Data Collecting Procedures

I have justified the adoption of the ethnographic research instruments in this study in the last section, and now I will delineate the procedures of data collection in a chronological way, on the one hand, to demonstrate the genuine and rigorous process of the study to establish its trustworthiness and authenticity, and on the other hand, to expose false starts and pitfalls experienced by the researcher to the reader so that they can make their own judgment on the validity of the study.

(1) Access to the Field

The selection of Durham University as research setting is based on the consideration that a considerable population of Chinese students is studying in Durham University at present. Negotiation of the access to the setting was made possible with the help and connections of the staff. After one year‘s familiarizing myself with the setting, my access to the field was quite straightforward, without meeting gatekeepers or any other obstacles. In fact, the research was quite a welcome one both to the institution and to the participants. Following the normative research procedures outlined by the university, I filled out an Ethical Approval Form and obtained approval to do

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classroom observations during the coming term.

(2) Pilot Study

Generally speaking, Chinese students tend to put trust in the people who are older and more experienced, and even a blind trust in their teachers. Because of my age, teaching background and personality traits: amiable, considerate, caring, sociable, these students would come to me for advice in various aspects of life and I was always ready to share my opinion and experience with them. This co-national network started in October of 2004 when I was a visitor, funded by China‘s Scholarships Committee, at the School of Education of Durham University and lasted till the summer of 2005. I thought this would become my group of informants, but when I reported this rapport and trust to my supervisors, I was advised that my practice was not sound due to unintentional intervention. So I had to review my own epistemological stance on ethnography. Through familiarizing myself with various strands of ethnographic methodology, I distanced myself from the postmodernists‘ view of researcher‘s reflexivity to the conviction of the feasibility and desirability of rigorous and systematic ethnography. I decided to start all over again in October of 2005 when a new academic year started and I was officially placed on the PhD program. I accessed a new group of Chinese students, who were in their first year overseas study, either on Master or PhD program, and had never been abroad before, relatively diversified in their backgrounds of region, gender, age, discipline, etc.

My pilot interview was conducted in November of 2005 when my former student came to visit me. At that time she was studying mass media in another university in England. She stayed a couple of days at my place and I told her that I was interested in her learning experiences in the UK. She happily agreed to be interviewed and did not mind being audio-recorded. After transcribing and translating the interview, I brought it to my supervisors for discussion. The main purpose of the pilot interview was to identify the pitfalls in interviewing techniques. For example, the suspicious leading questions were identified; where and when I should probe a bit to clarify the meaning

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of the terms used; and the techniques of eliciting, encouraging the interviewee to talk more without committing myself to any views. In addition, several implications or flaws of the study were also pointed out. First, the interviewing place was my house, which could be an inhibiting factor for the interviewee to express herself fully. Second, the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee was that of teacher-student, which would generate a power relationship and affect the quality of the data. The consequences of these nuances might be evidenced from her positive comments on her university life in Beijing where I taught her for two years and she might have understated the academic difficulties confronted to avoid the implication that the teacher or the home university did not prepare her well for the new learning setting.

Though the pilot interview was flawed in many ways, it was a very valuable exercise to polish my interviewing techniques, which helped me overcome or be on guard against my own research biases in the following study. The pilot study proved that interviewing was an effective way to investigate informants‘ beliefs system about teaching and learning, for the student could verbalize how and why she was studying in a certain way, what strategies worked for her and what not.

(3) Participants Recruitment and Their Profiles

It is particularly true with Chinese students that informal networks are often trusted more than official channels, for they are more likely to respond positively to direct, interpersonal appeals or from acquaintances. Recruiting participants for this study was initiated informally through a Bible studies group, led by a British couple and regularly attended by newly arrived Chinese students, mainly from Mainland China or Taiwan, on alternate Friday evenings. I realized the importance of the diversity of participants because different informants represent different groups of constituents and associating with only one group on a field site means forfeiting information about the life experiences of people in other groups. My participants in the Bible studies group viewed the research purposes as valuable and my research motives as benign, so they

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voluntarily introduced me to their classmates or flatmates who were not involved in the Bible studies group.

Purposive sampling was adopted to identify information rich students and to make the participants‘ demographic features more diversified by taking into the factors like gender, age, discipline, etc. The previous investigations were insensitive to the disciplines of the participants, but, as reviewed in Chapter 3, students‘ beliefs about knowing and learning are not unrelated with their disciplines. For example, students majoring in well-structured ‗hard‘ science fields viewed knowledge as more certain than did students majoring in ‗soft‘ areas of study, such as social sciences; students in applied fields are more likely to believe in simplicity and certainty of knowledge as well as the quickness of learning as compared with students majoring in pure fields (See Buehl & Alexander, 2001; Kitchner, 1984). I deliberately recruited students from diversified disciplines in order to confirm or disconfirm the general impression that Chinese overseas students who study natural sciences are able to progress rapidly in their research, without much pausing and stumbling; while those who study in the discipline of social sciences are ‗weighted down by the system of deference to authority, both dead and alive, which governs their success or failure in their programs in China‘ (Winchester, 2002: 105-110).

