Research Question
What are the effects of friendship on undergraduate students’ emotional health (EH)?
Hypothesis
Satisfying friendships have profound beneficial impacts on undergraduate students’ EH.
Research Design
The planned study will use a descriptive approach aimed at providing a detailed description of friendships’ possible effects on Saudi Arabian undergraduate students’ EH. The latter pertains to the prevalence of positive emotional states and healthy coping techniques (Williams & Hardie, 2019). Instead of experimentation or cause-effect analysis, the study will spot and describe major EH tendencies in different friendship satisfaction scenarios.
Population and Sample
The project will target undergraduate students in three large universities in Saudi Arabia, including a few thousand potential participants. The universities will be asked to place links to a questionnaire in their social media communities. All undergraduate students visiting their institutions’ resources will have an equal chance of participating in the study, so simple random sampling will take place. After receiving 300 responses, the researcher will close the questionnaire. All 300 respondents will be asked to contact the researcher if they would like to be interviewed. Using purposive non-probability sampling, the researcher will process all applications and select ten interviewees who have a good command of English and can be contacted via Skype at a convenient time.
Ethical Considerations
To offer protection, the research will instrumentalize the informed consent procedure. Survey respondents will be asked to confirm reading an informed consent form prior to providing their demographic information and answers, which is a standard precaution in research (Rifenburg & Pridgen, 2020). The researcher will introduce all interviewees to how their transcribed responses will be processed to remove any names or details mentioned in discussions.
Data Collection Tools
To proceed with the mixed-methods approach, the researcher will use two tools. The quantitative tool, which is an anonymous 15-question survey, will be administered to at least 300 undergraduate students in Saudi Arabian universities. Ten respondents will be contacted to participate in semi-structured interviews.
Anonymous Online Questionnaire
A questionnaire with 15 Likert scale questions will be disseminated among students who have not received their Bachelor’s degrees yet. The online survey method possesses various advantages, including the ease of administration and response accuracy due to the lack of social desirability bias (Houtenville et al., 2021). The survey tool will consist of four parts, with part one asking respondents to report their gender, age, and major. Part two will assess their satisfaction with current relationships with friends by measuring their agreement with five statements. In part three, students will assess five statements pertaining to their emotional state. In part four, respondents will evaluate five statements related to expressing and coping with emotions. The researcher will seek to receive at least 300 individual responses. The survey webpage will also invite the respondents to e-mail the researcher if they wish to participate in interviews.
Skype Interviews
The researcher will select ten participants to be interviewed via Skype. Each data collection session will take 15-20 minutes and involve three open-ended questions. First, respondents will assess their satisfaction with friendships they have on a scale from one to five and explain their choice with examples. Second, participants will reflect on how these relationships (or the lack thereof) are linked to their current emotional state and exemplify the identified trends. Third, respondents will elaborate on these relationships’ possible impacts on their ability to express emotional states and cope with them.
Data Analysis
Quantitative and qualitative findings will be analyzed in dissimilar ways. The researcher will enter questionnaire responses into an MS Excel file and group them according to demographic details and the participant-reported degree of satisfaction with friendships to see EH trends in various subgroups. Concerning interviews, all responses will be transcribed, anonymized, and processed using content analysis software. This will support the identification of EH themes present in responses of participants with different friendship satisfaction scores.
References
Houtenville, A. J., Phillips, K. G., & Sundar, V. (2021). Usefulness of Internet surveys to identify people with disabilities: A cautionary tale. Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, 9(2), 285-308. Web.
Rifenburg, J. M., & Pridgen, E. (2020). Negotiating informed consent: A students-as-partners perspective. International Journal for Students as Partners, 4(2), 132-137. Web.
Williams, S. E., & Hardie, D. (2019). Introduction to Sanford Health Children’s Health & Fitness (fit) Initiative: A physical and emotional health promotional intervention. American Journal of Health Education, 50(3), 159-166. Web.