Questions:

1. Develop a suitable longitudinal research question that addresses the topic of individuals’ retirement decisions. Describe and discuss a feasible longitudinal research design to answer your formulated research question.

2. Assume that you have been tasked with designing a qualitative research study to examine multi-generational activities. Describe how you will prepare yourself to conduct field research.

3. With reference to relevant academic research literature and applied policy studies, identify one pertinent topic that you will aim to explore in the course of your field research. Discuss in detail the qualitative research method(s) you will adopt and the steps you will undertake in order to gather data on the topic you identified.

4. Develop a plan to analyse and code the qualitative data you obtain. Answers should also evaluate how quality of the obtained data will be verified.

5. Recognize and appreciate relevant ethical concerns and issues arising from the conduct of your filed research. Discuss how you intend to address them. 

Answers:

Designing a qualitative research study

Child care centres play an important role towards influencing the future generation’s societal perceptions and views thus making it important they are designed and managed appropriately. To design a qualitative study based on improving a child care centre it is important to improve how children social and professionals skills are moulded. 8 factors influence qualitative research namely: The focus groups, Projective techniques, Refer to case studies, Practical ground theory, Action research, Ethnography, Observations and In-depth reviews.

Each of these factors plays an important role towards developing effective qualitative research studies from which data must be collected, analysed and reported. This information can then be used to report on current child care centre operations as well as for making modifications to facility legislature with the objective of improving the welfare of children attending the child care centres. Every case will be unique and require individual’s research to be performance but recurring findings should be reported thus helping develop effective legislature addressing most facilities (Marshall & Rossman, 2014). Practical involvement is also critical towards evaluating the child care centres current management and operations as it would help determine areas which may require further changes and adjustments to improve.

Additional advice and input must also be included in the research study, this would involve more professionals delivering a wider perception of the current situation and how the child care centres are operating and can be improved. It also helps collect important data and statistics collection from different sourced which can be directed towards improving child care & welfare delivered by the child care centres.

Topic to be emphasized on during the research study

The current research is involves research on child care centres run by the local community and where older members of society volunteer to care for the children. It is important to build societal relationships and connections between children and older members of society since many nuclear facilities are missing this bond. Many children living in cities have lost their bond and alibility to correlate and interact with older members of society since they clack the elder members in their daily routine. Involving older members of society in the management of the child care centres will help improving this relationship. This would help retain the link between child, parents and grandparents also allowing for the older members of society to pass on their traditions and ways of life to the younger generations who may be losing this due to lack of exposure. Teaching is a basic requirement every child must secure but developing the societal bonds also plays an important role towards understanding how older members of society must be care for. Involving the older members of society to data care centre management and operation would help regain this interaction and ensure younger generation also correlate to older member of society and understand their needs as they grow older (Hughes & Read, 2012). It would also deliver an opportunity to the older member of society to also participate in some activities which would help keep three generations active which is also important towards improving all stake holders’ welfare.

Data collections, analysis, and reporting

Data shall be collected via conducting practical evaluations and assessments of the child care centres thus allowing the research team collect practical data from the field which would be saved. The data would then be organized based on each child care centres, the number of children, the number of older members of society, number of hours spent with children and his children’s perceptions of their surroundings as compared to children who are brought us in nucleus facilities. This information would require being categories on the scale of 0-10 since the numerical data can be entered into simulation tools to deliver important trends related to the influence older members of society may be having on the children. It is important to develop visuals and info graphics since this help deliver a visual description of the data which is critical towards improving any processes progress and influencing factors. Data must be reported in numerical categorization as it helps involve the use of modern digital technology which can be used to analyse the data and report findings to a high accuracy rate thus helping improve projects analysis and reporting (Phillips & Stawarski, 2016). The information’s can then be translated back to format reports which can be presented to the responsible legal authorities with the supporting data for further analysis so as to help the help redesign and improve child care centre legislature keeping in mind the benefit of the children future.

Taking up of relevant ethical concerns

Starting with these few childcare centres, Singapore is slowly but surely addressing a very real problem that is being faced the world over. They are getting the younger generation to interact with their elders, i.e. an inter-generational exchange of words, thoughts, and along with them – ethical trepidations too It is very obvious that when children will interact with elders from a young age, they will be more considerate towards them all throughout their life, as they will be able to understand them and their concerns better. Also, on the opposite side, the older generations are getting a much needed insight into the new age world of the younger guys around. They get to know more about how today’s technologically driven world works, gets acquainted with a lot of the problems today’s kids go through, and can have their say on the whole matter. It has been observed in these childcare centres that the elders actually aren’t that much different than the children of today’s time. It is seen every day that, contrary to popular belief, elders actually had solutions to most of the problems that today’s children find themselves going through, and interacting with them proved to be a very effective stress reliever for both the people involved in the conversation as elders found a channel through which they could share their wisdom. Also, it was observed that in the younger generations, a certain improvement in their behaviour towards everybody (and things around them) had changed for the good. And the credit could directly be traced to their new-found mentors. In an interaction with one of the elders, it was recorded that he felt that today’s generation was much rasher than them, and thus he tutored some kids on how things should be done – in an ethical way, which was the reason behind the behavioural improvement in children in all the childcare centres. Elder generations will always be more calm and experienced, and getting them to share their wisdom with today’s Generation-X is a sure way to somewhat improve their mindset towards the people and things around them. This in turn is very important to the whole country and can it can be changed as we know it!  

References

Hughes, A. M., & Read, V. (2012). Building Positive Relationships with Parents of Young Children: A guide to effective communication. Routledge.

Marshall, C., & Rossman, G. B. (2014). Designing Qualitative Research. Singapore: SAGE Publications.

Phillips, P. P., & Stawarski, C. A. (2016). Data Collection: Planning for and Collecting All Types of Data. John Wiley & Sons.