Experiencing problems in data collection by undergraduate EFL students as novice researchers

Data collection is a research process determining the validity and reliability of a
study, and novice researchers have been found to experience many problems in
this process. However, little study addressed the problem in data collection
among these researchers. Therefore, this study was conducted to uncover
problems experienced by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduate
students without any previous experience in data collection. Seventeen
undergraduate EFL students were assigned to collect data using a two-item
questionnaire, which involved communicating with research participants
before sending the questionnaire to the participants. After the data collection,
they were requested to write a brief report explaining their communication
with the participants and the problems they experienced. The reports written by
the students were treated as the data for this research and were subjected to
qualitative analysis to understand the problems they faced in the data
collection. The results show that students experienced some problems in
collecting the data, i.e., lack of responses, late responses, a negative response,
and uncompleted questionnaires. The results of the study suggest that potential
problems in data collection should be introduced to undergraduate EFL
students before they conduct their undergraduate research.