This page outlines the Interviewee Recruitment Plan to be used for the Library & Sakai 3 Integration user research study (Oct 2009).

The Interviewee Recruitment Plan defines who we are aiming to interview and how we will coordinate our efforts in recruiting interviewees.

Research Question Background

Why and how do instructors use scholarly resources while preparing and conducting their courses?

Definition of "instructors"

For this project, we define instructors to fall into the following three categories:

1. Faculty - Professors, Assistant Professors, Adjunct Professors, etc.
2. Graduate Student Instructors - Teaching assistants, discussion section instructors, etc.
3. Instructor Assistants - Staff that assist faculty in setting up or conducting courses

Definition of "scholarly resources"

For this project, we define scholarly resources broadly as resources that are used by the instructor for the course. Following are some examples:

• resources used in lectures (i.e. quotations, graphs, images, videos, sound clips, etc.)
• resources used as assignments (i.e. books, chapters, journal articles, etc.)
• resources used for assignments (i.e. article databases and indexes, the library, librarians, the Internet, etc.)

Though our design effort concerns library and Sakai 3 integration, by focusing on broadly defined scholarly resources we can gather data on how best to prioritize the vast array of resources and services that various university libraries have to offer.

Interviewee Characteristics

General Interviewee Characteristics

Based on the research question and further definitions above, there are some basic assumptions we can make about the types of users we should be recruiting:

• Instructors that make at least some use of scholarly resources for their courses
• Instructors that can reflect on their experiences and speak in detail about them

These general interviewee characteristics are few, but will greatly increase the quality of our interviews if considered when selecting interviewees.

Number of Interviewees

For our entire user study (across all institutions) we are aiming for a total of 18 user interviews: 6 Faculty, 6 Graduate Student Instructors and 6 Instructor Assistants. If we end up having resources for more interviews, we may go over this initial goal of 18 total user interviews.

Behavioral & Demographic Variables

At this early stage of our recruitment process, these distributions act as guidelines and do not strictly need to be followed. The priority is on getting an initial batch of interviewees recruited and then using these guidelines to select more.

For each group of 6 interviewees within an instructor group, we want to try and match the following behavioral and demographic variable distributions. Variables with importance high are given most priority. The medium and low distributions are more flexible. The distributions are based on the 2009 Sakai Multi-Institutional Survey Initiative results as well as background knowledge of the Data Analysis Group.