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emind those who had not. Two days after the deadline, the response rate was 25per cent and a further e-mail of this kind was sent. The questionnaire was closed aweek after the original deadline, with a response rate of 33.5 per cent, which waslater revised down to 30.5 per cent (i.e. 61 responses) when questionnaires whichwere substantially incomplete were discarded. The vast majority of respondentscompleted the web-based version of the questionnaire.InterviewsPhase 2 of the study consisted of follow-up interviews with teachers who hadcompleted the questionnaire and volunteered to speak to us. The purpose of theinterviews was to explore in more detail teachers’ responses to the questionnaire.Teachers who agreed to do an interview wrote their names at the bottom of theirquestionnaire and we were thus able to personalise the interviews by askingteachers about their own individual questionnaire responses.Of the 61 questionnaire respondents, 42 volunteered. to do an interview. Giventhat we were seeking to conduct semi-structured interviews lasting around 30minutes each, it was not feasible (given our resources) to interview all of thesevolunteers and we decided to speak to 20. These 20 teachers were selected usingcriteria from two specific questionnaire responses: (a) teachers’ beliefs about howautonomous their students were and (b) teachers’ years of experience in ELT.Interviewees were then chosen using stratified random sampling (see Bryman,2008). In a stratified sample the criteria for selection are represented in the sameproportions as they are in the larger group the sample comes from.The next stage in preparing for the interviews was to develop an interviewschedule. Our aim was to use teachers’ individual questionnaires as prompts forthe interviews, and in this sense each schedule was, as noted above, personalised.We, did, though, develop a common framework of questions which could then betailored in each interview depending on what the teacher said in the questionnaire(i.e. whether they agreed or disagreed with a particular statement). An example ofan interview schedule is included in Appendix 2.The 20 interviews took place over a month; ten were conducted by phone from theUK and ten face-to-face in Oman. All interviews were, with teachers’ permission,audio recorded. We recognise the socially co-constructed nature of interviews(for a recent discussion of this issue in applied linguistics, see Mann, 2011) andacknowledge that teachers’ interactions with us will have been shaped by theirperceptions of our agenda in conducting the project. The positions held by theinterviewers – one was the teachers’ manager and the other was a UK-basedacademic – and the different forms of interview (face-to-face vs. telephone) willhave also influenced (perhaps in distinct ways) how teachers’ responded to ourquestions about learner autonomy.Data AnalysisThe closed questionnaire data were analysed statistically using SPSS 18.Descriptive statistics (i.e. frequency counts and percentages) were calculated forall questions. Inferential statistics were also used to examine relationships betweenvariables and differences among them.Teacher Beliefs Autonomy | 225