Mass Communication Research
Group Project 3: Report of Student Issues
INDEX SYLLABUS SCHEDULE e-MEDIA COMM-STOP

Your group is required to conduct between 20 and 30 unstructured interviews. This assignment is worth 60 points. The interviewees should comprise a variety of majors, years in school and approximately equal genders. Your group should determine how the interviewer guide will be set up, how the work on interviewing will be assigned in the group, and who will write the report. You should use the communications section in Course Info to keep in touch with other members of your group. This assignment is worth 30 points.

Groups submitting paper copies of preliminary reports by the beginning of class, Oct. 15, will recieve comments from the course instructors on how to improve their project. Your group will submit a final written report by the beginning of class, Oct. 19. Minutes for your group meeting should be posted as a new thread on the C300 CourseInfo Discussion Page. This report will cover the interviewer guide, and your answers to what's on the student mind. These sections can be broken down as such:
  1. Interviewer guide (15 points)

    • Introduction (e.g. who you are, why you're doing this)

    • Opening question (e.g. what problems face UT students today?)

    • List of probes (e.g. why do you say that? can you explain this further?)

    • Transition question (e.g. can you think of any other problems?)

    • List of specific questions (e.g. other people have said safety concerns them, does it concern you?)

    • Demographic sampling info (e.g. gender, GPA, year in school, age)

  2. Your answers to the student mind (45 points total)

    • Based on the interviews, what issues should we examine? (15 points)

    • Name five key issues on student's minds at UT (15 points)

    • Why is this interesting? (15 points)
Grading Criteria

  1. Did you do the assignment? Have you addressed all points listed in the assignment and carefully followed the suggested outline? Was everything completed by deadline?

  2. The written report should be completed in a professional manner, i.e. clearly and concisely written with no mechanical errors. The report should discuss the five issues of most interest, and why these were found to be interesting, i.e. what makes the issues different from other issues?

    The written report should be approximately 2,000 words covering the outlined structure previously given to you. In this, you should tell us what you did and what you found. Provide enough detail so that we know if you did a good job or not. Provide a brief description of the protocol for your open-ended interview (one paragraph should do).

  3. Similarly, the qualitative interviews need to be reported in a way that demonstrates that you understand principles of qualitative research and have done a good job with them. Again, we're stressing quality.
You will lose points for the following:
  1. reporting quantitative analysis of qualitative interviews, i.e. counting the number of mentions of a particular topic, or listing topics that get the highest number of votes (-10 points)

  2. mechanical errors of spelling, grammar, usage, etc. (-3 points per error)

  3. missing the deadline (a letter grade per day late)
The current assignment — conducting unstructured interviews — is part of a term-long project. In addition to examining the "student mind," you will work in your groups on two more projects: (1) designing a structured questionnaire to conduct a quantitative survey on student issues, and (2) reporting the results of your group's analysis of data gathered by the entire class through the survey.

You should approach the current assignment with the subsequent projects in mind. As you examine what's on the student mind, you should begin thinking about how the gathered information can be used in further research.

Qualitative research will provide some general answers about what the important issues are, but we'll need quantitative research to let us know how many people think the issues are important, and how important they are to those people. That would probably provide good material for news reports, but we'll want to look further than that. If we're going to consider other uses of research, we'll need to try to understand why things are as they are.

Your open-ended interviews should help you understand what's on the student mind and guide your choices. But remember this is qualitative research. You shouldn't just count the number of mentions of a topic and then list the ones that get the highest number of votes. If you'll recall, the lectures and the book both say that this kind of research is not a good way to reach quantitative conclusions.

You should be aiming to find five topics that are interesting, important, and worthy of more research. It might be that a good topic is mentioned by just a few of your respondents. For example, if a few respondents said the university would be improved if all clocks on campus showed the same time so people wouldn't be late to classes, that might be a good topic. It's up to the members of your group to decide if it's a good topic or not — not your respondents.

If you don't understand something in this Web note, please e-mail Dr. Sitton.

INDEX SYLLABUS SCHEDULE e-MEDIA COMM-STOP
©M. Mark Miller & Ronald W. Sitton 2001
Revised 092811 — http://www.uamont.edu/FacultyWeb/sitton/crz/mrea/studentissues1.html