learning English and with learning how to write in English. Providing the profiles of the participants based on their answers to the interview questions, hopefully, would help the readers understand the participants better and then understand their feelings and struggles regarding learning English and writing in English. Understanding these individual profiles can also help the readers make sense of the findings and discussion chapters later

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4.2. The participants’ biographical profiles based on their answers to the