Ethical considerations

Some of the ethical dimensions of this research study have already been discussed, but the research process thoroughly implemented and utilised the ethics policies and procedures of the University of Derby, in a document entitled ‘University Research Ethics Committee: Policy and Code of Practice on Research Ethics’. The standard ethical processes were worked through firstly for institutional consent, as part of the taught Ed D process, and then with all four strands involved in the research process. Having completed and passed all three

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taught Ed D units, and having completed a Learning Proposal for Independent Study, the formal transfer to the research phase took place in July 2010.

On a basic level, through all four strands of research, all individuals received an ‘Invitation to participate in the study’ letter containing: information on the study, giving the process of their consent, the process of withdrawal of this consent, de- briefing information and how to access to the full research project (see Appendix 1). Everyone who took part in this research process was required to sign individual consent forms, to confirm their consent to take part in the project, after having received their information letter. This was after developing a unique code, so that these ethical consent forms could be stored separately to the information that they have given – irrespective of format (questionnaires, focus groups or interviews: Kamberelis and Dimitriadis, 2013). This process enabled participants to be able to withdraw from the study, without their anonymity being breached. As would be expected in such a process, the confidentiality and security of this data is to be safeguarded for the duration of seven years after the completion of the thesis, and the academic authority of the university is paramount. It should be noted, though, that no requests for the withdrawal of any participant’s information have been received during this study.

There are a large range of potential ethical issues raised with collating data from both quantitative methods such as questionnaires, and qualitative methods such as focus groups and interviews (Cohen et al, 2007), which will be further discussed below. But the principle concerns relate to consent and sensitivity. As the original intended research process was to be conducted on the areas of SES, with potential discussion turning to ethnicity and gender, there is - self-evidently - a degree of sensitivity involved (Matthews and Ross, 2010: 84). Although these areas of stratification are often used in sociological research, it was decided that this would not be studied: the centres were too disparate in too many ways to gain any concrete benefit from recording the gender or Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) differences in their experiences of the qualification involved.

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There are considerable ethical considerations for this doctoral research process though. The University of Derby ethical guidelines rightly argue that to engage participants in detailed research processes that may not lead to being used in the eventual research process, engages ethical questions, this is also raised by Mason (2002). However, in a project of this duration - as has been described above - professional research interests can morph into something slightly different as professional interests shift over time. The roles held by the author have shifted considerably during the duration of the Ed D research process, as the phases 1 to 8 of the research process diagram in Figure 1 above on page 30 highlighted, but still leaves the position adopted very much that of insider researcher (Blaikie, 2007).

As with the questionnaires and the focus groups detailed above, the same ethical processes were followed for the interviews. This process started with the access to the study information (that had been e-mailed beforehand in all these cases). At the start of that day’s interview the SLT member was then talked through the information - to check that it had been read and processed – as they are busy people. Subsequently, the SLT member was then asked to work out their unique code, and sign the consent form, so that the interview could then be recorded for transcription purposes. The interviews were very open-ended, as can be seen in Table 8 below, but were merely used as triggers for discussion content (Silverman, 2014).

What is interesting is that most colleagues referred to the content on a very personal basis, talking to me about how the success and failure made them ‘feel’ and what they had ‘experienced’ despite the questions not being put to them like

this. This is the connection with Mayring’s (2000) methodology on experience

and feeling, as utilised through this research process. Only one particular independent head maintained the use of very formal and formalized language, referring to the decisions from the school’s perspective rather than from his own perspective. However, this was in a very thriving IB school, and they were clearly successful, so the author put this down to him not wanting to come across as

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arrogant, rather than anything that the author thought had been done particularly differently in this interview.

Table 10 - Open ended interview schedule (generic for all SLT members)

However, on reflection in Centre 8 the SLT responses were also slightly shorter than they had been everywhere else, so the interview lengths were between 51 and 55 minutes long in this school, as opposed to the 55 to 69 minutes seen elsewhere. This was interesting, as Centre 8 was the only single sex boy’s school (including sixth form) that had been visited during this research process: everywhere else had been co-educational. The author’s role as a participant

1. Why did you choose to introduce the IB into your centre?

2. What were the specific challenges of introducing the IBDP here? 3. What have you learnt from having the IBDP on the curriculum here? 4. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the IBDP…

5. What do you think you have learnt as an SLT from introducing the IB? 6. If relevant, how did you make the decision to pull out of the IB?

7. If relevant, could you foresee a circumstance where you would attempt to reintroduce the IBDP?

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observer may have been relevant, as in all centre’s visited some of the informal discussions with senior staff (small-talk on school tours and so on) had discussed her own children’s educational positions, and as her secondary age children are both girls it is thought - with hindsight – this might have had an impact on the wider circumstances surrounding the particular responses from that one group of SLT members.