Handling Research Challenges
This chapter explores some of the challenging issues that were raised for the author while conducting her first biggest research project as an international doctoral student at one of the United States universities. The main challenge that the author faced was the difficulty of having access to a language center to examine her technology professional development model on language teachers to explore its effectiveness in understanding the teachers' adoption and rejection decision of using education technology and to collect data for her dissertation. After choosing an alternative venue and planning to travel to the United Arab Emirates to conduct the practical part of her research at one of the UAE's universities, an academic networking event changed the course of the latest plans and had a gatekeeper assisting her in experimenting her model and conducting the rest of her study in an American university. The chapter explores some of the challenges and how the author tackled each one of them. The chapter ends with some general recommendations for graduate students and novice researchers.