A qualitative research needs to follow some criteria in order to ensure quality. A way of adding and ensuring quality in a research is by making a research trust-worthy. Lincoln & Guba (1985) state that in a qualitative research, researchers often use “reliability”, “credibility”, “transferability” and “confirmability” as the criteria of trustworthiness.
However, in quantitative research the term of dependability is crucial, and it is largely compared in terms of quality in both types of research. It is often claimed that qualitative studies cannot have so much reliability (claimed as de-pendability in quantitative studies), but on the other hand, one of the main strengths of the qualitative approach is describing the uniqueness of situations (Cohen, 2011). According to Shenton (2004, p. 71), “if the work were repeated, in the same context, with the same methods and with the same participants, similar results would be obtained”. So, the fact of transcribing the interviews and use the same thematic analysis helps to raise reliability (Cohen, et al., 2011).
In reference to credibility, it can be defined as the accuracy of research find-ings where researchers attempt to show that a true picture of the phenomenon under scrutiny is presented (Shenton, 2004, p. 63). Guba (1981) mentions several procedures that raise credibility, such as prolonged engagement at the site, per-sistent observation and triangulation. The present research takes into account tri-angulation as the vision of the studied phenomena is in two different areas de-partments and countries, as well as different interviewees, university teacher and managerial positions workers (treated as HR figures). Triangulation allows to broaden the vision of the topic by getting answers from diverse points of view.
Transferability is considered for evaluating the applicability of a research in another reality. Hence, a research with transferability “provides with sufficient detail of the context of the fieldwork for a reader to be able to decide whether the prevailing environment is similar to another situation with which he or she is familiar and whether the findings can justifiably be applied to the other setting”
(Shenton, 2004, p. 63). This present study takes into consideration transferability
of the findings, aims to it, and it can be presumed that similar themes and topics would be brought up, if the study was conducted in other university depart-ments in Finland and in Spain.
As in for confirmability, it refers to “demonstrate that the findings emerge purely from the obtained data and not from their predisposition” (Shenton, 2004, p. 63), meaning that the researcher manipulates the data too much that it ends up being biased and not realistic. In the same line, Guba (1981) remarks triangulation and reflexivity in order to raise confirmability in a qualitative study. As stated before, triangulation has been applied in this research as well as reflexivity. The data was transcribed by the same researcher and read many times in order to obtain the most accurate and realistic meaning out of it. Additionally, I have been a student from both departments. I was a student in the Spanish department from 2011 to 2014 and in the Finnish department from 2017 to 2019. Therefore, I could see and experience from the point of view of a student how competent the teach-ers were in terms of 21st century skills and their professional development. That served me to realize some aspects obtained and analyzed in this study and link it to my previous experiences.
An authentic research requires ethical consideration because researchers
“go into the field” and collect data from participants (Goffman 1989, p. 130). More specifically, in order to raise integrity and validity of a research, ethical issues need to be taken into account (Chowdhury, 2015).
Marshall & Rossman (2011) suggest that researchers should be fair to justice and moral principles by respecting the participants to an informed consent. In a consent, ethical issues turn to be useful to protect the right and dignity of indi-viduals (Chowdhury, 2015). In the present study, the participants were contacted through email. Once they agreed on participating in the study, the official JYU letter of consent and privacy notice were sent to them, in which the researcher stated to maintain the privacy, anonymity, confidentiality and guarantee to the participants that participating in the study would represent no harm to them. The Finnish participants agreed on signing the printed version of both documents on the interview date, before conducting the actual interview. In case of the Spanish
interviewees, they all sent back the forms filled in before the interviews were conducted.
In line with ethical issues, Gonzalez-Lopez (2011) stablishes an ethical view-point named “mindful ethics” which corresponds when the researcher is aware and alert to the physical, emotional and political safety and wellbeing of the par-ticipants. This aspect was also taken into account while conducting the inter-views, as some questions addressed topics of self-esteem and self-image, as well as beliefs and religion.
5 RESULTS
Chapter five focuses on describing the obtained results and presents the findings in con-nection to the research questions.
The data was analyzed and organized under four main themes and answers to the research questions of this present study. The main themes used for data anal-ysis were: current society, professional development in the institutions (with the subthemes: institutions as departments and; departments towards teachers), pro-fessional development – teachers’ reflections on the development of their own 21st century skills learning (with the subthemes: 21st century skills and; learning enhancers) and; teachers’ identity and agency. In the following chapter, the find-ings related to each theme are presented first theme by theme by developing the subthemes, if any. After the presentation of findings in relation to each theme, the research questions and how these findings relate to them are discussed.
While presenting the findings, this chapter refers to the interviewees, whose interviews are been drawn on, by their pseudonyms stated earlier in this study in order to guarantee anonymity.