CHAPTER II. METHODS AND DESIGN 61
IV. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS 93
The UBC project officially granted the researcher permission to use its database for the purposes of this study, which required the researcher to sign a confidentiality
agreement. The researcher followed the British Educational Research Association (BERA) guidelines (2004) for the qualitative study.
Prior to the interviews or observations, voluntary informed consent was obtained from the caregivers who participated in the in-‐depth interviews and observations.
The researcher explained the process for the interview and observations to the participants. An effort was made to clarify all the issues that were raised by the caregivers.
Participants were told that the purpose of this research was exploratory and not evaluative and that the research would be used for the purpose of a doctoral thesis and to improve the ‘Un Buen Comienzo’ project. They were also told that a research
assistant would help with the coding of the data, and that the research findings would first be shared with the researcher´s PhD supervisor and co-‐supervisor at the Institute of Education, London and with the ‘Un Buen Comienzo’ team and that possibly once the thesis was finished it would be made available for others to read.
Participants were told that they had the right to withdraw or opt out at any time. Participants were also consulted about what steps could be taken to reduce a sense of intrusion and to put them at their ease during the qualitative data collection process; and during the observations an effort was made not to alter family dynamics.
The home observations were guided by a deep respect for the families and the
caregivers. This implied that this researcher made an effort not to judge the upbringing practices observed or reported by the parents. The underlying notion was that parents were most probably doing the best they could and that the purpose was to understand (and not judge or defend) their views and practices.
Once gathered, participants’ data was treated with confidentiality and pseudonyms were used for all the children and families in the data and conclusions herein presented.
There could have been an ethical issue in the fact that the researcher had previously been involved in the Un Buen Comienzo project and then became an independent researcher (PhD student), and as such collected the data for the current qualitative study. Allegedly, the families under study could have had a previous relationship with the researcher or they could have thought that their child’s participation in the UBC project was dependent on their participation in the qualitative study. However, this was not the case because the families in the qualitative sample were from districts that were not participating in the UBC project when this researcher worked in the project. In fact, the researcher only met these children, their families and their schoolteachers and principals of the schools attended by the target children when she approached them for the purpose of the present qualitative study. Moreover, the families in the qualitative study all belonged to schools that were part of the control group of the UBC experimental study. In fact none of the caregivers ever asked a question about or commented on the UBC intervention. A couple of caregivers did recall however that the child had been tested the year before. When this happened this researcher again underlined to them that this qualitative study was not part of the UBC research and the fact that they had signed the previous consent form for the UBC study did not imply they had to participate in the current research.
Another ethical issue stemmed from the fact that while the 30 families under study were all from mid to low SES, this researcher is a professional woman and would qualify as high SES in Chile. Whilst recognizing that educational and socioeconomical background give shape to a person’s views, reasoning and assumptions, this research follows previous researchers who have done more complex ethnographic studies such as Lareau (2003) in taking the position that it is possible and legitimate for an outsider to study a certain specific social group to which he or she doesn´t belong (p.10).
Power issues could of course arise when an outsider from a socioeconomically advantaged position studies a low SES population. In the Chilean context of great socioeconomic inequality (as described in the introduction to this thesis), there could be a danger, for example, of reinforcing negative stereotypes or deficit theories. This researcher was acutely aware of these dangers and checked for the emergence of these views during the analysis of the data and writing process. Conversely, however it is equally important to acknowledge that in trying to avoid a deficit perspective sometimes achieving balance was difficult. For example, this was the case during the observations and data analysis, when this researcher was eagerly looking out for the presence of authentic literacy practices (used for authentic purposes rather than limited to academic purposes) like the ones that Purcell-‐Gates (2008) had identified in
a low income Costa Rican Community. Thus, during the first home observations this researcher sometimes found herself keenly looking out for memory notes, shopping lists, book-‐keeping, or literacy related to cooking and eating or literacy related to parents work places. The possibility of not finding several literacy uses in the homes studied was perceived as something that could immediately condemn the study to a deficit approach. The field notes taken during the observations and the completion and checking of field notes in the immediate hours after a home was visited, were useful tools for detecting this researcher bias. This episode, which could seem like more of an issue of methodological rigour, is also an example of an ethical problem because participants should be able to expect rigour and imposing such specific expectations upon the field and the families is unfair even if (or more so) these expectations are not explicitly known to the families.
Discussion
The introduction to this chapter referred to some of the methodological challenges that a researcher faces when studying the HLLE. One of these challenges is that different aspects of the HLE may have different relationships with different language and literacy outcomes (Burgess et al., 2002). This research faced this challenge both in the
quantitative analysis -‐ where different components were described separately and their relations to the different outcomes were also separately analysed through
regressions, correlations and path analysis, and also in the qualitative analysis, in which the HLLE components were treated as different constructs.
