Questionnaire design

A self-completion questionnaire was designed to investigate how participants use and define their own learning activities in social media spaces. An initial pilot of the questionnaire ran from late August to early September 2011 with six test participants providing feedback and sample data that allowed questions to be re-considered and changes to wording, formatting and organisation to be made. The final questionnaire (Appendix II) proposed seventeen questions about social media and informal learning in continuous professional development contexts. These questions were accompanied by four further demographic questions.

Prior to completing the research questionnaire participants were asked to read and complete a consent form (Appendix I) confirming their understanding of the research process they would be taking part in. Participants were asked to confirm that they were social media users since the intent was to focus on learning processes and interactions among a wide range of social media users, rather than to draw comparisons between users and non-users.

The questionnaire (Appendix II) included a mixture of question types. Multiple-choice questions were employed where quantitative data and analysis would be appropriate, such as frequency of social media use, rankings and simple yes/no/other questions on specific types of behaviour. A relatively large number of open-ended questions sought to elicit participants’ views and comments upon their own learning process and experience. These included questions on: types of social media tools used; the relationship between social media use for learning and professional life; questions on interactions, relationships and experiences in these spaces. At the end of the questionnaire all participants were asked if they would be willing to participate in follow-up interviews.

Bristol Online Survey[1] was used for delivering the questionnaire primarily due to its compliance with the UK Data Protection Act[2] and the flexibility of data export afforded. Responses were analysed using Microsoft Excel for initial examination and IBM SPSS software[3] for detailed analysis. The text analysis tools Wordle[4] and Voyant Tools[5] and the wiki-like word processing tool Voodoo Pad[6] were used for in-depth analysis of responses to some open-ended questions.

[1] Bristol Online Survey: http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/

[2] UK Data Protection Act 1998. http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/data_protection.aspx

[3] SPSS: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/analytics/spss/

[4] Wordle is a text visualisation tool for creating “word clouds” of textual data: http://www.wordle.net/

[5] Voyant Tools is a “web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts” enabling creation of interactive visualisations. http://voyant-tools.org/

[6] Voodoo Pad is a wiki-like application: http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/

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