Data Collecting Instruments and Justification

I take the view that there can be various ways to address the same research topic; however, some social research methods may enjoy the preference or privilege and more effectiveness to study certain topics. In this research, I am concerned about people‘s attitudes, beliefs, interpretations and meanings given to their learning experience in a new cultural setting. Considering the complexities of cultural and intercultural phenomena, no more effective ways than participant observation in the setting and in-depth ethnographic interview enable the researcher to get better access to this group of people‘s real life and meaning world. They are better suited than survey and experimental research to capture the ever-changing reality and voices of ‗lived experience‘, and so in this sense, as long as they are conducted in a systematic and rigorous way, they are scientific, if not more scientific than quantitative methods.

a. Participant Observation:

The objectives of interpreting and understanding the social meanings and behaviours of people in a given socio-cultural setting make it imperative that the researcher should keep close association with the researched group and be involved in their daily

111

activities or practice. Participant observation is such a method to access the social meanings held by individuals and groups. In other words, social meanings of everyday processes cannot be studied in depth without the researcher‘s participant observation. According to Agar, participant observation means that the researcher enters the world of the people rather than bringing people into his world, so ‗participant observation is a diagnostic feature of ethnography‘ (Agar, 2000: 9). Participant observation, to some extent, is covert and surreptitious in nature, since co-participants are unaware that they are being observed and studied, and their behaviours and opinions will not be affected by the so-called reactive effect. By close familiarity with the people in the setting, an insider‘s account can accurately capture social reality and unambiguously represent it in textual form with an outsider‘s rigorous analysis.

As a mature student with years of teaching background in my home country, I was treated more as a colleague than a student so that I could assume a role of both insider and outsider to observe closely the Chinese students‘ learning behaviour and the practices of British teaching and learning culture. The insider status put me in close proximity to the individuals involved and could offer ‗thick description‘ deeply embedded in the setting for study. But, in the meanwhile, as a participant observer, I constantly reminded myself to keep a fine balance between the status of being ―insider‖ and ―outsider‖. On the one hand, as a participant observer, I had to identify with the people under study and enter their world to share in the lives of other people and understand the meanings on their own terms; on the other hand, I needed to exercise personal skills to jump out of setting and maintain a professional distance or sufficient detachment to allow adequate observation and interpretation.

The classic criticism of participant observation is that the researcher is an intervening variable in the research and the introspective data from the researcher are unscientific. For example, both naturalistic and positivistic ethnography are accused of ‗naïve realism‘ (Brewer, 2000: 38) by postmodern reflexive ethnography, which ‗abandoned both the claim that reality could be accurately represented ethnographically and the

112

criteria by which ethnography‘s truth claims could be assessed‘ (ibid: 55). The research here is a combination of the naturalistic, which emphasizes ‗insider‘ status, and positivistic ethnography, which recommends the standardization of research procedures and instruments, aiming at an accurate representation of the participants‘ inner world, or the so-called ‗subtle realism‘ (Hammersley 1990: 61; Miller and Brewer, 2003: 101).

b. Observations in the Field

I attended various social gatherings and sought out opportunities to observe informants‘ interaction with other people in natural settings. The degree of participation varied across settings and cases as well. Gold (1958) categorizes participation according to the kind of interaction in which the researcher engages and how aware participants are that they are being studied: the complete participant, the participant-as-observer, the observer-as-participant, and the complete observer. I can say that I have assumed these four roles on different occasions and in different settings.

(1) The complete participant is a researcher who assumes an insider role in the group being studied, his or her research identity being not known to the group. As a full-time Chinese PhD student, I was myself a full member of the studied group and engaged with complete participation in the research setting. In our Bible studies group –which will be explained below— I was also entering into the social life of my participants as a full participant, though with an observant mind-eye. This covert observation allowed my participants comfortable interactions without feeling being observed. And I myself, more often than not, was so involved that observer‘s role receded into the background. Under these circumstances, I never requested to audio-record or engage in any purposeful data-collecting activities. But I would use other opportunities to seek feedback from my participants on what was observed and stimulated their recall to see how it was interpreted.

113

that my informants took. As a full-time PhD student, I was entitled to sitting in on any taught courses if they were agreed (by the supervisors) to be helpful to my thesis. In these situations, I was known to be a researcher to the teacher, but not to the students. I did not negotiate any obtrusive data collecting facilities, like video camera or audio-recording, but simply immersed myself in these situations and deliberately sat nearer to my informants so that I could join in their group discussion.

(3) I also sat in on two lectures offered by the Law School. During the lectures, I was also known as a researcher to the teacher, but not to the other students. I was an observer-as-participant in this sense, not engaging in any interactions with participants. Data collected in these lectures were not very productive, for almost no participation pattern could be observed. And the teacher, whom I interviewed after class, admitted that there was no time for discussion in class, for the former lecturer, a German professor, wasted too much time on that, and they lagged behind in their teaching schedule. So she had to catch up and finish their teaching plan before the end of the term.

