After months of waiting for ethical approval, it was finally approved. So far, the project has not been smooth sailing and has provided its fair share of challenges. I wanted to get stuck into the project and get the data gathering happening as soon as possible.
With the time constraints, we decided to skip the focus group and just send the questionnaire to as many students as possible. This involved emailing many departments across the university and societies, posting it on LinkedIn, and going through the Leeds University Union to get as much reach as possible.
We had set a two-week timeframe for the questionnaire and data collection. We felt this was enough time to distribute the questionnaire and receive responses. The questionnaire contained participant information and the consent form, so students were aware of what they were filling in and had the option to withdraw if they wanted.
It was important to ensure that the questionnaire was being sent to a wide audience and aimed at the non-traditional students more, as well as getting a viewpoint from all students. this was done by aiming at certain societies groups and ensuring they were sending the questionnaire to the students to fill in to ensure we had diverse responses.
I was closely monitoring the responses from the questionnaire coming in, and I could see they were slow. I was getting worried as we approached the two weeks that we did not have enough responses. So, after discussing with my supervisor, we decided to extend the data gathering another week and send out more emails to ensure the questionnaire was being sent to students.
After a little more persuasion, more responses came through, allowing us to better understand the data and make it more comparable.
After the data was collected, it was time to analyse it and put it together into comparable graphs.
On reflection, we perhaps chose the wrong time to send out the questionnaire. It was sent out in the middle of January when students started to return to campus, and it was also exam time. So, next time we should have aimed to send it out after this period and perhaps created posters to put around the campus with QR codes to get more students involved.