GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

ABSTRACT

The study sought to assess the relevance of purposefulness in research as an empirical survey of the perception of academic staff and post graduate students in public tertiary institutions in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. The study was conducted in Akwa Ibom State using the public tertiary institutions in the state (University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State University, Akwa Ibom State Polytechnic, Akwa Ibom State College of Education and Akwa Ibom State College of Science and Technology). The population of the study comprised post graduate students from the aforementioned two universities and academic staff from the five institutions. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 80 post graduate students from University of Uyo, 40 post graduate students from Akwa Ibom State University, and 50 academic staff from each of the 5 institutions, giving a total of 370 respondents for the study. The Instrument titled “THE RELEVANCE OF PURPOSEFULNESS IN RESEARCH QUESTIONNAIRE (RPRQ)” was used. Face validation of the instrument was carried out by 1 expert in business, statistics and architecture while Cronbach Alpha technique was used to determine the level of reliability of the instrument. The reliability coefficient obtained was 0.93 which was proved high enough to justify the use of the instrument. The researcher subjected the data generated for this study to percentage analysis which was used to answer the research questions and Pearson Product Moment Correlation Analysis for testing the hypothesis. The test for significance was done at 0.05 alpha levels. The study revealed that there is very high need of the application of purposefulness in research for realization of dependable solution. Several relevance of purposefulness in research were also identified, including creating a focus for the study, creating a driving force in the course of the research, ease of the study process for realization of dependable solutions. It was concluded that there is significant relationship between purposefulness in research and dependability of the results obtained. One of the recommendations was that every research should be propelled by unique purposefulness with a quest to either solve a prevalent problem at hand or to increase store of knowledge, etc. and that there should be a well-designed purpose of the study well presented at the inception of the research for proper guide and realization of the dependable solution.