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SCK4802 assignment 2
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Research Methodology and Descriptive Statistics full course summary (passed with an 8)
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The Practice of Social Research - Earl Babbie
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CHAPTER 1GENERAL INTRODUCTION, PROBLEM FORMULATUION AND THE
APPLICATION OF THE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PROCESS
1.1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION AND PROBLEM FORMULATION
Teen mother is a term that describes people who become mothers while they are still
teenagers, the other common name for teen mother is “teen mom”. A teenager is
any person who is between the ages of 13-19 years. Teenage pregnancy has
become a serious concern in South Africa as the number of girls falling pregnant is
increasing rapidly on a daily basis. According to Boezaart (2009:221) South Africa
has a huge teen pregnancy problem as one in three girls have had a baby by the
age of 19 years. The author went further to say that the number of pregnant
schoolgirls jumped from 1,169 in 2005 to 2,336 in 2006 in Gauteng according to
statistics released in the provincial parliament.
Teenage parenthood becomes more of a challenge to the teen mothers than it does
to the teen fathers because it’s the mothers who have to take a break from school in
a form of maternity leave in order to look after their new born babies for the first
month of their arrival. Teen fathers are in most cases affected financially because
they are expected to provide for their kids, however not all the fathers do so. “Most of
the teen fathers abandon their kids and leave the mother to face the challenges on
their own” (Worth, 2009:43).
The absence of many teenage fathers further increases a young mother’s risk of
poverty, therefore the mothers end up depending on welfare and at times having a
need for social work support. According to Deborah Weiss (2012:26) and Salkind
(2010:50) children of teen mothers are often born at low birth weight, experience
health and development problems and are frequently poor, abused or neglected.
However little has been written on experiences, challenges, coping strategies and
need for social work support of teen mothers in relation to raising a child.
The researcher was motivated by the desire to explore more on experiences,
challenges, coping strategies and need for social work of teen mothers in relation to
raising a child since little has been said regarding the subject. In order to explore
more on the topic, the researcher has formulated a research question which is
discussed in the ensuing section.
RENEILWE MADIBE (45362106) SCK4810 ASSIGNMRNT 02 1
,1.2 RESEARCH QUESTION
It is customary, in qualitative research to use questions and not a hypothesis at the
beginning of the study. According to Beck, Bryman and Liao (2004:91) research
question can be defined as a research problem in a form that can be investigated
and define its nature and scope.
Knight (2002:11) points that a good research question explores whether the claims
stand up with different samples or a variant of the original methods.
O Leary (2010:64) defines research question as ’’ the question which researcher set
out to answer’’. The research topic was rephrased into a researchable question by
the researcher as follows:
“What are the experiences, challenges, coping strategies and need for social work
support of teen mothers in relation to raising a child?”
The researcher has discussed the goal and objectives of the undertaken research in
the following section.
1.3 RESEARCH GOAL AND OBJECTIVE
The researcher will take the reader through a discussion of the goal as well as the
objectives that she wanted to achieve in undertaking the research project. “Goals in
a broad sense include motives, desires, and purposes or anything that leads you to
do the study or that you want to accomplish by doing it” (Maxwell, 2013:23).
“A goal is a specific and measurable accomplishment to be archived within a specific
time and under specific cost constraints” (Rouillard, 2004:4).
According to Moskowitz and Grant (2009:58) a goal is a cognitive representative of a
future object that an organism is committed to approach or avoid. The researcher
understands a goal to be something that a person hopes to achieve, therefore the
researcher’s goal was as follows: To develop an in-depth understanding of the
experiences, challenges, coping strategies and need for social work support of teen
mothers in relation to raising a child.
In order to achieve the goal, the researcher had to set objectives that enabled her to
focus on the set goal. According to Schenck, Nel and Louw (2010:191) “Objectives
are specific statements of progress towards goal attainment or definite stages or
actions on the road to the goal.” O Leary (2010:64) has a similar definition as he
defines objectives as actions taken towards goal attainment.
RENEILWE MADIBE (45362106) SCK4810 ASSIGNMRNT 02 2
,According to Rouillard (2004:12) “the objectives are tactics you use that are
complementary to the goal, just as goals objectives must be complementary to the
mission.”
The objectives formulated in view of this research were as follows:
To obtain a sample of teen mothers.
To conduct semi-structured interviews aided by open-ended questions
contained in an interview- guide.
To explore the experiences, challenges, coping strategies and need for social
work support of teen mothers in relation to raising a child.
To sift sort and analyse the data obtained according to the eight steps of
qualitative data analysis constructed by Tesch (in Creswell as cited by
Alpaslan, 2010:26).
To describe the experiences, challenges, coping strategies and need for
social work support of teen mothers in relation to raising a child.
To interpret the data and conduct a literature control in order to verify the
data.
To draw conclusions and make recommendations about the experiences,
challenges, coping strategies and need for social work support of teen
mothers in relation to raising a child.
In order to reach the set goal and objectives, the researcher had to think of the kind
of research approach to be used. The definition of the research approach that was
used as well as its characteristics are discussed in the ensuing section.
1.4 RESEARCH APPORACH
The researcher conducted the research in a natural rather than a laboratory setting
and there was no use of a large population, therefore the researcher approached this
research from a qualitative approach.
According to Denzin and Lincoln (2011:6) “Qualitative research is an
interdisciplinary, transdiciplinary, and sometimes counter disciplinary field. It is
interpretive”
Salkind (2010:28) defines qualitative research as ‘’an umbrella term used to cover a
wide variety of research methods and methodologies that provide holistic, in –depth
accounts and attempt to reflect the complicated, contextual, interactive and
interpretive nature of our social world and it is also known as qualitative inquiry’’
The characteristics inherent to qualitative research as discussed by Holliday (2007:6)
are as follows:
RENEILWE MADIBE (45362106) SCK4810 ASSIGNMRNT 02 3
, Activities
Qualitative research looks deeply in to the quality of life rather than using a
large population
Locates the study within particular settings which provide opportunities for
exploring all possible social variables, and set manageable boundaries
Beliefs
Conviction that what it is important to look for will emerge
Confidence in an ability to device research procedures to fit the situation and
the nature of the people in, as they are revealed
Reality contains mysteries to which the researcher must submit, and can do
no more than interpret
The following characteristics of qualitative research are discussed by De Vos,
Strydom, Fouche and Delport (2005:74):
The research attempts to gain a first hand, holistic understanding of
phenomena of interest by means of a flexible strategy of problem formulation
and data collection shaped as the investigation proceeds.
Methods such as participant observation and unstructured interviewing are
used to acquire an in-depth knowledge of how persons involved construct
their social world.
Subjects are selected in a purposeful rather than a random manner.
The subject plays a role in the interpretation of the results, researcher tries to
do reconstruct reality from the participant’s frame of reference.
The reasons for doing qualitative research as discussed by Van Rensburg, Alpaslan,
Du Plooy, Gelderblom, Eeden and Wigston (2010:87) are as follows:
Research that, because of practical and ethical considerations, cannot be
done by means of experiment
Research that makes in-depth inquiries into complexities and processes
Research where the relevant variables still need to be identified
Research that tries to find out and explore why the current policy and practice
do not work
Research about unknown phenomena
RENEILWE MADIBE (45362106) SCK4810 ASSIGNMRNT 02 4
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