The target group (viewers)
Six colleagues from Vermont Primary School made up the target group who viewed the animations and answered the questionnaire. There were three females and three males. As they were not to be identified, they are referred to as "viewers" throughout this thesis. The viewers range in age from 25 to 55. Each one is represented by a coloured box:
The first three are female:
The final three are male:
Although I work with children on a daily basis in my role as the Performing Arts teacher at Vermont Primary School, my focus group were all adults. This was because I wanted to be able to ask specific questions during the interviews that dealt with pedagogy. Working with professional teachers enabled us to have detailed discussions.
I wanted to avoid multiple-choice questions for the various musical concepts presented in the animations. Apart from the fact that this would prevent people from guessing, it also made the target group use specific language in their written responses. This was a deliberate part of the experiment. It was my intention that people learn essential and specific musical terminology in the same way that an auto mechanic uses specific language to avoid confusion. The only exception to this was question 6 where people had to draw lines to link the various terms with their meanings. This was because the terms themselves are difficult as they are in Italian.
Wellington (1) lists three main styles of the interview for educational research. They are:
- Structured
- Unstructured
- Semi-structured
I chose to use a structured interview which is essentially a face-to-face questionnaire. This meant that I had the same questions for each viewer although all participants were encouraged to elaborate on any issue they thought was relevant.
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(1) Wellington (2000:74-75)