Research that Benefits Children and Families- An Imaginary Research Topic

The scenario posed this week... Imagine that you possess the means and the knowledge to conduct research studies about any topic in the early childhood field. Imagine further that you are not restricted by the reality of the present. Imagine that your study will make a major positive contribution to the well-being of children and/or their families. What topic would you choose? What can you imagine the positive contribution(s) would be?

I think that if the reality of the present was not an obstacle I would choose to research collective leadership in the early childhood field. The reason I did not choose this topic for my research simulation in our course, Building Research Competencies, is that there is very little information out there about the topic. Also, I am passionate about professionalizing our field and decided that developing a research study about that topic would be beneficial to the providers I currently work with. Not all of them would be interested in collective leadership.

I have a strong belief in practices such as reflective supervision and collective leadership. I live in both of them in my job as a coach and am continually grateful for the fact that my supervisors have set up our team in this way. Even within a system that we cannot control or change (the funders of our program) we still work in a collective leadership model within our team.

I imagine the positive contributions of researching collective leadership in the early childhood field to be far reaching and extensive. I can imagine a world where teachers are respected and trusted to take a role in leading programs. When that happens they become empowered to view themselves as valuable; their work as important. That would trickle down to the families who would have confidence in the care and education their children are receiving. They would view teachers as professionals and it would begin to change the perception of the field. Of course, when teachers, families, and the field see positive impacts children naturally benefit. Programs that adopt a collective leadership approach would be able to trust that they were doing so based on

research about the benefits and value of the model.

My Personal Research Journey

           The topic I have chosen for my research simulation is professionalizing the field of early childhood education. I chose to focus on the subtopic of the influence of professionalizing the field on program quality. I chose this subtopic for a few reasons. First, my work centers around increasing quality in early childhood programs. As a coach I feel that the more research and information I can gather about the way that professionalism influences quality the more able I will be to help providers to see the connection. The second reason is that I have found very little research about this subtopic- or the more general topic of professionalizing the field of early childhood. I am approaching the research simulation as if I am actually going to conduct the research and data gathering. I expect that data collection would support the idea (or dispel it) that when those working with children focus on their work as professionals quality will increase and, of course, children, families, providers, and communities will benefit.

        As I completed the reading and research chart this week I realized that I still have a lot to learn about compiling a research design. I also have a lot to do before I can design my own simulation. I am still unsure what type of methodology will best fit my topic- inductive or deductive. Inductive is focused on qualitative research and deductive is focused on quantitative. Also, inductive methodology is more fluid in design as it can be adjusted along the way; deductive is rigid in the design and process and cannot be changed "midstream" if the data is to be reliable (Mac Naughton, Rolfe, & Siraj-Blatchford, 2010).

        So, I pose the question to all of you. Do you have suggestions about what type of methodology I should follow? Have you determined what method you will follow and have you had a chance to determine if there are pros or cons to either? Do you have any other advice or insights to share that have occurred to you during these first weeks of the course? Finally, I ask for any reliable resources you may have come across about what influences quality or the effects of professionalism on quality.

        At this point I am not sure how many resources I can share with you. I did find a helpful website from the University of Minnesota which describes several different types of research designs. You can access it here- https://hsl.lib.umn.edu/biomed/help/understanding-research-study-designs.

The design possibilities seem endless when I see graphics like this:

Although I am willing to support all of my colleagues in their search for information and resources I find it difficult to share additional resources without knowing your topics, hypotheses, and designs.

References


Mac Naughton, G., Rolfe, S.A., & Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2010). Doing early childhood research: International perspectives on theory and practice (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

University of Minnesota. (2017). Understanding research study designs. Retrieved from https://hsl.lib.umn.edu/biomed/help/understanding-research-study-designs