Construction and improvement of the research instrument

learning in teacher education, cooperation in the teaching profession and cooperation in careers. Gradually, a list of key terms was compiled to generate ideas for writing the questions and the prompts for the interview schedule. During this relevant period of development, accumulation of relationships allowed self-reflection and awareness of the culture being studied. This undertaking was followed by consultations with three experts whose involvement in the validation of the instrument was considered extremely useful. The consultations were on a regular basis, carried personally or via the Internet. The experts, whose suggestions were incorporated in building a frame of the dissertation research first, provided me with valuable observations and detailed comments. As a result, the concepts and categories identified in the literature were reinforced.

Next, in the validation study, the interview schedule came into focus. The preliminary list of questions (Appendix A) for the semi-structured interview was based on Brown’s guidelines (Brown, 2001). The process of constructing the actual long schedule had several stages. First and foremost, in order to achieve construct reliability, the set of questions was worded with great care. To establish reasons for asking the questions was just as important as to relate them to the research questions. It was consciously checked that the questions addressed that purpose. In order to obtain parallel form reliability, it was made sure that the questions focused on the same or group of relevant constructs across items. The questions were carefully ordered. In addition, in the context of constructing the interview schedule, it was also regarded essential to establish the profile of responses to be expected. The first draft was followed by modifications after additional consultations with the three experts. With the intention to ensure content validity, the instrument was further given to a selection of four people who were

familiar with the topic of research. The informants had knowledge of the field and were requested to list the areas essential to the research but not covered by the questions for the interview.

For the study of validation of the long interview schedule, three interviews were conducted over ten days in the spring of 2005. The same procedure was followed in all three interviews. All three interviews were recorded and transcribed. A sample of one interview is included in Appendix G. Both strict confidentiality and anonymity were guaranteed before and throughout the procedure. The purpose at this phase was to see how the questions worked, how much information could be received and how to improve the tool for collecting data. In order to achieve consequential validity a ‘double interview’ technique was used with the respondents, when they were provided the opportunity to give feedback and reflect on their responses once they had completed the interview. Subsequently, the interview schedule underwent necessary modifications in line with the observations during the interviews and the feedback received afterwards.

Most important for the construction and improvement of the research instrument were the participants in the validation study. In this regard, those interviewed are discussed in this section. The participants, two female and one male previous students at CETT, had been involved in real-life collaborative teaching during their year-long teaching practice. However, from the point of view of careers, they belonged to different areas:

the first was employed as a senior budget officer for a private company; the second had a full-time job as a teacher of English in a grammar school; and the third worked as an assistant to the managing director and personal relations manager in a multinational company. It is essential to note here that the procedure for carrying the interviews is

elaborated in section 3.2.6. The main reason for discussing the steps later is that I adopted the same approach for proceeding throughout the interviews at the different stages, namely validation study, pilot study and dissertation research. To avoid repetition, information about the arrangements and the actions taken to conduct the interviews is provided in relation to the dissertation research in section 3.2.6.

Eventually, further improvements of the research instrument followed after each interview respectively. Most of the changes were made after the interview with the first participant. The main questions were chosen and others remained as prompts, apart from that, some questions were rephrased and others omitted. There were only a few minor modifications after the second interview. The conclusion was reached that the prompts were useful as they helped to generate valuable ideas and genuine information.

The third participant could answer the questions easily and did not consider any of the questions difficult or ambiguous. To be more precise, the procedure of the interview with the third participant indicated that only the shift of one question was necessary.

Thus, it must be emphasized here that apart from the single improvement, the interview schedule for the last interview, remained unchanged; therefore, ended as a final version of the research instrument shown in Appendix B.

In fact, the application of the interview schedule with the third respondent led me to the view that the instrument for data collection was successful. This was due to the fact that the research instrument allowed gathering data smoothly and obtaining a wide variety of information, which indicated that it could be relied on. The anxiety related mainly to how clear or ambiguous the wording was ceased to exist. It had also been felt that some questions might be asking for the same information but these questions proved to be necessary. The length of the interviews, conducted in English, as well as the amount of

data collected indicated that the number of questions could be considered as sufficient;

therefore, whether the instrument covered enough issues remained beyond reasonable doubt.

On the whole, the validation study was found to be useful as it revealed that the instrument for the research was reliable. Data collection with the semi-structured interviews proved time-consuming, however, the process allowed great opportunities to get insights into the area of research. The possible drawback of this study was that it did not put enough weight on triangulation. This weakness implied the need for triangulation in the research to follow. The data of the validation study were partially analysed to point at the results which were achieved later with a pilot study (Barócsi, 2005b; 2006).