From my initial observation, I also suspected that the academic adjustments varied in terms of mature students and younger ones, male and female, and whether he or she specialized in science or humanities, but, given the qualitative nature of the investigation and the small number of the participants, these demographic variables were not expected to achieve any generalization.

Demographic profiles of the participants: Participants

code

Region Discipline Degree

Program Age group* Sex F1 Mainland Education MA 1 F F2 Mainland Education MA 1 F F3 Mainland Social MA 2 F

120 Science F4 Mainland Law MA 1 F F5 Taiwan Law MA 2 F F6 Mainland Law PhD 1 F F7 Mainland Politics PhD 1 F

M1 Mainland Business MBA 1 M

M2 Mainland Finance MSc 2 M M3 Mainland Law MA A M M4 Mainland Engineer PhD 2 M M5 Taiwan Physics PhD 2 M M6 Taiwan Mathematics PhD 2 M M7 Taiwan Philosophy PhD 2 M

*1: No working experience 2: With at least two years of working experience Though I have pointed out the problems of the previous research on ‗Chinese learners‘ with regard to its indiscriminating Chinese ethnic groups (See the section on homogeneity and heterogeneity of CHC learners in Chapter 3), no solid research results so far have shown statistically significant differences existing in terms of culture of learning between students from Taiwan and Mainland China. Besides the common Confucian heritage, all the participants in this study speak the same Chinese language variety, Mandarin Chinese, and explicitly identify themselves as ‗typical Chinese students‘, so it is quite justifiable to study this mixed group as an arguably homogenous cultural entity.

Another two questions need answering: (1) Why postgraduate students? (2) Why first-year experience?

Focusing on postgraduate students is for both practical and theoretical considerations. Those who pursue Master degrees make the biggest component of Chinese international students body, and therefore, they are easily recruited, but most importantly, their intercultural learning experience will be more representative. In addition, postgraduate students‘ cultural adjustment may experience more hurdles than plastic younger students due to their seasoning experience of the education system in their inherited culture, or more entrenched cultural beliefs towards teaching and

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learning; in contrast, British academics may impose higher expectations on the postgraduate students—experienced learners of higher education—to be an independent learner or researcher, capable of critical thinking and other sophisticated academic skills.

In this study, I focus on Chinese students‘ first-year postgraduate overseas study, no matter whether they take taught courses of Master degree or independent research PhD. As we saw in a previous chapter, research has shown that first year experience is critical in shaping students‘ perceptions of the learning context and the beliefs about the subject learning (Carroll & Ryan, 2005; Krause, Hartley, James & McInnis, 2005; Ryan, 2000). However, previous research on Chinese students‘ cultural adjustment did not make this variable explicit, and this might distort the picture of their adjustment, because in the study of intercultural adjustment, the first encountering of new cultures and initial response could be vital in the whole process of their adaptation.

(4) In the Field

The main methods adopted in this study are observation and interview, which mutually interact with each other in the course of the investigation. However, given the nature of this study, I take semi-structured interview data as the primary area or central source of data for systematisation and use observation and informal interviews as either stimulus or a test of the semi-interview contents. The discrepancies between observation data and interview data will be addressed in the within case and across cases analysis chapters.

The first round of interviews was conducted in December of 2005 and January of 2006. Following the verbatim principle, though not fully appreciative of its intrinsic value, I started transcribing the first batch of interview data. I have to say that this mechanical and monotonous work progressed rather slowly and this resulted in the delay for the participants to check their accounts and my interpretations. Had it not been the fact that the second round of the interviews was set during Easter holiday of 2006 the transcribing would have never been finished. So the second round of

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interviews had to fulfil two purposes: on the one hand, it is to ask the participants to check the accuracy of their own accounts and my interpretations of their points, and on the other hand, the participants were asked to elaborate on the emergent themes generated from the data set. This routine process of confirmation turned out to be a most complicated one. Not only did they modify their statements, some of them even retracted their testimony flatly. This perplexing results seemingly confounded purposes of the second round of interviews, but in retrospect, they proved invaluable for this study. The inconsistencies or conflicts in the data were the true reflections of their ambivalent reactions to the new learning experiences.

I didn‘t transcribe the second round of interviews immediately. Because I needed to go back to my teaching post in my home university in China in early October of 2006, I had to budget my time in England and made the best use of it. I started re-reading more systematically the learning theories and the literature on Chinese students‘ learning, and, in the meanwhile, listening to the interview recordings to sensitise my understanding and interpretations. At that time I was preparing for a conference presentation, so I translated some excerpts from the recording directly into English without transcribing into Chinese text first, and I thought that I could have a better grasp of their meaning by listening to their talking, as recordings could revive the scenario and also provide more contextual and paralinguistic information than written form. It did not occur to me that using translated data might affect the process of interpretation and hence the result of data analysis particularly in cross-cultural or intercultural qualitative studies (Robinson-Pant, 2005) until I was referred to a recent PhD thesis (see Chen, 2009). Moreover, Gonzάlez y Gonzάlez and Lincoln (2006, also cited in Chen, 2009) advocate the importance of making the data accessible in original language so that the reader has the option to examine the original language of the data along with the presentation language. As a response to this call, I present the original Chinese interview accounts (quoted in the thesis) in the Appendix II for Chinese readers to judge the trustworthiness of the data and interpretation (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

