Semester 2 week 3

This session was very useful as it involved interviewing, sampling methods and analysis. There was unstructured interviews conducted in my research project and all the credit goes to this session as I gathered all the skills required for the interview from this session.
The session covered effective ways to conduct structured and unstructured interview, and how to gather information in interviews. Being presentable, serious minded but good humour, self disciplined, a good listener, patient and persistent, empathetic, tolerant and understanding are all characteristics of a good interviewer. With all this characteristics in mind the interview for my research project was a success.
The sampling method can be very challenging, the topic of my research project was investigating staff turnover so I used the Judgment sample method (Non- probability sampling), I needed to collect information from ex-employees so I choose staff members who left the organisation and still in contact with them.

Analysis of data involves using methods that helps to describe facts, detect patterns, develop explanations and test hypotheses (Levine 1976) and this session give me in-depth understanding to analysing data.

Semester 2 Week 2

This session was about primary research, it covered designing of questionnaires,different approaches to research, application of the different techniques in data collection.
I had basic knowledge in conducting research but this session broaden my knowledge in conducting primary research which helped me a lot in designing the questionnaires for my research project.
I designed the quesitionnaires to collect employee’s personal information, tenure in the organization, employee loyalty, motivation and satisfaction. The questionnaire also allowed employees to evaluate their level of importance, relationship with their supervisors or managers and causes of dissatisfaction.
The questionnaire enabled me identify the key themes which was very helpful to my research project.

Semester 2 Week 1

This session was all about Literature reviews, we compared, contrast, judged and analysed several literature reviews in this session. The purpose of a literature review is to describe the work that has been reported on a subject or field. In this session I understood that a literature review goes beyond the search for information and includes the identification and articulation of relationships between the literature and your field of research.
We critically analysed various literature reviews  in a view to improve our critical analysis and to understand the whole concept. 
At the end of the session, I identified that the purpose of literature review is not only to describe a secondary data. It demonstrates an individual’s ability to identify the significant information and sketch existing knowledge. It helps fill in the gap in the research that the work will address, and generates rationale or justification for the study. In other words the main purpose of a literature review is to demonstrate the scholarly capacity, identify information, and outline the presented knowledge (Marchi 2009).

This activity helped me deal with many difficulties I encountered during my research project and this has really helped me developed my research skills.