Following the 3 participants that took part in my semi-structured interviews I got in touch with students who had undertaken the same Sponsored Student Projects as the staff that I had interviewed. The main reason that I decided to do this was to get different perspectives on the same experiences and be able to create some good case studies to demonstrate and present my research findings. It was also useful that I was developing a good understanding of how each project worked, which helped in writing the questionnaire.  

I took a similar approach to developing the questionnaire as I had with the staff interview questions. I took a three section approach again however I shifted the sections slightly based on the findings from my staff interviews. With the students it was important to find out what project they had been involved with, what college they attended and what sort of work or output they had produced – these questions formed part 1 of the questionnaire. Figure 1 shows a screenshot from my Miro board for ARP with the key questions in their relevant sections.  

Figure 1: A screenshot of a table from my ARP brainstorm Miro with an outline of the key questions for the students.  

Once I had developed the key questions I turned to Microsoft Forms to set up the questionnaire properly ensuring that I had provided different ways for the students to answer each question including ranking, options and short answer questions. I tried to keep the number of short answer questions to a minimum as I wanted to make this as straightforward as possible.  

Figure 2: A screenshot from Microsoft forms of developing my questionnaire for the students.  

I tested out the questionnaire on one of my dissertation students who had taken part in an LCF live brief in 2020 when she was a first year. I wanted to do this to ensure that the questions made sense and students were able to understand and answer them. Following this test the student suggested that I add in defintions to the sections so that everyone answering the questions was on the same page and had the same level of understanding. She told me that often they don’t use the term ‘Sponsored Student Project’ but they call it a ‘live brief’ or an ‘SSP’. I made sure to add clear definitions to the form going forwards before I sent it to any more students, the definitions are displayed in Figure 3.  

Figure 3: A screenshot from Miro where I began to develop definitions for the key terms used in the questionnaire.