Attitudes of Pre-Service EFL Teachers Toward Research

D. Collecting Data

The fourth step of a research process, collecting data, includes the identification and selection
of the sources of information (individuals, institution, places or data base) for a study,
obtaining the permission to study them, and gathering information (data) by asking people
questions or observing their behaviors (2017).

In his “Method” section, Pardede (2015) identified the data source by revealing the
population of the study, i.e. the whole students of the English Education Program of
Universitas Kristen Indonesia Jakarta who were active at the time this study was conducted.
He selected the source by purposively determined the sample, i.e. The participants of this
study were 38 pre-service EFL teachers who enrolled in fourth year (eighth semester) of their
4 year undergraduate teacher education program at the Christian University of Indonesia,
Jakarta. There were actually 54 students enrolling in that semester. However, it was assumed
that to participate well in this study required certain experience in undertaking research.
Although the 54 students had passed the classes of Research Methodology, Statistics for
Social Sciences, Research in ELT, and Seminar on ELT Research Proposal, only 38 of them
had finished conducting a research required to write their undergraduate thesis when this
study was carried out. Therefore, only these 38 students were invited to participate in this
study.

The author did not mention how the permission to study the sample was take. But he clearly
explained the methods used to collect the data were survey and semi structured open- ended
interview; while the instruments was a questionnaire and an interview guide. The
questionnaire was adminitered to collect quantitative data, while the interview was employed
to collect qualitative data.