As noted in the introduction to the chapter, it was decided that the most appropriate method of gathering the required data would be to use a questionnaire. Reasons for this include: the flexibility of a questionnaire in terms of gathering both qualitative and quantitative data (see Section 3.5); the anonymity offered by a questionnaire compared to any form of interpersonal interactive contact with research participants; the
potential ease of distribution; and the relative economy of time required from participating schools for their learners to take part in the research. Cohen, Manion, and Morrison (2011:91) state that “…the essence of anonymity is that information provided by participants should in no way reveal their identity.” This criterion was met with no personally identifying data collected during the course of the research. Anonymity was considered an important aspect of the research, as it was felt that participants would be more likely to provide truthful answers knowing that these answers were not going to be examined by the school, or traced back to them personally.
It was originally planned to follow up the participation in the questionnaire with an interactive session with respondents at each of the schools. The aim of doing this was the possibility of gaining further insight into the information collected through the questionnaire. As the schools had already provided much assistance in terms of allowing, and arranging for their learners to participate, it was decided that pressing them for further involvement would be unnecessary and this follow-up idea was abandoned.
The decision to make use of an online rather than paper-based questionnaire was taken on the basis of avoiding the printing and manual data capturing inherent in paper based forms. Following Cohen et al. (2011), online questionnaires have a further advantage over paper based ones in that many of the options available for creating them also include automatic collation and results presentation features. It was also felt that distribution to the schools would be easier, and the time taken for each learner to complete the questionnaire would be less than if a paper-based survey was used.
Several options for appropriate software were investigated, with the major criteria being ease of use, unlimited respondents, and little or no charge. Limesurvey (www.limesurvey.org) met the criteria, and although not as simple as other options to set up, proved to be the most appropriate candidate. Installation on an active web server was required, and once this was done, the construction of the questionnaire was able to move from rough draft towards completion.
Once the first online draft was completed, it was decided that each school should have their own unique URL and accompanying database. This was to prevent instances of respondents from one school pretending that they were from another, and to enable
separate databases to be kept for each school. It should be noted at this point that in the initial correspondence with the Principals of the schools, it was communicated that the individual schools would receive feedback on the responses from their learners, as well as the overall responses at the conclusion of the research.
At Schools A and B, the URLs were placed on the respective intranet pages of the schools. At School C, the URL was sent out to the learners in an email (by the school representative), and was accessed directly off the Internet. It should be noted that prior to the engagement of the respondents with the questionnaire at each of the schools, the following informational piece was distributed to the schools, for advertisement to the respondents prior to commencing their responses:
‘Instructions to participants prior to commencing the questionnaire
• Permission has been granted by your School Principal for you to take part in this survey
• Your name and contact details are not asked for and as such your participation is ANONYMOUS, so please answer freely
• Individual responses will not be distributed to anyone
• The collective responses both from your school and from the other participating schools will be provided to your School Principal.
• Several questions are marked as mandatory, so you will need to answer them before you are able to proceed to the next question [these related to consent, age, Grade and gender]
• Please read the instructions to each question carefully • Please answer all questions
• The purpose of this survey is to assess your awareness of online threats, and online behaviour patterns, with a view to providing useful feedback in terms of online safety. • Thank you very much for your participation ‘
Worth noting too when examining these instructions is that they were informed explicitly that permission had been granted. For discussion of possible disagreement with this statement by respondents, see Section 3.4. Furthermore the anonymity of participation was again made clear, and emphasized in light of any potential misunderstandings from respondents regarding the provision of collective results to their schools. The standard request to answer all questions was felt necessary in order to encourage participants into responding with the mind-set of fully completing the questionnaire. Options regarding mandatory questions are discussed in Section 3.4, and the remainder of the pre-response information simply emphasizes the subject of and reasons for the existence of the questionnaire and their participation.