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I don't have too much time to reply, but this is something I didn’t know before starting grad school, so I thought I’d write briefly. As a qualitative research

I don't have too much time to reply, but this is something I didn’t know before starting grad school, so I thought I’d write briefly. As a qualitative research project, the goal was not to find out how many students have which outcomes or experience. The goal was to find a range of experiences and how those experiences are viewed by students. For a qualitative project, 26 is actually a large sample and I intentionally sought a range of demographics, bootcamp stages and outcomes to capture a large range of viewpoints. The goal here is depth on a few people rather than breadth across all bootcamps everywhere. I hope someone does a proper quantitative study as well, finding the size of groups and correlations between factors and success. I chose qualitative methods because I wanted to discover viewpoints, which is something quantitative research is not well suited for. I believe my research demonstrated the existence of several groups and viewpoints. For example, some students successfully change careers and I found what it meant for them, while others struggled and I found what it meant for them. Similarly, I found that some people took a year or more to change careers, so I can say that this is the case for some people. I can't say how big these groups are, just that they exist. Whenever I cite numbers (such as at least four students married to programmers), that is not intended to show how many students are married to programmers, but to suggest future researchers, bootcamps, and students might want to consider it and look into this more.

jaclaz 9y ago
>I believe my research demonstrated the existence of several groups and viewpoints. I am not in anyway contending that, all I was noting was that your demostration (of what I would have assumed to be self-evident "there exist several groups and different viewpoints") is backed by so little data (and as written on the paper "a small sample of students in coding bootcamps in one part of only one country") that the title "What I Learned From Researching Coding Bootcamps", swiftly followed by a graph with "big numbers" such as "Graduation rates of coding bootcamps compared to Computer and Information Science degrees in the US. " seemed to me like a "quantitative" study. And notes like "Also, we noticed that at least four students happened to be married to programmers, and at least seven others had parents, siblings or other important people in their social circle who were programmers." do seem like a statistical approach.
- kylethayer 9y ago
  I definitely see how the graph with numbers at the top and numbers mentioned inside the paper could be misleading. I hope I made it clear enough in the post and paper what the limitations are that people don't misinterpret my findings even if they may be disappointing in my methods and their limits.

jaclaz 9y ago

>I believe my research demonstrated the existence of several groups and viewpoints. I am not in anyway contending that, all I was noting was that your demostration (of what I would have assumed to be self-evident "there exist several groups and different viewpoints") is backed by so little data (and as written on the paper "a small sample of students in coding bootcamps in one part of only one country") that the title "What I Learned From Researching Coding Bootcamps", swiftly followed by a graph with "big numbers" such as "Graduation rates of coding bootcamps compared to Computer and Information Science degrees in the US. " seemed to me like a "quantitative" study. And notes like "Also, we noticed that at least four students happened to be married to programmers, and at least seven others had parents, siblings or other important people in their social circle who were programmers." do seem like a statistical approach.

kylethayer 9y ago
I definitely see how the graph with numbers at the top and numbers mentioned inside the paper could be misleading. I hope I made it clear enough in the post and paper what the limitations are that people don't misinterpret my findings even if they may be disappointing in my methods and their limits.