Ethical Considerations

At this point, it is necessary to explore ethical concerns raised in carrying out this study. The following sections deal with ethical principles as they relate to initial data collection in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Bradfield. These focus principally on procedures for finding participants and conducting interviews, but later sections that deal with issues related to respect of persons also cover procedures that refer to the main study in the department of Education.

4.2.1 Ethical guidelines

In their guidelines for educational research, the British Educational Research

Association (2004) identifies three types of responsibility that researchers must take into account: responsibilities to participants, sponsors of the research and the

community of educational researchers. Three core principles are often referred to: ‘respect for persons’, ‘beneficence’ and ‘justice’ (Burton & Bartlett, 2009;

Kubaniyova, 2008). The first of these relates to protecting identities of research participants and ensuring that their well-being is not put at risk, while beneficence refers to the maximising benefits whilst minimising harm. Justice refers to the way in which any benefits from the research are distributed fairly. Opportunities should not be given to some students but denied to others, for example. Five key aspects suggested by Burton and Bartlett (2009) provide a focus for fuller discussion of ethical considerations in the design of this study. They are namely:

1. Informed consent

2. Confidentiality and privacy 3. Honesty and openness 4. Access to findings

5. Avoiding harm (doing good) (p.32)

4.2.2 Selection of participants - gaining consent

Deciding on how many participants to track in the first study was not a

straightforward process, but one that was heavily influenced by issues of practicality. As a full-time member of staff, working on the main Bradfield campus and not on

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the Archaeology town centre site27, there would be limitations on the time available for data collection, setting up and carrying out interviews. The strength of case study research lies in providing a depth of data with a small number of participants

(Hyland, 2009; Robson, 2002), and it does not aim to generalise from large samples, so a large number of participants was not required. Even so, the most difficult

unknown in this situation was the potential take-up of student participants. The study would rely on self-selection and voluntary consent from participants, and it was not clear what I might expect in terms of the ratio of volunteers to the cohort size targeted. As I used the opportunity of a presentation on language support as a means to speak directly to a group of these students, the invitation to participate in the research went out to nine students who attended that meeting. Of these nine students, three volunteered to participate in the study, and I carried out five interviews with each of them over the course of their taught programme.

The principles of beneficence and respect for persons are clearly linked to important procedural matters of gaining informed consent at the outset of a study (Marshall & Rossman, 2011). In order to find participants for the first round of data collection, I carried out a two-stage approach to obtaining informed consent for volunteers for my study. In the week before teaching began in 2008, I set up a first meeting with Archaeology students on Master’s courses. The meeting was primarily aimed at outlining language support options provided by the ELU28., but I was also able to give a short presentation at the end of the meeting to outline my research project and invite collaboration. The nine students who attended the meeting were informed in detail of courses, workshops and consultation options within the English Language Unit’s provision. I then gave a brief, five-minute presentation of my proposed PhD research, before inviting students to participate.

I outlined the potential benefits to participants in terms of the direct link I could provide to the English Language Unit, and I made clear the time commitments in terms of interviews while also explaining the level of access I required to their

27 _{The Archaeology Department site is located in the town centre, approximately 3 miles from the} main Bradfield campus

28 _{Archaeology students in the Town centre site often struggle to fit in classes on campus and find it} more useful to book free consultations on drafts of their writing instead.

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written texts and feedback. Students were told that I would e-mail them individually within two or three days of the meeting to invite them again to volunteer to

participate in my study. In this way, I avoided inhibiting students by asking them to make a public commitment to participate, while also giving them time to consider their decision. The second stage was a follow up e-mail with attached letter of permission (Appendix C) to all students who had attended the initial meeting. This gave a detailed account of the project in writing, and invitation to participate. The written explanation was provided in the form of a letter that could be signed to give formal consent to take part in the research.

4.2.3 Confidentiality and privacy

In the presentation and the letters of consent, I was careful to outline the nature of the research and that participants would be guaranteed anonymity in any written report. The letter also guaranteed that participants’ details would not be disclosed at any other point in the research process. However, it cannot be assumed that the mere fact of not mentioning names alone will ensure anonymity. A real concern was that of maintaining anonymity with small numbers of participants from the same

department. Revealing details of countries of origin could have been an issue in this respect; since the cohort number was fewer than twenty, individuals might have been identified on the basis of nationality. I took the decision to provide only details of region in the written thesis report (i.e. East Asia / Western Europe) while retaining students’ gender, but assigning them typical English first names. Maintaining anonymity of tutors was likely to be even more difficult. My approach to this was to refer to all tutors as female, and to avoid providing a level of biographical detail that would make it easy for those in the same department to guess identities. In the main study in Chapter 7-9, tutors B and D agreed to their names being used if I felt it was appropriate, but for matters of consistency, I maintained an anonymous approach. The time span involved in this research was also a mitigating factor to some extent. The delay between data analysis and publication of the final thesis was likely to be at least four years. The expectation was that student participants would have moved on and would be unlikely to encounter any written report.