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Though the interview contents were not fully materialized into texts, I was fully convinced of their meaning and interpretations and generated some statements from the data for the participants to comment on in the third round of interviews. In this stage, the research interest was becoming more clearly defined, but was not sufficiently discussed in the earlier rounds of interviews. For example, there were some information gaps that needed filling in. The statements abstracted from the analysis of the last two rounds of interviews were more focused, but I still made room for the participants to make modifications to the statements.

Considering the different nature of taught degree and research degree programmes the participants were involved in, not all the statements were equally applicable to all the participants. The order of the statements was also flexible, depending on the interviewing context. Question wording would be discussed and explained to make sure that they understood the questions or statements. Thus, on the one hand, the semi-structured interviews in this study were ‗systematic in questioning‘ (Marshall & Rossman, 1999:108), which is necessary in multiple case studies; on the other hand, they could seek further interpretations on the topics from the participants and verify or rectify my interpretations as well.

(5) Researcher Role and Identity Handling

‗The myth that ethnographers are people without personal identity, historical location and personality, and would all produce the same findings in the same setting, is the mistake of naive realism.‘ (Brewer 2000: 99). This resonates with Burgess‘s view that the main instrument of data collection in participant observation is the researcher (1982: 45). The personal characteristics, however, most affecting conduct of qualitative research, are the investigator‘s identity as the ‗essential research instrument‘ (Wolcott, 1975: 115). The identity of the data collector mediates all other identities held and roles played by the investigator.

Erickson (1973) suggests that the task of the ethnographer is to make the familiar strange—to try to look at events, behaviour patterns, interactions, and artefacts as if

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they were occurring on a different planet. In that way, we may be able to look at them afresh and understand them and their consequences in a new light. As a teacher having been at a university in China for more than ten years and a new PhD student in a Western educational institution, the biggest challenge I was facing was to de-familiarize myself from the familiar regularities and the routine learning experiences. In fact, to keep an open mind is more achievable than ‗emptying the head‘. Constant reflection and playing naive are effective means of de-familiarizing the phenomena and keeping a critical distance in the field.

As an ‗observant participator‘ (insider status), I had no problems in winning their acceptance and trust, but it might reduce my capacity to achieve professional distance from the group ties. Therefore I had always been consciously warning myself to maintain enough detachment. In fact, I quite enjoyed this ‗double agent‘ identity, living simultaneously in the tension of ‗insider‘ and ‗outsider‘, member and non-member, experiencing while reflecting; participating while observing.

In short, as a full-time student, I could experience the full range of the events and activities in the new setting to familiarize myself with the practices and values of it. In the field, I managed to maintain the balance between ‗insider‘ and ‗outsider‘ status by getting close to my participants enough to identify with them, but, in the meanwhile, maintaining a professional distance permitting adequate observation and objective analysis. Being a native enabled me to fully participate and share in the lives and activities of the participants, to interact with them in different social situations and to have a deep understanding of how they made sense of the new learning setting and living environment. Of course, the danger of losing critical faculties and sharp perception of the familiar phenomena was always threatening.

(6) Other Issues in the Field

Traditional ethnography has been struggling with the fact that there is no third language which could mediate between the native language and the ethnographer‘s own (Gellner, 1970; Asad, 1986), but native ethnography reverses this order in that the

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native language is the ethnographer‘s own whereas the language of the final record is not; and, unfortunately, there is little literature about how to negotiate this linguistic labyrinth to translate lived stories into English data while ‗keeping alive the meaningful nuances imbricated in them‘(Kraidy, 2002: 195). Therefore, focusing on the words the participants used and analysing the meanings they were attaching to them was one of the important analytical tools in this study as well.

a. Interview language

The choice of interview as a data collection method is based on the assumption that the participants have the ability to verbalize their thoughts and feelings. So it is important that the language the participants used should fulfil the research purpose. In this study, it was the participants who chose in which language he or she would be interviewed. Except for one interview (F5C) in the third round conducted, all the interviews were conducted in Chinese. I believe participants could better express themselves in their mother tongue. However, code switching was quite common among some participants in their accounts, but mainly on word or phrase level. These linguistic matters themselves are treated as data, from which more data are generated.

b. Recording data, transcription and translation

I found taking notes during the interview was obtrusive and affected the effectiveness and natural flow of communication, though usually before the interview began, I would tell them that I might take notes to help me recall later. I used MP3 to record the interviews, but altogether three times the device failed for an unknown reason, and I had to recall from memory and take down the points for further confirmation from the participant.

All the interviews in this study were transcribed verbatim in the original interview language, but not with the detailed notations for conversation analysis, except for