Hello, I have been looking for a reference to guide me as to whether I have enough questionnaire responses for my professional doctorate research. Using online surveys consisting of quantitative and qualitative generating questions, I have asked teachers (one survey), Educational psychologists (another survey) and parents (another survey) for their views on parent involvement with children's learning.
I have had responses from 31 parents (6469 words of qualitative data) , 23 teachers (4432 words of qualitative data) and 22 educational psychologists (5412 words of qualitative data).
Many thanks for any guidance!
In order to seriously help you, we need to know what is your research question, problematic, and scientific field. Questionnaires (you refer as "survey", which is a different technique) are merely technical tools; thus, nd to acknowledge if you have collected enough or less, one really needs to be aware of your research inquiry, including the original findings that you expect to reach through your investigation. You also indicate that you have received "responses" that you classify as "words of qualitative data". I am afraid that can be some confusion in the process since one cannot transform immediately questionnaire answers into "qualitative data", which has a diverse collecting procedure like personal interviews, ethnographic observation, etc.
Yes, I agree with Tadesse Alemu, my students continue to interview until the point of saturation is reached.Please consider the following papers/chapters and links:
Article Saturation in qualitative research: exploring its conceptual...
Chapter Data Saturation
Article A simple method to assess and report thematic saturation in ...
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.nova.edu/dist/a/4/files/2015/09/fusch1.pdf
In many researchers experience they commonly use the concept of data saturation to determine how many people to interview or how many focus groups to conduct. In some instances, less than 10 is enough, sometimes more is necessary. But what is important is the careful selection of study participants - those who could provide substantial information in relation to the research question.
In qualitative research, there is definite sample size. sampling technique is "representation enough" i.e., continuing data collection until saturation level and the researcher easily identify when it starts happening. agree with Rodney Duffett and Tadesse Alemu
It would depend on the size of the population you're researching and your sample size. Survey responses tend to be around a quarter to a third of those sent out, after attrition.....
Thank you Jessica,
First is to commend you for applying a randomized block design since the sub-groups in your population are different.
Additionally you are supposed to ensure some close balance in the number of participants in each study group.
In regard to the sample size you can consider the following;
- Adding more participants until you reach saturation i.e, the participants rae not providing any new information.
- Otherwise the sample size which involve in-depth interview is between 15-50 with 30 being the most appropriate.
A lot depends on your research goals, and in particular how you plan to combine the qualitative and quantitative data. In particular, if you want to do mixed mixed methods, then you need to integrate the two sets of results, rather than simply "stapling together" two separate studies.
One common mixed methods design that you might consider is an explanatory sequential approach (QUANT --> qual) where you use the qualitative data to help understand the results of the quantitative analysis.
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