After-Project Group Interviews with Students

After each implementation of the ProE model (two in total) I conducted group interviews with the students. With this type of interview I sought to expand on, and understand more fully, the individual accounts given by the students in the after-project questionnaires (cf. 4.4.4). I wanted to do likewise at the group level with the same project groups to ensure the truthfulness of the information provided in the after-project questionnaires (Morgan 1993). The aim of the former questionnaires, as I explain hereafter in this chapter, was to study the impact of each project on student ASEC engagement, as well as help identify contextual factors that shaped the students’ engagement or disengagement; this was also done with the intention of paving the way for the group interview. Thus, a total of ten group interviews were held. The first round, after the first project, featured four group interviews with a total of 19 students, while the second round, after the completion of the second project, included six group interviews with 16 students in total.

The group interviews aligned well with my research objective, which was that of delving deeply into the complexity of student engagement while maintaining rigorous quality standards. To illustrate, firstly, group interviews are regarded as very effective research instruments for eliciting more accurate accounts than individual interviews, especially when young individuals are involved (Eder & Fingerson, 2003). One reason for this is because there is less room for subjectivity, as more than one respondent is

meaning (Kuchah & Pinter, 2012). In practical terms, this means that the respondents’ contributions are generally subject to the judgements of their peers, who (ideally) evaluate and contest the veracity of the information provided. As Bryman (2012: 503) notes:

In conventional one-to-one interviewing, interviewees are rarely challenged; they might say things that are inconsistent with earlier replies or that patently could not be true, but we are often reluctant to point out such deficiencies. In the context of a focus group, individuals will often argue with each other’s views. This process of arguing means that the researcher might stand a chance of ending up with more realistic accounts of what people think, because they are forced to think about and possibly revise their views.

In my case, the group-talk proved to be an effective way to capture a reasonably

objective vision of the salient engaging (and disengaging) moments of the shared project experience, and their causes. That is, by interviewing the project groups rather than the students individually, I was able not only to crosscheck their answers with the ones given in the after-project questionnaire but also to test the veracity of those answers against the judgement of their peers. As a result of this, in the interview transcripts there is evidence of students challenging each other’s responses, co-constructing the

conversation, and clarifying ideas, amongst other features. All of this is illustrated in Chapters Six and Seven when I present interview transcripts.

Another potential reason why the group interview was an effective method for obtaining high-quality data is because it also facilitates a context in which students feel more at ease, mainly because they outnumber the adults in the setting (Eder & Fingerson, 2003). As Kuchah and Pinter (2012) argue in this respect, “being at ease with each other in a group naturally decreases the power the adult may have and gives the children some control over the adult agenda”. In this sense, as the excerpts scattered across Chapters Six and Seven will demonstrate, it is not surprising that the relaxing atmosphere provided by the group interview allowed me to gather honest and extended responses from the students.

Finally, group interviews can also uncover specific concepts or themes that would not be spoken of in individual interviews (Kuchah & Pinter, 2012; Wilkinson 2010). This is understandable if we take into account that, in, group interviews, the respondents themselves become elicitors of information by means of interaction (e.g., building on each other’s talk, jogging the memory of others with the help of their contributions, etc.), which may lead to a richer amount of information (Hill et al., 1996). Examples of these are featured in Chapters Six and Seven.

Having said this, group interviews (and by extension, pair interviews) are not without their pitfalls. In this kind of interview the participants may tailor their responses to seek the approval of the interviewer (or the teacher in this particular case), or simply to be more congruent with the responses of their peers (see Fingerson 1999). The former factor is usually caused by power dynamics amongst peers (Adler 1998; Eder &

Fingerson, 2003), or might even be due to an irrational attachment to a certain viewpoint (Janis 1982). Also, especially in pair/group interviews with students, it might be the case that some interviewees feel uncomfortable with sharing personal information in front of their peers, and also that there are personal differences between students (Eder & Fingerson, 2003).

To mitigate this, I put several strategies in place for both the pair and group interviews. For example, I tried to group students on the basis of friendship. This was possible for the pair interviews but more difficult to achieve for the group interviews because such interviews featured the groups participating in the project, which, as Chapters Six and Seven will highlight, were assembled so as to prevent the existence of groups of friends working together. Moreover, in order to elicit truthful information from the students I used techniques such as: encouraging honesty; emphasising the relevance of having different personal views for the interview; and stressing that our discussion was entirely confidential and anonymous (Bryman 2012; Dörnyei 2007; Richards 2003). Indeed, this

was all accompanied, as far as possible, by an empathetic (though neutral) stance that would allow me to obtain a greater amount of information from the students (see Chapters Six and Seven, for examples).