I'm going to provide you with a brief overview
of the participants and context sections of a method in a thesis or a paper.
Now when we're talking about participants we start off with a descriptive phrase about how the
participants were selected and that can be part of a longer sentence so we want to know whether
they're volunteers they whether they were randomly selected or whether it was a sample of convenience
for example your class now we really want to include the first five of these the total number
of participants the gender breakdown the age or age range the experience level an education level
so those are pretty important characteristics to include and then we can add any relevant
characters that could be perceived as having an influence on how the data will be interpreted
for example socioeconomic status or computer ability now if you have two or more populations
for example you collected data from both students and teachers you'd want to describe each in two
separate subsections now with respect to context you want to describe where your data was collected
in general you're including all the relevant characteristics that gives the reader a sense
of the setting so you conclude ESL population for example what was in a school setting average
income whether the population was rural suburban or urban and actually a number describing the
size of the population for example four hundred thousand or two million those characteristics
can make a difference in a sense you're giving the reader a description of how about you're setting
your research is so what I mean by that is when you see the results here and you have a thousand
participants and they're from a very urban you know a big urban area very multicultural you
might be able to generalize the results more than if it was a small sample in a an isolated rural
community so let's go to some concrete examples so here the student has participants and there's a
teacher and students okay and so a description of the deep the teacher is provided about her years
of experience and a comfort level with mathematics and her experience with blogging so that's
important to this study and the kind of tools that she had available to or a laptop projector
smart board so gives you an idea of the teacher you could probably include age here I think that
would be also important and education level you don't always collect all that data so think about
it ahead of time so that you aren't caught without the data as the student was now let's take a close
look at the student population here there are 48 grade 9 students so we know the level of education
they have and we know the number of males and females five didn't respond they're 13 to 16
years old selected from two classes in a large urban secondary school and then it goes on to
describe the school and the population of grade 9 students and then there's a description of English
as a Second Language there's almost one-fifth of the students have english as a second language
or we're identified with special needs and the average income is 80,000 and then there were 27
students from an academic stream and 21 students from an applied stream all right so there's a good
discussion here this is somewhat contextual but it describes the school so it it fits nicely in this
this section then it goes on here to talk about their comfort level with using technology which
the student thought was important now here we have the context of teaching and that is important what
are the teaching strategies that the the instruct used and that gives someone a sense of how typical
this classroom is or what was going on when the specific method was applied over using mathematics
and blogging ensure that the more detail you can provide about that context relevant detail the
better so that the reader can really understand the setting in which the study occurred now here's
a second example now the student use sample description it's typical to use participants
now samples are more in scientific papers so we we generally see the word participants in education
papers like that can vary so this student wrote volunteers were recruited okay so it
says volunteers for three sections and that this is the total n here have a computer programming
course so we start to get the context and the year we don't often put the urine but you could and
then it talks a bit about the college and the size of the college and the number of courses number of
students in each section and then we have this student went into a lot of detail about the
response rates sometimes you put the response rate if you're doing volunteers using volunteers so you
might say I asked 150 so keep that in mind and 50 responded so that's a 33-percent response rate so
you if you are selecting volunteers and you know the size of the sample where you're that you're
asking for then you can use that simple equation the number of students have responded from the
total number a stand and can get a response rate that's that's important too here's an age
description here and specific ages and the range is here so the students really gone into a lot
of detail then he describes the computing skills and whether they have the prerequisite and clearly
these this is a range of questions asked and and what students can do and so obviously here the
one hundred percent 98% a lot of the students can do most of these tasks then the student
goes on to describe the culture of learning so that's context I like culture of learning and
describe specific characteristics about that culture and their specific attitudes towards
teaching strategies that's a very long section you don't normally get that but again the student
felt that they needed to describe these details so that someone looking at the data including
the student himself could look at it within a certain framework and understand the context
so those are two examples when you're looking at the participants and context section in a method