"Pragmatic" Research Timeline

Someone always say that you learn from work. That is very true. Even though, I have read Knight's Chapter 7 "Doing It" 2 weeks ago, it wasn't speaking to me until now I finally sit down to write my research proposal. Knight(2002)'s "Being Pragmatic" becomes my guideline in designing my research timeline. I find Knight's "nine common difficulties" in small-scale social science research very helpful in helping me to design the timelines of my research. According to Knight (2002), it is almost a "must happen" issue when data collection delays. I am not sure if I will be lucky enough to avoid this, but at least I can reduce the potential damage by planning at least one to two days extra to allow my some room between my schedules. Preparing for a rather low response rate, I will propose a sampling scale of at least 100 participants if I am planning to get 20 respondents. A friend of mine lately distributed her research survey on breast feeding through Survey Monkey via Facebook. Based on her feedback, she distributed 500 online surveys and stopped when she received 100 responses. However, her questionnaires were all multiple choices and the research topic was more general. My research topic, instead, is a salsa-dancing one that is targeted a specific ethnic community group. In other words, what worked on her would not work on me. In terms of this, the "snowball" method mentioned by Dean last week becomes essential for me to develop my focus group. Nonetheless, online distribution is still my primary method because majority of my research target group are cyber users.