(4) There were also the times when I worked as a complete observer in some settings. Even at that time, the participants might have been used to my presence and treated me as a full participant, though I did not perform or participate. Perhaps Adler & Adler‘s (1987) categorization of researchers‘ memberships in groups being studied as peripheral, active, and complete can also categorize my field observation roles.

c. Ethnographic Interviews

‗Conversations with a purpose‘ is an accredited means to access reality from the ‗inside‘ (Burgess 1984: 102). Agar also advocates interviews as the core of ethnographic fieldwork (2000: 160). In this study, informal ethnographic interviews served as the main data-collecting instrument, with observation in a supplementary role. As for peoples‘ learning beliefs and conceptions, it is more effective to learn those meanings though eliciting them to talk about what they do and how they interpret what they do and what they perceive.

114

(1) Storytelling/ Narrative Interview (Riessman, 1993)

Human beings are storytelling creatures who ‗think in story form, speak in story form, and bring meaning to our lives through story‘ (Atkinson, 1998:1). So they serve effectively the purpose of studying people‘s perceptions and conceptions of the phenomena under investigation. Narrative studies have been widely used in the educational research to investigate students‘ learning experiences and process from the students‘ own perspective (Wengraf, 2001). In an initial session, participants were encouraged to tell their stories and learning experiences with minimum interruption from the interviewer. However, I have to admit that some participants were not used to monologue narratives, and felt more comfortable with question-answer format. Moreover, the stories told or narratives were not only the representation of the past experiences, but mixed with the participants‘ own interpretation and reflection, which might not correspond to the objective reality. In this study, what is more valued, as in other qualitative research, is the participants‘ own perspectives on the phenomena of interest instead of the ultimate truth (Patton, 1990: 484; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). The stories they told detailed their perceptions and conceptions of their overseas learning experiences and shed better light on understanding their learning behaviours and strategies adopted. In addition, when they were describing their overseas learning process, their accounts were not strictly confined to ‗learning‘ in its narrow sense, but extended to various aspects and levels, which could not be simply filtered out if we want to understand and interpret their overseas forms of learning culture holistically.

(2) Stimulated Recall Interview

The purpose of a second round of interviews was to elicit the participants‘ explanation and elaboration on the themes that had emerged from the first round of interviews in order to generate more data from their related comments and reflections. As I mentioned above, I also took this opportunity to check the accuracy of their narrative accounts and my interpretations of the earlier interviews. So this procedure turned out to be more complicated than expected. It seemed that three months of intervals

115

between the first and the second rounds of interviews created an unexpected truth crisis in terms of data interpretation within or across the cases.

The questions in this round were still very tentative and general to invite their unbiased comments and supplementary examples. Having drawn lessons from the pilot interview, I familiarized myself with the techniques of asking the informants for their views in such a way that they could speak in their own terms and endow meanings in their own words, without imposing views from outside. Though I had to ask the informants in depth, since the meanings assigned to their experiences were often complex, sometimes problematic and even ambiguous, I never used ‗adversary and discombobulating tactics‘ that Douglas (1976: 178) first described. I think the aversion to them is as much my personal inclination as a Chinese national trait. Confronting, doubting, or instigating are not good probing approaches when interviewing people from a culture where interpersonal harmony, understatement, implicitness are held more valuable than stark facts or reality.

(3) Semi-structured Interviews

The semi-structured interview has been extensively adopted in the studies on learning issues in tertiary educational research (Chapple, 1999; Li, Lee & Kember, 2000; Säljö, 1981). In ethnographic study, Agar argued that a better model of fieldwork would be a ‗funnel‘ (Agar, 2000:184). This ‗funnel approach‘ was elaborated as:

One first takes an involved, humanitarian position, striving for breadth of understanding in a student-child-apprentice position. As the field work progresses, one in part takes a detached scientific view, focuses on some specific issues, and designs systematic approaches to formally document the experience from the perspective of a stranger.

(Agar, 2000: 251-252) During the first two rounds of informal interviews, I started with a broad horizon, open to all aspects of learning issues in the participants‘ interest. By mutual checking on the data obtained from observation and participants‘ accounts, I came to the narrow

116

end of the funnel and focused on certain themes of common interest articulated by most if not all the participants. These themes were formulated into hypothesis-testing statements for further systematic testing in the format of semi-structured interviews, but still with ample room for the participants‘ own understanding, modifications or even falsifications. In fact, by the time of this stage, the themes of interest were multilevel: from their general life aspirations—not separable from their learning beliefs—to specific essay writing techniques, but the main thread running through their narratives was their constant reflection on their overseas learning and re-negotiation of their cultural beliefs about knowing and learning. The format of semi-structured interview was necessary and essential so as to help strengthen the comparability and transferability of the data, acquired from systematic questioning.