Management Plan and Timeline
The management plan that I used incorporated the nine months that our course encompassed. During the months of September and October I worked on the formulation of the problem statement. Channeling my energies toward the Review of Literature in my topic area proved to be the primary focus during this time. I developed a database using the software program FileMaker Pro Version 4.0, to enable me to organize and code the many articles that I was collecting to use in my literature review. This, in itself, was a major task, since I had limited experience with this particular software. I was successful in developing a fairly complex database with many fields available for the large variety of information that I needed to compile. Within the parameters that I set in the database, I incorporated fields for coding. As Creswell (1998), argues, a researcher needs to understand as much as possible about a phenomenon under investigation to successfully build a theory. Creswell's description of the conditional/consequential matrix, used as a coding device, seemed to fit into the manner that I generally collect and mentally digest data (Creswell, 1998). Creswell makes four analytic points:
1. "Macro conditions/consequences should be part of the analysis when these emerge from the data as being significant.
2. Macro conditions often intersect and interact with the micro ones.
3. In direct or indirect ways they become part of the situational context.
4. The paths taken by conditions, as well as the subsequent actions/interacts and consequences that follow, can be traced in the data (the paths of connectivity" (Creswell, 1998, p. 182).
When I started coding the literature that I have been reading I used the following categories of References:
- Historical (with sub-codes on repeated historical events)
- World view/global references
- Economic
- Marketing/Advertising
- Use of the keywords: brainwashing, manipulate, Orwellian, Totalitarianism, Brave New World, Pavlovian, Big Brother, subliminal, behavior modification, hypnosis.
Exploring the various research paradigms and practicing the interview process also were included in these two months. The transcription of a 60-minute interview and the completion of the first draft of the Literature Review were completed by mid-October. November and December included the continued re-writing of Chapters 1 and 2 and my total re-thinking of my problem statement. I actually began the final and more complete version of the Literature Review during the last weekend of November. The re-writing of Chapter 1 (Introduction to the Study) was in its final draft version as December began. The signed permission form by the "Gatekeeper" was completed by December 4, 2000. The permission form included several formats allowing me options to use dependent on how the study continued. The Project Proposal was complete by mid-December. Further data collection continued through January along with the drafts of the questionnaires and interview questions that I planned to use once the Project Proposal was accepted. The process of finalizing the questionnaire/survey questions and the technical considerations and work required a fair amount of time at this point of the study. Data collected from the surveys were analyzed and from this analysis the interview questions were developed. Due to the large amount of online responses and the fact that I had 48 separate questions to analyze, many with 5 or more possible answers, I had to develop a method that could organize the data is an easy to maintain and access format. After several failed attempts utilizing various organizational methods, I decided to use Microsoft's Excel, a spreadsheet application. In Excel, data can easily be put into tables and graphs. The tabbed worksheets provided the perfect management system for keeping each question a separate entity for analysis while still being able to cross-examine related and or conflicting data. Further analysis of the survey data, in conjunction to the data collected through interviews and observations, began in mid-February and continued through April. I needed to re-visit all of the research subjects for clarification of data collected. Field notes that I took were maintained on an almost daily basis. Final analysis and conclusions of the research project was completed, and a PowerPoint presentation of my findings was given at the end of April.