Recruiting and engaging participants: methodological implications

Abstract

Recruiting participants has always been a major challenge in data collection for research in Applied Linguistics and other disciplines that involves human-beings. However, challenges can be turned into opportunities when researchers activate potential participants’ motivation to engage in research by creating a win-win situation. This paper describes data collection and analysis within a mixed-method one-year longitudinal study on Secondary 6 students’ out-of-class English learning experience in shadow education (private supplementary tutoring) in Hong Kong. It began with an initial questionnaire which also served to recruit case-study participants who were invited to ...