Choosing the sample

In qualitative research the sampling approach is just one; purposeful sampling (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) or “sometimes called purposive sampling, judgment, or judgmental sampling” (McMillan & Schumacher, 2006, p. 126) and its variations. In this study I ‘intentionally select’ (Creswell, 2012, p. 206) the undergraduate students and three faculties as the sites to understand the campus experience phenomenon. However,

76 purposeful sampling has many strategies (see Creswell, 2012) so I decide to use some of these strategies as discussed and justified in the ensuing paragraph.

I interviewed first and third year undergraduate students from the same three faculties. Third year undergraduate students have been targeted since it is likely that having been at the university for two full years have gained considerable campus experiences to inform this study in a significant way. However, I am aware that they may not recall fully their first year experiences. This is why I also included the first year students. These different year groups serve the purposes of methodological triangulation by opening both first and third year student perspectives to the nature of the studied social phenomena. So here I adopted ‘homogeneous sampling’; a purposeful sampling strategy (Creswell, 2012, p. 208) of three faculties that have similar characteristics and the three became sites of interest for this study.

Qualitative sampling aims at deeply understanding the phenomenon and this involves looking at “a process of the meanings individuals attribute to their given social situation” (Hessy-Biber & Leavy, 2011). For this reason, a proper sample size is not one which is representative in terms of figures, but one which leads to deeper and high quality understanding of the phenomenon being investigated. This sounds very easy but I found myself joining Baker and Edwards (n. d. p. 3) in pondering about “the thorny question of ‘how many interviews are enough?’ in conducting a piece of qualitative research?” They assert that “[T]he answer, as with all things qualitative, is “it depends” (p. 3) on a number of factors. The representativeness is located in the quality of the information to be obtained that answers the research questions as correctly as possible to achieve the research aim.

The sample and procedures are determined by the level of discourse; how data will be collected and analysed and the types of generalisations and representations derived from the data (McMillan & Schumacher 2006, p. 12; Hessy-Biber & Leavy, 2011). Furthermore, in this purposive sampling, “on the basis of the researcher’s knowledge of the population, a judgment is made about which subjects should be selected to provide the best information to address the purpose of the research” (McMillan & Schumacher, 2006: 126). As such, when the issue of ‘how many’ participants to interview for the

77 study came to my mind, two deciding factors were already in place. One is the fact that my study is part of a mega research as discussed in the previous sections and the other is my decision to take the phenomenology route. A phenomenological approach is suited with deliberately selected small samples (McMillan & Schumacher, 2006).

Some efforts were made to vary demographical variables (Swanson-Kauffman, 1886) by differentiating the target sample by gender, race, nationality and whether resident on campus or non-resident (See Table 3.1). This resonates with Creswell’s (2012, p. 207- 208) maximal variation sampling; “a purposeful sampling strategy in which the researcher samples cases or individuals that differ on some characteristics or trait”. In South African context, race refers to African, Coloured, Indian and White and ‘black’ refers to African, Indian and Coloured combined (CHE, 2010). This constituted the “information – rich key informants” of the target group being studied as McMillan and Schumacher (2006, p. 319) puts it. In this way, the issue of a diverse student body which characterizes the institution under study was taken into consideration.

In qualitative research, this is one way of presenting multiple perspectives of individuals to represent the complexity of the world (Creswell’s (2012, p. 207) in this case the university campus environment. To augment this, I also employed what Hessy-Biber & Leavy (2011, p. 46) term opportunistic sampling; where “sequence of events lead to the unintended selection of individuals for interview”. For instance, I would interview a group of friends, students on the bus or at the sport field. This voluntary dimension of the participants for ethical considerations, somehow affected the proportionality with respect to gender balance. However, efforts were made to take into account to offset a fair proportionality of male and female participants. In qualitative sampling, researchers agree to be more flexible but try to get the best participants for the study. In consideration of the sampling issues raised this far, all in all, forty seven students were interviewed for this study. The prospective participants completed a brief demographic form (see Appendix C4) before the commencement of the interview. The survey requested students to provide information about gender, race, nationality, nature of residence, and year of study. The table 1 below shows the description of the interview sample.

78 The table above shows that there were forty seven students altogether interviewed in this study. In South African context, race is categorised as Africans, Whites, Coloureds and Indians. Currently at Wits, ‘black’ refers to all Indians, Coloureds and Africans registered students (Agar, 1990). Of these, twenty one were first years and twenty six were third years. Furthermore, twenty six of them were staying in university accommodation1 while twenty one were non-residents2. The table also shows that two faculties: Humanities and Engineering and Built Environment had the largest number of the participants. Another observation is that there were more females than males in the interview sample. This resonates with the Wits Annual Report (2011) which indicates that in 2011, there were more female than male students enrolled in the university as a whole and in the three faculties added together. This picture could also be attributed to “opportunistic sampling” (Hessy-Biber & Leavy 2011, p. 46) alluded to earlier on. In fact there were more female than male students in university residence. One could interview more than one participant once at the residence because students would not be in a hurry to go nowhere and as a result chances of inviting more and getting positive affirmation through ‘snowballing’ (Creswell, 2012) were high.

1 _{Commonly known by students as ‘in res’}

79 With regard to the actual selection of the participants, the criteria were based on the individual’s willingness to share his/her experiences and willingness to provide a detailed narration of the campus experiences. After formally seeking written permission from Deans of the three faculties through the major project, my actual recruitment commenced with me physically visiting the public spaces where the targeted sample could be located at one point in time such as the lecture and tutorial rooms and halls, sport fields, laboratories, study areas and by the libraries and computer laboratories.

I informed the prospective participants about the purpose of my study and invited them to take part in the interviews. Those willing to participate were booked instantly and I gave them my cell phone number to send a please call message so that I contacted them for booking. During the booking, it was mandatory to accommodate the prospective participants’ schedules and preferred sites for conducting the interview as well as seeking their permission to audio- record them. Simple as it may sound, this turned out to be one of the challenging exercises in the data collection process as indicated in the later sections where I detailed my experience on the field as I collected data. In the next section I discuss the methods that I employed in collecting the data.