For the ENGA14 paper, students may opt to design and incorporate an original research component for additional credit. This component is not required for the basic course credit, but is encouraged. Students who wish to do the original research component should review this document.

Relationship of the Research Component to the Basic Paper

The original research component must be a fully-integrated natural extension of the basic paper; it cannot be an "extra" section which is simply appended to what otherwise would have been the paper.

Specifically, the original research would address the research question posed at the beginning of the paper, the explication and analysis of which is then given in the body of the paper. Are there still aspects of the research question that are still "open" after you have exhausted the available secondary sources? Is it possible to clarify some of these aspects via your own research within the time and other constraints of the course? (See for example the Followup Report of Saija Suomaa's paper on Currant Production in Finland.) Are the aspects you think could be clarified reasonable subjects for academic research? Will your research produce new knowledge? If so, how, and why?

All of the above questions should be considered when planning your original research. Related to these is the question of your research "target" and what information you wish to elicit and analyze.

Research Methodology

While a wide variety of possible research methologies could be used, depending on the paper's topic and the resources available to the student, the most commonly-used have been questionnaires, interviews, surveys, and primary sources which have not been used previously for that topic (at least not in the way you will use them).

With questionnaires, interviews and surveys in particular, the issue of validity arises in various forms.

• Will you be able to obtain enough answers to claim that they will be "representative" of your target audience? (Consider how "representative" responses from 5 people would be considered, compared to responses from 50 or 500.)
• Are there "qualifications" to be included in your target audience? Must they all be of a certain age, or gender, or race, nationality, or educational level, or interested/disinterested in a certain topic or have certain experiences or conditions in common? Should they be urban or rural? Or are you interested in a cross-section of all of these?
• How objective are their responses likely to be? Would some or all have a personal interest in the answers showing one aspect rather than another? Do any of the respondees know you? If so, would that influence their responses compared to others who may not know you?
• Will you be conducting all the research personally, or will others helping you collect the data? If others are involved, might there be influences on the data collection as a result of different personalities, times and places, or ways in which the procedures were implemented?
• How will it be decided whether responses can be accepted for the analysis? Do you have minimum and maximum target numbers? Will all responses automatically be included, or is there a provision for disregarding some which do not meet certain quality criteria? If so, what are these criteria [ground rules should be established before collecting the responses]?
• If you are using a questionnaire, how will it be deployed? If it is a paper instrument, will you distribute it in person or use assistants? If it is an e-mail or web-form version (see two examples of form-questionnaires that have been used in papers by Salla Hakulinen and 'Anna Annanen'), is confirmed identity inportant? How can you control that each response is from a different individual? Is there a specific time period during which the questionnaire must be completed? With electronic data in particular, what if you suddenly get dramatically more responses than you had anticipated?

The above is only a sampling of questions that need to be considered when constructing a research methodology.

Designing a Research 'Instrument'

Regardless of the mode of your instrument (personal questioning, a print or web questionnaire, etc.), it should be carefully designed before you begin to use it. What information do you need to get in order to further explicate your research question? What questions need to be asked, in what order, in order to elicit this information in a usable (quantifiable) form. The logical sequence of the questions is important. Are they "yes-no" questions, multiple-choice, or open-ended? If "yes-no," and you are assuming a "yes," what happens if the answer instead is "no"?

Research instruments should be reviewed by the instructor before deployment. If there are experts on the topic about which you are collecting data that you could consult, their opinions may also be helpful. Test your instrument on a small sample audience before deployment, to check that questions will be understood as you had intended, that the question sequence is logical to the respondees, and to guard against other "surprises."

All written instruments that will not be deployed by you personally should identify you, your institution, and the purpose of the instrument. If respondants have questions, how may they contact you (and when)? Will their responses be confidential, or will they be identified? [remember that questionnaire or survey responses may be confidential, but interviews cited in your paper must identify the interviewee].

The 'Human Factor': Thanking and Informing Your Respondants

Above all, bear in mind the "human factor" when designing and deploying your research instruments. Remember that all the people you consult and interview are volunteering their time to help you. They must be treated thoughtfully, with courtesy and respect. A part of the "human factor" is to thank your respondants for the time they have taken to help you, and to make it possible for them to see the results of your research, should they wish to do so.

