Snowballing Method Used In Qualitative Research

The research methods employed to explore teacher’s perception on the influence of socio-economic status on the phonological awareness of students is examined in this chapter. This chapter begins with an overview of the research design including the research aim, research philosophy and time horizon of the research. Then the specific research methods employed for participant recruitment, instrument development, data collection and data analysis are discussed. This chapter will justify the use of quantitative surveys over qualitative or mixed methods. It will discuss the snowballing method used in this research for data collection and Last, it will discuss the ethical considerations and any issues that occurred throughout the research.
3.2 Overview

Since the primary aim of this research is to establish the association between socioeconomic status and phonological awareness from teachers’ perspective a quantitative research methodology is considered suitable for this research. An examination of several studies that have examined teachers’ perception have utilised quantitative research methodologies (Brady et al., 2009; Wolff et al., 2016), qualitative research methodologies (Crume, 2013) and mixed methods research methods (O'Leary, Cockburn, Powell and Diamond, 2010). One major weakness identified in qualitative research methodologies was the large number of participants dropping out of the interviews and difficulty in gathering in depth data due to reluctance of the teachers to share more information during interviews (Crume, 2013). In the qualitative study by Crume, (2013), nearly 40% of the teachers dropped out in the follow up

This self-administered questionnaire (Appendix B) was designed for the study through the use of the site esurveycreator.com. Since a self-administered questionnaire was designed for the survey an information sheet was provided as the first sheet of the survey to ensure that the respondents understand about the purpose of the survey, the confidentiality and anonymity of respondents and the freedom to participate or withdraw from the survey. As an additional step to increase the anonymity and encourage honest opinions from the respondents the survey was conducted through an online media. The study conducted by Gnambs and Kaspar (2015) revealed that computerised survey motivates respondents to provide answers to even sensitive