Another challenge referred to in this chapter is that there are few instruments for measuring the HLLE available in Spanish with published reliability scores and evidence of their reliability. This research avoided this problem by using quantitative data from the UBC project, gathered through the application of the Romero-‐Contreras-‐ parent questionnaire (2006), which had met the validity and reliability criteria when tested with a Costa Rican population in 2006.
The methodological design herein described was based on the specific purposes of this research and the literature reviewed. Some specific purposes of this study were (i) to provide descriptions of the main components of the Chilean Low SES HLLE as well as of the relationships and trajectories of influence between components of the HLLE and language and literacy outcomes of the children and (ii) to provide an HLLE
conceptualisation or model that helps to explain, in part, the initial differences in language and literacy development among Chilean urban preschoolers from low SES backgrounds. This model should include all the components that, according to the
quantitative analysis, turned out to have a direct or mediated influence over the language and literacy outcomes studied. All these purposes called for the quantitative methods used in study 1, specifically factor analyses, correlational analyses, path analysis (SEM) and discriminant analysis.
This research aims at studying the literacy practices and beliefs of an understudied population in order to discover and expose their specificities. Thus, an exploratory purpose underlies both the quantitative and the qualitative studies. The quantitative study fulfils this purpose by producing a model of the HLLE that is specific to the population studied, that is to say, a predictive conceptualisation of the Chilean low SES HLLE.
By determining the effect size of constructs that measure early home experiences, longitudinal studies such as the EPPE project in the UK (Sylva et al., 2004) and the Home School Study in the US (Dickinson & Tabors, 2001) have convincingly demonstrated the significant importance of the home environment for children’s general cognitive outcomes (Sylva et al., 2004) and for specific emergent literacy skills (Dickinson & Tabors, 2001). Gonzalez et al. (2011) identified, however, the need for studies that focused on understanding how the HLE relates to outcomes. This
quantitative study responds to this need by exploring the factor structure of the HLLE as well as the paths through which the different components affect the different outcomes.
The longitudinal studies reviewed show that the magnitude of the effects of HLE components (such as storybook reading) on language development is small. For example in the longitudinal study by Sénéchal et al. (1998) the effect size of storybook reading was .31 in kindergarten and .54 in first grade. This implies that researchers who study the effect of the HLE over language and literacy skills should work with large samples which give them the statistical power they need in order to make the potential associations visible.
Through the study of a large sample (N=1132), the present study aims to obtain a deeper understanding of the relationships between distal and HLLE components and language and literacy outcomes. Since this research aimed at studying variations of HLLE provision within a SES-‐disadvantaged population (rather than among different SES groups) the large size of this research sample also increased the chances for more specific differences to emerge.
Study 2, in turn, was designed to explore and increase our understanding of complex phenomena such as Chilean low-‐income urban families´ literacy culture and literacy
and educational beliefs, values and expectations, and the connection of these cultural models to these parents’ practices and to the language and literacy resources they provided to their preschool children in the home. Along these lines, this research aimed at producing detailed descriptions of the families’ HLLE. It also aimed at exploring what meaning literacy and education have in the every day life of low SES-‐urban families of preschoolers. These objectives called for qualitative methods such as in-‐depth
interviews and naturalistic observations in the homes of the children, all of which were used in study 2.
As mentioned in this chapter’s Introduction, the two studies in this research are not independent. Study 2 is nested within study 1 and serves to triangulate its findings. The HLLE index, which results from study 1, serves to identify the specific cases for study 2. The findings from the observations and interviews conducted in Study 2 are discussed in relation to the data from the parent questionnaire, the HLLE index and also in relation to the children’s outcomes. As a result, the qualitative study further improves the HLLE model that results from the quantitative study; it also helps to clarify some of the possible cultural origins of specific HLLE aspects. Moreover, both studies provide information that could help to design culturally appropriate observational tasks for measuring language and/or literacy input of parents and children. In this sense, this research supports and inform projects such as the UBC project by providing; a) a deeper understanding of how parents perceive literacy, their beliefs regarding literacy development and the purposes of literacy and how these perceptions and beliefs relate to the parents’ experiences; b) more granular descriptions of the home literacy routines and children’s home environments; c) an HLLE index which could help to identify families in possible need of more guidance in supporting their children’s learning; d) information on the different qualities of HLLEs within the UBC population.
This approach and its findings responds to the need for Chile to increase its
understanding of what constitutes the natural HLLE of Chilean children, what are their natural literacy registers and how familiar they are with the Western school literacy register, in order to improve their chances of succeeding at school. This type of research not only serves to extend our knowledge beyond the traditional focus in Western countries but can also serve to inform and improve intervention projects by providing more specific knowledge of the risk and protective factors in children’s early learning environments.