The World of GILMAD
Research Instruments for Data Collection
These are the fact finding strategies. They are the tools for data collection. There is no doubt that in Educational Research, data collection, forms an essential component of the research process. This is because it enables the researcher to obtain relevant information or gain the experience of others from which he or she imbibes lessons for the enrichment of his report. In this respect, different procedures and data collection instruments have to be employed. These principally include questionnaire, interview, observation reading and transcribing. Since data collected specifically in qualitative research has to help in answering research questions, the researcher must carefully select the informants (respondents) to be interviewed or administered with questionnaire. He must carefully choose relevant documents to be read or visual materials to be observed. This means that research question or statement of hypothesis significant in quantitative research determines the appropriate data collection instrument for a research.