A Dissertation by GRACE HUI-CHIN LIN Submitted to the Office of ...

at the students’ after-class time, instead of in-class time. In examining the
respondents’ data, the researcher assigned each student a mutually agreeable
pseudonym (code name) as follows: Sung Ru, Cheng Chih, Jiun Sheng, Jian Guo,
Tien Long, Ling Mei, and Pei Pei.
IRB Consent Form
Denzin and Lincoln (1994) elucidated that written documents and records
needed to be well handled in order to ensure the participants’ confidentiality:
“Researchers may often be able to get access to documents, whereas access to
records may be restricted by laws regarding privacy, confidentiality and anonymity”
(p. 393). For the document confidentiality issue, this study was conducted under
Texas A & M’s research procedure. Before the processes of training and interviewing,
the students were requested to read and sign a consent form, in compliance with the
research regulation of Texas A & M’s Institutional Review Board. All 24 participants
had read and signed the consent form that explicitly addressed how their privacy
would be preserved. In this consent form, students were notified where, by whom
and how the videotape would be retained and destructed.
Interview in Mother Tongue
The seven respondents were invited to have a discussion in their native
languages, whether in Taiwanese or in Mandarin. They also were allowed to speak in
English if they could express their feelings well in English. In both rounds of
interviews of this study, the students had been advised to converse freely in their
mother tongues in order to express their perceptions more confidently and precisely.
The researcher anticipated that the seven volunteers would present their perceptions
precisely by using their mother tongues. The freedom and the confidentiality given to
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