General comments on the design of the study

In this section, I present general comments on the overall design of the study. I draw on the opinions of several research experts who discuss how to design and develop research. This will help me to describe the endeavours undertaken in my study.

The first comment comes from Brannen (1992: 3–4, cited in McDonough and McDonough 1997: 223), who observes that “the practice of research is a messy and untidy business which rarely conforms to the models set down in methodology textbooks … The cart often comes before the horse … Researchers are often required to conduct balancing acts between a number of pragmatic considerations.” It seems that these words rightly describe my study. Having completed the study, it became clear that in my study I had not followed a traditional chain of stages including: “hypothesis/idea → choice of materials → investigation → results” (McDonough and McDonough 1997: 80). I had not been “able to follow such a neat and logical set of stages” due to “dead-ends, new data, data that [did] not seem to ‘fit’” (McDonough and McDonough 1997: 80). However, when preparing the report of the study, I decided to follow Wilczyńska and Michońska-Stadnik's (2010) advice and focus on the final product of my intellectual research efforts, without bothering the potential reader with the starting points and dead-ends encountered during the process of conducting the study.