As I mentioned in my action plan, but wish to emphasise here: My project focuses on psychological safety. It is essential, therefore, that my ethical approach reflects this, ensuring that my participants feel safe and supported throughout the research process.
I’ve written more about how I wish to achieve this in my Reflecting on research methods blog post and also within the ethical action plan itself.
Ethical action plan
I’ve uploaded both versions of my ethical action plan, to show the progression and thought process change between the two. My tutor John’s comments were invaluable to me as I widened my considerations and added in further details highlighted in yellow, based on his comments. One of the key feedback points was looking at the ‘crit’ as an ‘inherited institutional form of sharing – blending performance and ritual, power and cultural capital, vulnerability and an (often tacit) pedagogy’. (O’Reilly, 2024). I want to explore this idea of tacit pedagogy and whether (or how) it translates into online learning.
One of John’s suggestion was to incorporate visual elicitation (be it photo or object) in interviews, allowing participants to express their perceptions of psychological safety through photo or object prompts or perhaps asking them to bring or make something that articulates or expresses ‘feeling safe’. I love this idea and think that this concept is definitely worth exploring and while it might not be feasible to do during my interviews with student due to time constraints – I’d like to find a way to include it in my practice as a learning designer when it comes to designing activities in which students are asked to share.
Data collection methods
While exploring research design approaches, I found Creswell’s (2023) central questions for mixed methods particularly helpful in structuring my methodology.
- What knowledge claims are being made by the researcher (including a theoretical perspective)?
- What strategies of inquiry will inform the procedures?
- What methods of data collection and analysis will be used?
1. Knowledge claims
I think my approach is a constructivist one where knowledge is co-created through shared experiences and shaped by the social, cultural and digital environments in which we operate. My goal is to explore how students experience psychological safety within online learning spaces and to understand how this impacts their willingness to share creative work. I’m also cautious not to hide behind theory. As Nyemba and Mayer (2017) caution, academic researchers can sometimes become disconnected from the realities of their co-researchers and community partners. To avoid this, I want to keep my research grounded in the lived experiences of the students I work with, ensuring their voices remain central throughout. This is one of the main reasons I have opted to use semi-structured interviews.
2. Strategies of inquiry
As student voice is central to my project, it made sense to me to adopt a phenomenological approach as my research strategy.
3. Data collection methods and analysis
Researchers may first survey a large sample of individuals, and then follow up with a few of them to obtain their specific language and voices about the topic. In these situations, the advantages of collecting both closed-ended quantitative data and open-ended qualitative data prove advantageous to best understand a research problem.
Creswell (2023),p. 22
As the topic and area of psychological safety is new to me, I’d like to adopt an open, exploratory approach (qualitative) which is also one that does not assume variables (quantitative). For this reason, I will be adopting a mixed methods design.
Mixed-methods approach
Qualitative approaches prioritise understanding individual experiences, using open-ended methods like interviews and narratives to capture rich, contextual insights. On the other hand, quantitative approaches focus on measurable data, using tools like surveys to test hypotheses or identify trends.
However, neither approach alone seemed sufficient to fully address the complexities of psychological safety in online learning. I wanted to capture both the breadth of student experiences through quantitative measures and the depth of individual perspectives through qualitative data. This led me to adopt a mixed-methods approach, which aligns with pragmatic knowledge claims and allows for both open- and closed-ended data collection methods.
To support my project, I have developed the following materials:
| Data collection method | Mode of delivery |
| Questionnaire | JISC (online survey) |
| Semi-structured interview | MS Teams |
Data collection methods
I’ve included a copy of the questionnaire, the interview schedule and the interview slides for reference.
Questionnaire
Interview schedule and slides
References
Creswell, J.W. (2003) Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches. 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.
Lenette, C. (2022) Participatory action research: ethics and decolonization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neubauer, B., Witkop, C. and Varpio, L. (2019) ‘How phenomenology can help us learn from the experiences of others’, Perspectives on Medical Education, 8(2), pp. 90–97. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-019-0509-2.
Nyemba, F. and Mayer, M. (2017) ‘Exploring the roots of participatory action research: An interview with Dr Marja-Liisa Swantz’, Action Research, 16(3), pp. 319–338. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750316684003.
O’Reilly, J. (2024) Feedback on my ethical action plan.
Pauwels, L. (2019) ‘Visual elicitation in interviews’, in Atkinson, P., Delamont, S., Cernat, A., Sakshaug, J.W. and Williams, R.A. (eds) SAGE research methods foundations. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036846496 (Accessed: 14 October 2024).