See for example Laura Paatelainen's Spring 2010 U.S. Popular Culture paper comparing The U.S Senior Prom and The Finnish Senior Dance. For this, two surveys were employed, one to a Finnish audience concerning the Senior Dance; the other to a U.S. audience concerning the Senior Prom. The U.S. survey employed a webform, which can be seen here.

When respondants had completed the form, they were directed to a 'thank-you' note which both thanked them for their effort and notified them when the finished product would be available, and from what URL. The URL in the thank-you note was a 'dummy' page (which was originally at the URL now occupied by the paper) so respondants could bookmark the URL and know where to return when the paper had been published. It is a good example of the steps to be taken in (a) planning ahead to (b) be considerate of respondants who have made your research possible.

Also included in Laura's paper (see Appendices) were brief samples of the types of responses that were obtained to the questions asked, so those reading the paper can judge the type of raw material that had been available for the conclusions reached by Laura in the paper (respondants are also usually interested in how others had answered the questions, and whether their own responses might have been chosen for the sample).

A longer and more detailed responses summary can be seen here [PDF], as appended to Rosamaaria Perttola's Spring 2010 US-7 paper on Images of Popularity in Selected [U.S.] High School Movies.

In the examples above, the survey instrument and deliverables were all online. However, even for personal interviews or paper surveys, respondants should be properly thanked and informed of when and how they might be able to see the results of their contribution in your paper, in which they would naturally have an interest.

Additional Examples of Research Instruments

It is often useful to examine the instruments other writers have used for insight into questions or wordings that might also be used in your research. One example would be the questionnaire (PDF) employed by Jenni Leinonen in her research on patient associations as information sources for people with chronic diseases. Her paper concerned the Finnish 'institution' of patient associations for many chronic diseases. These associations should act as a primary information source for the ongoing treatment of the particular chronic condition. The research question sought to test this assumption. Are the associations "primary" information sources, relative to other possible sources to which the patients might turn?

A contrasting instrument to Leinonen's, which was distributed by the convenors of regular regional meetings of association members in Finland, is the questionnaire used by Marjaana Lehtomäki in her research on Finnish-African marriages. Marjaana administered her questionnaires personally. As she was meeting couples, at least one member of which was native Finnish-speaking, while the other member may not have spoken Finnish, her questionnaire had both English and Finnish versions.

See also the Examples of Past Student Research Instruments index page.

Describing Your Research in the Paper

The location for describing your research methodology and analyzing your findings generally comes toward the end of your paper, after the text that has preceded it has fully identified the research question and its context within the larger topic. There should then be a smooth transition between this background and what you have done to further explicate a particular aspect of the research question.

The description of your original research might follow the IMRAD format (although all of the IMRAD sections would not be relevant to ENGA14 research). At least the following must be part of your description:

• An introduction to why you conducted the research. How does it connect to questions raised in the descriptive part of your paper? What specific information was your research designed to elicit? How does this information clarify questions raised in the descriptive part of your paper where existing sources did not provide adequate information? What is the value of the reader knowing this new information?

• A description of the methodology you used. This must be detailed; sometimes to those who are reading your paper it is more important how you went about conducting your research than what you discovered. The methodology must always be reproducible, in case someone else wants to test your findings by employing the same methodology and similar target audience. The methodology will also always suggest potential variables or discrepancies in the data you had obtained.

  The methodology must include all the whats, whys, wheres, whens, and hows of your research. Include a copy of the research instrument in an Appendix to the paper.

• A description of the results obtained through your methodology. If the results are easily quantifiable, include a table of the results either in the paper or in an Appendix, possibly also with graphs to help interpret the data. If there is an overwhelming volume of data, samples of the types of responses obtained may be used instead.

• The discussion or analysis of your results; the conclusions you have reached on the basis of your results. What do the results show? How? Why? What is the significance of your findings relative to your research question (and thus the rest of your paper)?

• An additional point which may often be relevant is recommendations you would suggest, post-facto, on how you feel your methodology might be improved in future similar studies, and how the differences in methodology might affect the future results. In short, what do you now know might have been done differently to better effect, and why?

  Another point often covered in the recommendations is what related questions might be studied in future studies that you were unable to study in yours, or which only became apparent to you during the course of, or after completion of, your own study.