I am currently researching the demotivating factors and remotivating factors of high school students in my country. My study only has 13 participants, and I groups them into 3 groups depending on their level of motivation. My original aim was to identify the factors rather than seeing there was any relationships among the factors and other variables, or to identify any process. After describing my results, I found that because of my limited pool of participants, there was no factor unique for each group, so I am quite stuck with the ideas to write in my Discussion section.
I planned to compare my results with the framework of Trang, T. T. T., & Baldauf Jr, R. B. (2007), which is a influential research of the same interest in my country to see any similarities and differences. I would point out the similarities in themes and refer to other previous research to back them up. For the differences, I planned to focus on some factors, instead of themes, which only appeared in my study, and offered my explanations based on the data and what I understand.
Would you please check if my plan for the Discussion is acceptable enough, or should it include something more?
Tinh, this looks like an interesting case study. I think you should firstly try and bring out the richness of each of the thirteen participants' responses, identify key common themes amongst them as well as any divergent themes before doing a comparative mapping and analysis between your and other studies, including Trang and Baldauf's (2007) research. Interesting work...
Dear Tinh Ta,
The way you have described your study is pretty much all that you can do with it. What I could suggest is that, instead of comparing your findings with only Trang and Baldauf, discuss your findings using everything that you can find from the literature, including Trang and Baldaouf. While you could certainly look at the similarities, try to wean out more differences and expand upon it since that would be your new findings and thus your contribution rather than confirming the already existing studies.
Some ideas here.
First, your results can be of importance to others doing similar research and help prevent them making the same errors. You can present theresults.
Result 1: a sample of 13 is not large enough to see differences if you divide them into three groups.
Result 2: the results cannot be compared to T & B.
Then I have a few questions going back to the design of your tesearch and going back to your analysis of the data.
Q1. how did you measure “motivation” and could the lack of differentiating variables be an artefact of that measuring method? Did it really “measure” motivation?
Q2. What if you divide the total of 13 into 2 groups, high motivation vs. low motivation. Is there a factor that now describes each group?
Q3. Without using motivation as the discerning variable, looking at the 13 subjects, does any other grouping make sense? I assume you looked at who went back to school, if you look at who went back to school and who did not, making two groups, are there common themes in each separate group? Motivation is an intrinsic factor, but can you see other relevant environment factors, such as someone who supported them, or a role model, or having enough finances, or a stable living situation, etc that is a common theme for each separate group? Forget about motivation, look at your data with fresh eyes.
Perhaps there is literature about other factors that influence going back to school or finishing school, both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. If you list these, you can use it twice: 1st for comparing motivation with these other factors and 2nd for looking at your data if there could be a better fit with another factor.
That should give you enough for your Discussion, and perhaps even more. It could help you re-interpret your data and lead to new results.
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