ART401H-Advanced Research Theory – Management Assignment Help

The following scenario has been used for teaching purposes in the eMaster classes and for the first assignment. It is now time to execute the research.

Many South African parents opt to home-school their children for a variety of reasons.
The home-schooling movement has grown in recent years, and with it the springing up of smaller private schools and learning centres. The learning centres have mimicked the home-schoolers in their use of boxed curricula where the child is signed on for a curriculum, receives a box of textbooks and workbooks, and attends the centre for extra tuition – and social contact with other schoolers. As smaller businesses, these centres survive on attendance and the payment of fees. As boxed curricula are selfcontained, attendance at a centre is an ‘extra’. When COVID-19 brought with it lockdowns and restrictions the centres could not operate in their usual ways. Fees stopped coming in as the usual service (tuition) could not be provided and children were withdrawn from these centres. The protracted lockdown of 2020 saw many businesses close, including learning centres and smaller private schools.

Question 1 
Explore the main differences between quantitative and qualitative research approaches. Use examples from the scenario to illustrate your points.

Question 2 
Assume that your research questions are:

 Why were some learning centres forced to close, even though lockdown restrictions have been largely lifted?

What enabled some learning centres to survive and remain open?

(a) Describe two broad populations you could target in the execution of your research.
(b) Describe the sampling method you would use, and justify your choice.
(c) Name, describe and explain the two most important research ethics principles that you would need to adhere to.

Question 3 
In preparing to execute your research you had to do some background reading. You were busy with this task on the 12th April 2022. While searching through journals you spotted one called ‘Learning Centre Research’. You flipped through it and saw an article ‘Keeping our centres open during lockdown’ written by Paula Jili and Neli Bosworth. It was a very new journal which only came out this year. This was its first volume, but already it was the third publication of the year. The article started on page 7 and occupied four pages. In your eagerness to read the article you put down the book ‘Research in Education’ distributed by the Learnalot Press in South Africa, in Pietermaritzburg. Local academic Shireen Chetty wrote it in 2017. When you had finished looking at the article your eyes wondered over to your computer screen. You had been ‘surfing’ earlier and at ‘www.looking-for-learning-centre-information.co.za’ you saw that Nosipho Xaba’s ‘How my learning centre survived COVID-19’ had finally loaded. She wrote it last year when lockdown restrictions were beginning to be lifted. Being a diligent student, you indexed everything immediately, and your task now is to present these in a reference list using the IMM Harvard style. (Please do not try to ‘google’ these materials as they are fictitious!)

Question 4 
In the first phase of your research you decide to use a qualitative approach in an exploratory fashion to obtain a broad understanding of what were believed to be the key reasons for some centres closing.

(a) Using one of the target populations identified in question 2, describe the most suitable research instrument to use with eight participants, face-to-face, individually.

(b) Construct a research instrument suitable for this purpose. It needs to have ten questions or items in total, both relevant to the research question and applicable to the quantitative approach, appropriately presented.

Question 5 
You now need to draw up a quantitative research instrument to have a much wider reach. You want to compare the learning centres that stayed open with those that closed, finding out why some closed and how the others stayed open. Your work needs to show good layout for easy administration. You need to start with an option to tick,

Then:
(a) Section A, questions 1 to 5, needs to have five relevant demographic-type details.
(b) Section B, questions 6 to 10, needs to have questions about how the centre was running (operating) before lockdown.
(c) Section C, questions 11 to 15, needs to have Likert or Likert-type questions on how participants feel about the impact of COVID-19 and lockdown restrictions on small businesses like learning centres.

Question 6 
Please refer to question 5.
(a) What is the level of measurement indicated by the numbers in the ‘Code’ column of the ‘Status’ table?
(b) If the questions in Section C require your participants to rate their feelings, what level of measurement is being used, and what type of statistical technique would be appropriate?
(c) Suppose there were 20 centres in the Eastern Cape that stayed open and 13 that closed, while 17 closed in KwaZulu-Natal and 24 stayed open. Present these results in two ways, or describe how you could present them clearly in two ways.