Exploring- on line students experiences and identity: A thematic analysis
Assessment: Reflective Essay
For this assessment, you will need to reflect on your degree experience so far and reflect on your skills in terms of strengths, weaknesses and opportunities and consider how these link to your career route/goal.
Content and detailed guidance
Your reflective essay is designed to address your personal development across your degree programme. Within this summary you will explore the requirements of your planned career route or how you will make use of your degree in your current role.
Also reflect on the skills you have developed during your time on the programme and evaluate what skills you may need to develop to progress in your degree or career route.
For this essay, you may find it useful to identify a job/further education, that you would be interested in progressing to within psychology; or you could also focus on your current role and how your degree impacts this, to guide your reflection.
Consider your strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to analyse your academic skills in psychology and how they apply to your progression or current role. It is recommended that you include the following in your reflective essay:
up to two strengths
up to two weaknesses
up to two opportunities
Write in first person in your essay where appropriate. You should also aim to use wider literature to support your reflection, for example, this may include referring to relevant professional body documents or skill-based literature.
Qualitative Report
For this assessment, you will work as part of a pre-allocated group to complete an ethics proposal before collecting data and writing a research report on an individual basis. As part of your group, you will pick 1 of 3 available research areas to focus on for your ethics and research report, although the specific research question can be decided by the group and will be supported by your group tutor.
For this assessment you are asked to write a 4000-word structured qualitative report on an individual basis. To complete the report, you will need to design, collect and analyse data then write this up in a standard psychological report format. Prior to data collection, you will work within a pre-allocated group to develop your research focus/question and to obtain ethical approval.
Select one of the 3 available research areas relating to either identity, health or gender, and develop a specific research question and ethics proposal:
IDENTITY – Exploring the experiences and identity of online students.
Analytical Method => Thematic Analysis
Epistemology => Phenomenology
HEALTH – Exploring the lived experience of a certain condition/illness e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome.
Analytical Method => Thematic Analysis
Epistemology => Phenomenology
GENDER – Exploring how gender influences engagement and participation in physical activity and sport.
Analytical Method => Thematic Analysis
Epistemology => Social Constructionism
Produce an ethics form (also known as a research proposal or ethics proposal) as part of your group and gain ethical approval from your tutor in writing.
Further details on the Ethics process are available within the module under the ‘assessment’ tab on the module home page, and this process will be further outlined in the week 1 welcome collaborate session.
For this module, you are advised to use a Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) and the stipulated epistemology for the research area question that you chose.
Conduct a full analysis that includes identifying key themes; however, you will select and only report 1 key theme for your results section, using as many quotes as required to support the theme and your analytical points.
