In the previous chapter learning and identity were positioned as processes which constantly evolve in the face of ongoing experience. In the words of Wenger (1998 p158):
“The temporal notion of trajectory characterizes identity as: 1. A work in progress
2. Shaped by efforts - both individual and collective - to create a coherence through time that threads together successive forms of participation in the definition of a person.
3. Incorporating the past and the future in the experience of the present 4. Negotiated with respect to paradigmatic trajectories
5. Invested in histories of practice and in generational politics”
Given therefore, the fundamentally temporal nature of learning and identity, it was necessary to identify a method of data collection by which ongoing contact could be maintained with the study participants as they experienced their placement, so that I might meet the second and third aims of my research to explore their negotiation of meaning, and shifts in identity, as they occurred. In Baker’s (2013, p134-135) research on transition, Facebook was demonstrated to offer a consistent and reliable communication tool for maintaining research relationships, during a period in which participants were experiencing “personal, social and academic upheaval across time and space”. This
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would indicate that Facebook might be a means by which to maintain contact with placement students who as a result of their circumstances would inevitably be geographically dispersed during the course of the research project. Baker suggests that Facebook facilitates communication through the documenting services of email in addition to a real time chat facility. The instant messaging function Baker (2013) argues, offers the opportunity for synchronous communication where both the researcher and their participant are online simultaneously. This allows for communication which is more interactive and more like face-to-face interviewing. The messaging service in contrast functions asynchronously and thus offers participants an opportunity to carefully consider their response in terms of what they choose to share and how. Due to the transient and disposable nature of instant messaging Baker argues, the asynchronous messaging function allows for the collection of more detailed data collection of the two.
King, O’Rourke and Dellongis (2014) stated that the sheer size of Facebook, its omnipresence and its increasing integration into day to day life, means there is a growing potential for its use in directly appealing to prospective research participants. Part of its value they argue, lies in its potential for enabling targeted recruitment requests and offering access to study participants who might otherwise be hard to reach. They suggest to make the most of the advantages of the use of social media in research, it should be the tool used for both recruitment and online data collection. Where both recruitment and data collection are conducted on social media, an advertisement for recruitment can be used to direct participants straight to the study, before interest subsides (King et al,2014). In addition, Kosinski et al (2015) argue in relation to recruitment, that although the population of Facebook is not necessarily representative of the wider population, as users tend to be younger and some groups might be entirely excluded, the sheer size of its population means that even under- represented groups should remain relatively large. King et al (2004) argue further, that online recruitment and data collection allow participants to make participation decisions with less pressures than might occur in face-to-face research.
There are however pragmatic issues which must be considered when deciding whether to use online research. According to Kosinski et al (2015) for example, the use of Facebook in research does not necessarily require substantial changes to existing research procedures, but greater care will be required to optimise the experience for participants, due to the increased ease with which online studies can be abandoned. Beneito-Montagut (2011) in addition, claim online research requires a technologized researcher to ensure that they are familiar with the technology they have elected to use. Likewise, Kosinski et al (2015) argue there is no substitute for personal experience with the platform and as such the researcher should be/become an active Facebook user.
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Thus, while the use of Facebook would appear to offer an effective avenue for recruitment and for the collection of contemporaneous data, it is necessary to carefully consider issues with regard to design, to ensure that it remains an appropriate method to meet the study aims:
1. To apply a sociocultural theoretical framework to the understanding of placement learning, whilst contributing new theory driven knowledge to the work placement literature.
2. To explore students’ subjective understandings of their placement experience, paying particular attention to the attendant meanings that they form in response to their experience. 3. To analyse the impact of sandwich placement participation on the negotiation of identity and
to analyse where issues of identity impact upon the process of learning from the placement experience.
