Pendidikan Khas

It’s been too quiet here for too long. In my absence from this blog,
1) I’ve completed my dissertation proposal,
2) Proposed my research to my dissertation committee, received their approval with some changes required,
3) Made all the required changes,
4) Applied for and accepted into doctoral candidacy (in other words, I’m now a doctoral candidate, before this I’m just a doctoral student),
5) Went back to Malaysia for a 3-week holiday,
6) Applied for and received a new student visa,
7) Applied for and finally received the university’s institutional review board (IRB) approval to conduct my research with human subjects. This was a particular stressful process that took over 2 months of waiting and 2 weeks of providing additional answers to IRB committee’s questions. All the while trying to convince them that the benefits outweigh the risks and that my participants (with developmental disabilities) are capable of giving informed consent.

Now that I’ve received IRB’s approval I can officially start work on my research.

My research purpose is to evaluate the effectiveness of a specific type of video-based intervention to teach job skills to adults with developmental disabilities in employment settings. My main interest is the video-based intervention. My sample, adults with developmental disabilities in employment settings, is sort of a sample of convenience.

Sample of convenience? That means it is more convenient to do my research with this particular sample. My university has a program that provides supported employment services to adults with developmental disabilities, so it makes it much easier to find participants and there’s also a pool of support staff that could help me in data collection.

I decided not to do my research with children in schools because it can get very complicated. It’s not easy to get permission to do research in schools, and sometimes teachers do not want the extra work and burden of having graduate students come in and out. It’s also hard to schedule time for research work in a busy classroom schedule.

Even so, right now I am facing another hurdle: I need to get approval from the management of the two stores (a thrift store and a retail store) to conduct my research there. While it may be slightly easier to conduct my research with adult participants in employment settings, it’s still not easy. Actually, nothing is easy.

I’m interested to see if my intervention works. My biggest hope is for my intervention to be very effective very quickly. I mean very very quickly! But once again, nothing is easy…

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