Case Study One: University A

University A is a medium-sized post-1992 university in England, with a population of just over 11,000 undergraduates. First, I analysed documents from this university to understand the ways in which the university operates, with regards to the institutions’ undergraduate population. All documents were publicly available on the university website. I used the documents to develop my interview guidelines, including questions based on a few of the documents. For the academic interviews, I referenced the university’s Learning and Teaching Strategy, as well as the institution-wide policy, the name of which has been changed to the Student Collaboration Policy throughout this thesis. For the undergraduate interviews, I referenced the Student Collaboration Policy and the Student Charter. I chose to include the documents in the interviews to better gauge the participants’ relationship with their institutions. Secondly, I contacted the Head of Department and asked permission to recruit undergraduates and academics within the Department of English (see Appendix 1). It took several weeks to receive a response; in the meantime, I began interviews at University B. After two months, I was granted permission to conduct my research.

Initially, I planned to interview both academic and administrative staff; I had conducted a pilot study of one academic and one administrator at Lancaster University, which had

provided some rich data. I conducted two interviews with non-academic staff members at University A before deciding to concentrate solely on academic staff. These two interviews have not been included in the final data set. I excluded them because I felt that I did not have a large enough sample to justify interpretation; this was an issue that was raised during my confirmation process and it helped to ensure the project was more focused. Moreover, the small number of non-academic staff participants in the Department meant that my inability to present a justified interpretation was unavoidable.

At first, the Head of Department’s personal assistant sent a department-wide email outlining my research and requesting volunteers to both undergraduates and academics. Two academics volunteered immediately, after which, I had to contact chosen academics separately. I chose the academics based on their job titles, choosing a mixture of senior and newer academics with varying roles (see Appendix 5). All but one were English teaching staff; one academic was the former Dean of Teaching and Learning within the university. Although not an academic within the English discipline, it was important that this participant was interviewed because of their role in writing the Student Collaboration Policy. I gathered contact information for the staff from the university’s website and sent them an outline of my research with an invitation to participate. The response rate was high, and I continued to email academics for interview until I reached my planned number of six; the interviews were conducted between June 2017 and January 2018.

For the undergraduate interviews, a department-wide invitation email was sent via the Head of Department’s personal assistant and an announcement was made on

Blackboard, the virtual learning environment. The invitation emails were sent out periodically between Summer 2017 and Spring 2019. I put up posters around the university from January 2018 onwards, which were approved by the Department and the Student’s Union (SU). I also posted to the university Facebook pages, which was permitted by both the Head of Department and the Facebook page administrators. I also asked the participants at the end of the interview whether they would be happy to mention the research to their course peers and to pass on my details; they were all happy to do so. The undergraduate volunteers came through periodically between November 2017 and January 2019. I was not allowed to contact undergraduates directly, so I had to wait for them to approach me; subsequently, I continued to utilise the methods listed above to promote the research and reach as many volunteers as possible. I experienced some difficulty in recruiting undergraduates for two main reasons: first, the undergraduate cohort for English is fairly small in comparison to other subjects; and secondly, the semester breaks are long and a large number of undergraduates return to their hometowns, which prevented me from recruiting during those periods. I initially planned to recruit 12 undergraduates, but after experiencing difficulty, I changed the sample size to 10 and continued the same approach until I had reached that number.

The restrictions on the undergraduate interviews were as follows: a full-time undergraduate studying English of some variation (joint honours undergraduates were included), under the age of 25 and a UK resident. The reason for these restrictions was twofold. First, I wanted a sample that reflected the majority of undergraduates, which is why I did not include international, mature or part-time students because they form the minority in terms of total undergraduate population. Secondly, the restrictions of this study meant that I would not have been able to do justice to the experience of

international, mature or part-time students, because as the field of literature indicates, they have vastly different experiences of their undergraduate studies (Morris, 2009; Schweisfurth and Gu, 2009; Swain and Hammond, 2011; Mallman and Lee, 2016). The reason behind my purposive sample was not to reflect generalisability but instead to ‘identify groups, settings, or individuals that best exhibit the characteristics or phenomena of interest’ (Maxwell, 2012, p.94). Indeed, Cohen et al., argue that much qualitative research ‘seeks to explore the particular group under study, not to generalize’ (2011, p.161). My sample, then, was chosen to best represent the nuances of the interactions in question.

All interviews lasted between 30 and 100 minutes; they were semi-structured and focused on interpersonal relationships within sites of learning and teaching. The interviews explored the following topics: the marketisation of HE and the consumer model; the ways in which the institution and individual academics engage undergraduates, with a focus on different teaching and learning methods; the impact and evaluation of the policy documents for both the academic and the undergraduate; the relationships between undergraduates and academics and their meaning; visual representations of positive and negative relationships through participant drawings; and finally, the role of the SU and extra-curricular activity.

The volunteers were provided refreshments during the interview: a drink of choice and biscuits. I transcribed the interviews verbatim, however, repeated use of the word ‘like’ and the phrase ‘you know’ were removed from transcripts for ease of comprehension; this did not impact the content of the interview in any way. As well as this, affirmations

or agreements from the interviewer in the middle of the interviewee’s response were removed because they obstructed comprehension without adding value.

As well as interviews and public documents, I observed one lecture and one seminar of three academic interviewees. Although all academic interviewees initially agreed to me observing their classes, only three responded when emailed to arrange dates for observation. The seminar and lecture observed were of the same topic, which allowed for a sense of continuity; I also requested that the seminar and lecture I observe have the same group of undergraduates, which was granted. All notes recorded were written by me. The undergraduates who were part of the seminar and lecture were informed via the lead academic and they were given the option of refusal. The observations took place between October 2017 and March 2018.

During the observations I was looking for specific elements: facts, including the spatial environment and how it was utilised, as well as the number of attendees and the facilities in the classroom; events, including the amount of conversation between the academic and undergraduates as well as between peers; and behaviours, including both non- verbal and verbal behaviour of the academic and the undergraduates (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2011). The data collected in the observations was highly selective, which is inevitable for this method of data collection. As a researcher, I am aware that there will be elements in those observations that were unobserved or not recorded by me. However, that being said, ‘the use of immediate awareness, or direct cognition, as a principle mode of research thus has the potential to yield more valid or authentic data than would otherwise be the case with mediated or inferential methods’ (Cohen, Manion

and Morrison, 2011, p.456). The observations, alongside the interviews, gave my data a greater authenticity.