Where to do PHD Education Research in malaysia?
any suggestion?

Most of the respondents and universities are unable or do not want to cooperate in providing data thus you may enroll in a univeristy in Malaysia but chances are progress will come to an abrupt halt. Also you need luck to find a kind and cooperative supervisor, mine doesn't pick up his phone calls and read his emails which make it difficult to do any research. It is not in the culture even to reply most emails and this is a problem of doing any phd in the nation. Further, I am not sure whether it is arrogance, ignorance and or plain obstinance that people are mostly opposed to being in a sample study, so how do you make it statistically viable unless you pay or bribe to around RM20k a respondent organisation to provide data for your studies? So really, you have to factor all these hidden costs to your university fees which makes it nonsensical.

Always pain and absolutely no gain.

This post has been edited by zheng88: Jun 18 2013, 12:33 PM

USM has a School of Education with both Doctor of Education (coursework) and PhD in Education (research mode) available to students.

You should check out the websites of each universities in Malaysia, anyway, for you to make a better informed decision.

I have to agree with that. I always wonder why Malaysians are so inclined to refuse participation in social science related research (eg. questionnaire/interview)? It's not just the general public but business organisations as well. You can always read in journals from the west on how private business organisations giving access to researchers to carry out research in their organisations. In Malaysia..... .....it's so unlikelyyyy especially for a business case study or even a questionnaire distribution.

It's an irony when the public are the one complaining about the poor ranking of our local universities and yet they are the one who don't look forward to participate in academic research.

This post has been edited by Blofeld: Jun 18 2013, 03:28 PM

(1) Social research design in USM with APEX status, has to follow certain research objectives so as to satisfy desired specifications because the quality of the information (or data) obtained depends on how it is acquired.

(2) It is claimed that Malaysians in general are inclined to refuse participation in social science related research. On this view, if the case studies are conducted with Malaysian-based organizations, the quality of the research may be dubious or even questionable by the panel.

(3) As sometimes the target subjects of experiment may not have the proper participative behaviour, it may be necessary to modify the research design. This can be done by introducing a component to the social research with a proper configuration. And this procedure is sometimes known as compensation to human research subjects.

(4) However, the usual compensation schemes are not capable of satisfying all specifications at the same time; only circumventing certain issues because some are contradictory to each other. Therefore, two elements in the research must be balanced: (i) performance and (ii) robustness. All in all, you may need to rely on the minimization of cost criteria.

Perhaps there is something Malaysian social scientists can cooperate to solve. Where do you think the problems might break down? And how do you feel we should explore the causes of behavior?

In the first place Malaysians don't want to reveal their secret for success just in case you steal it from them. Secondly, even with all the robustness measures in the world, if there is not enough funds to get respondents to cooperate, it could go out the window. Even if there is cooperation there is no guarantee your study won't suffer from content bias. As far as I am concerned one wonder why academicians ask themselves why more people don't do further study, I think they can jolly well answer it for themselves.

This post has been edited by zheng88: Jun 18 2013, 08:49 PM

To solve no. 2, one should compare the difference between early respondents and late respondents for surveys as suggested by Oppenheim (1966) to assess non-response bias because late respondents are deemed similar to those who did not respond. If there is no significant difference between early respondents and late respondents, then there is no non-response bias. The quality of the research should then not be called into question.

In the case of a business case study, I can't comment because I've never dealt with such inductive case study research.

Apparently, researchers have encouraged the use of incentives to increase response rates as it will bring those who are not interested to answer the survey as well and most importantly, to reduce non-response bias. The literature have supported the use of incentives and incentive does not cause bias in the responses (Hansen, 1980; Mizes et al., 1984)

This post has been edited by Blofeld: Jun 19 2013, 07:56 PM

Kudos to you who must have done a considerable amount of literature review in questionnaire design and attitude measurement. By the way, what would constitute significant difference between early respondents and late respondents?

Have you started carrying out social surveys for your doctorate research? There are so many good things to learn from you, specifically on the critical treatment of questionnaire design problems such as faulty research designs, errors in sampling, ambiguities in question wording, biases in interviewing, losses of information, and the interpretation of attitude scales and of projective data.

Significance difference at p<.01 or p<.05 based on the chi-square test or the t-test.

I haven't distributed the surveys yet as I'm still "pre-testing" my questionnaire.

I'm still learning on questionnaire design. There are still so many things to learn.