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4.2.4 Honesty and openness

My description of the research aims for the first study in my letters of invitation focused on feedback and academic writing, and did not highlight the issue of critical analytical writing. However, as CAW is generally recognised as an aspect of

academic writing, I did not feel this was problematic. It was also my responsibility to ensure that time commitments would not be onerous for them, and my decision not to pursue the diary method was taken on this basis. I gave an indication that

interviews with students would last around thirty minutes and endeavoured not to go beyond this in any of the five interviews they took part in. While I could offer to advise participants in terms of accessing the English language unit, I was also careful not to promise any other direct benefits of this research.

4.2.5 Access to findings

As a part-time researcher engaged on a study that might theoretically take five years to complete, from the outset of the study I was constrained in how quickly I could gather data and carry out in-depth analysis. Given that I was only in contact with participants on their one-year taught Master’s programmes for a limited period before they left Bradfield to pursue careers in other parts of the world, it was not unexpected that contact might be lost before any meaningful analysis and findings had been produced. Although I constantly returned to the data to carry out initial analysis during the data collection period, I did not write up any coherent findings until Spring 2010.29 This was not the case with tutor participants, and they could be given access to findings more easily when they became available. The use of member checks has been discussed earlier (Section 3.7.3) as one way in which the findings could be made accessible to participants, in order to strengthen validity of the research method and results.

4.2.6 Avoiding harm and beneficence

The principle of avoiding harm can be linked to that of maximising benefits to participants (Burton & Bartlett, 2009). Feedback can have a profound emotional

29 _{I wrote the first version of Peter’s case study for a departmental upgrade meeting that took place in} April 2010. This was required to progress to the later stages of the PhD.

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effect and its sensitive nature is well documented (Higgins et al, 2000; Haggis, 2006). Discussion of negative feedback might certainly involve pain on the part of student participants, depending on how they viewed such feedback and how they chose to accept it or respond to it. In general, however, by building a positive rapport with student participants and creating a non-judgemental but supportive atmosphere, I hoped that some of this threat to face in the interviews would be reduced, and that reflection on feedback would not be a painful process for participants.

There were points during data collection where ethical concerns relating to ‘beneficence’ or potential harm came into play. One example of this was during the second formative feedback interview in term two, when one participant, Katy, was unable to decipher her tutor’s handwriting on her script and I felt obliged to help her with this. What followed was an exchange around the meaning of terms such as ‘anecdote’ in the feedback, which I attempted to explain. In the corresponding interview with another participant, Paul, it was clear that he needed specific help on how to balance quotation and paraphrase in his writing. I decided that it would be easier and more effective for me to help him, rather than set up a consultation in the ELU that he might not keep30. I subsequently took several examples from the assignment that we were discussing and created a short handout to demonstrate how he could improve them, avoiding overuse of quotation. In each of these cases, my decision to intervene was based on my responsibility to the students and recognised that a decision to remain detached could have been more harmful to them.

Tutor participants could also have felt threatened if they suspected that details of their practice could be presented as in some way deficient, so it was important to assure their anonymity. Despite the fact that the preliminary study focused more on the student writer and the nature of written feedback, using data from tutors as triangulation, the issue of findings relating to good and bad practice could not be ignored. What constitutes good or bad practice in this context is open to interpretation, but the findings were likely to identify certain practices that I

interpreted as more or less effective in pedagogical terms. One approach would have

30 _{At that stage of data collection, it was clear that Paul was reluctant to seek advice and help from the} ELU. I also made a short additional recording at the end of the interview, as Paul made some further remarks on the reasons for his over reliance on quotation.

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been to avoid presenting such interpretations, but I believed that as long as anonymity was maintained, tutor practice could be discussed in context and in relation to their stated intentions. Inevitably, the issue of a researcher’s responsibility to ‘tell the truth’ as he sees it then comes into play (see responsibility to research community in 4.2.1 above). If poor practice was somehow ignored, the question would then relate to harm to future students, balanced against possible violation of ethical principles of anonymity to tutor participants.

Tutor and student workloads are a potential problem for research which asks participants to dedicate time to interviews over a relatively short time-span. In this case, every effort was made to approach participants at times which were convenient for them. To fit in with students’ workloads and movements, I organised the

interviews in the town centre buildings that Archaeology occupied. My contacts with administrators in the department from my work with them proved useful in booking empty classrooms for this purpose. However, there were occasions when students told me that they would be on the main Bradfield campus and that they preferred to meet there. As my workplace was in a central location this proved convenient, and I was able to book a meeting room, rather than my cramped office, to carry out

interviews. While student participants were each interviewed five times, I decided to interview tutors once early in the taught year, and once towards the end of the year. In fact, given the different modules that students took, I eventually interviewed five different tutors (a total of seven tutor interviews) but in practice focused mainly on two key informants (tutor A1 and A2) who were more involved with the participants as their supervisors and marked their work over three terms. Tutors were asked for interviews at times they felt happy to arrange, but inevitably giving me thirty minutes of their time competed with their own workloads to some extent.