4. To explore the emergent practices which serve to enable or disable learning on placement. For the reasons outlined thus far I would argue that to enable the capture of the meanings students form in relation to their placement participation, to uncover the practices they believed to have been influential to their learning, to explore their shifts in identity and to gather data from which sociocultural understandings can be generated, requires a method of data collection which produces qualitatively rich data, that is contemporaneous in nature and which offers insights into the social experience of placement participation and the meanings students form in relation to these experiences. I thus elected to create a closed Facebook group, which computing and engineering placement students from the target university could choose to join. Questions aimed toward exploring the placement experience were put to the group on a fortnightly basis which they could answer at their own convenience. This method of data collection continued for 15 months and included the students initial return to university. Facebook was selected as the medium for communication based upon the assertions of past researchers who have found it to be an effective means of maintaining contact with a geographically dispersed sample. The questions posed were open, to facilitate the capture of detailed data, and reflected the sociocultural ontological assumptions underpinning the study and thus explored placement participation as a socially and culturally embedded experience. Designing this element of data collection to continue for 15 months enabled an ongoing exploration of meaning making and evolving identity throughout the course of placement, but it also enabled the capture of the return to university, a decision underpinned by past research findings which have emphasised the return to university as being an important aspect of the placement journey e.g. Auburn (2007). I elected to use a group as opposed to direct messages both for convenience and to keep users engaged with the project. Posting a question once to the group as a whole offers a more efficient means of contact than multiple direct messages, and each time a question was posed group members could see one another’s replies and thus keep up with the placement experiences of their
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cohort, which I felt might potentially encourage participants to keep returning to the group to combat the issue highlighted by Kosinski et al (2015) regarding easier drop out. I also wanted the research to offer value to the participants to make their participation worthwhile and so I offered students opportunities to capitalise on the group format and ask their own questions of each other, though none did. Evidently private messages would offer greater anonymity, however issues of anonymity were easily countered as the group was ‘closed’ so only fellow members could see responses. Where a student desired greater anonymity they could create a new research-only profile without identifying information, or they could privately request to direct message instead.
Before data collection began, I gained access to university affiliated Facebook groups from which I planned to recruit and was able to verify that large numbers of the target sample were members of Facebook and would thus have easy access to the group. At the time the research took place, Facebook had numerous features that would additionally facilitate its use in the project including: the ability to make closed groups which would provide a level of anonymity to group members, administrator functions which meant only the researcher could choose who entered the group and could control the posts of group members (such as if a post needed to be deleted should a participant not follow the rules surrounding group etiquette), and the ability to view who within the group has seen posts - facilitating the monitoring of engagement and ensuring important information such as the group rules were viewed by all. Being a long-standing user of Facebook, it was a platform with which I had enough familiarity to know how to create and run the group from a technical standpoint to meet the needs of the research.
Though research outlined above has suggested Facebook can provide a representative sample. Lunnay, Borlagdan, McNaughton and Ward (2015) caution that when using social networking sites to conduct research, those without internet access are denied an opportunity to participate. In addition, accessibility does not necessarily equate to ability, limited accessibility and digital literacy they suggest can serve to exclude, reinforcing existing inequalities (Lunnay et al, 2015). Given that the participants comprising the sample of the current study are university students who have already successfully completed two years of UK undergraduate study, their digital literacy and internet access is almost inevitable. It is unlikely many students could navigate the practices required in higher education without such resources. Even with access and ability however, many potential participants were likely not Facebook users despite reports of its popularity. Where this was the case, opportunities to participate in interviews offered an alternative route to participation, providing further support for an argument in favour of methodological pluralism.
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Interviews Rationale
Online research respondents have been shown to contribute shorter responses than face to face respondents (Lijadi and van Schalkwyk, 2015). This has the potential to be problematic as the meanings students form from their experience, their perceptions of practice and their evolving identity are complex phenomena, the exploration of which requires rich, detailed data. As such it is important to mitigate this risk. Similarly, though qualitative research has the potential to offer insights into phenomena that are deeply set in participants’ understandings of themselves, to do so has been argued to require responsive questioning (Ritchie and Ormston, 2014) and as I will demonstrate in the later ‘data collection method’ section, though happy to respond to the fortnightly questions, respondents rarely replied to follow ups and probes. Yeo et al (2014, p178) however suggest that interviews are “a powerful method for generating descriptions and interpretations of people’s social worlds”.
Wenger in addition characterised identity as a work in progress which involves ongoing efforts “to create a coherence through time that threads together successive forms of participation in the definition of a person”. The evolution of identity in response to placement participation is thus an ongoing process that does not end upon returning to academia. Students must continue to make sense of their experience and how it relates to their current trajectory. Interviews provide detailed subject coverage and an opportunity for a detailed exploration of each participants’ individual perspective, but they can also be useful in setting these perspectives in the context of a personal history of experience (Lewis and McNaughton Nicholls, 2014). The use of interviews would thus also enable insights into this reflective process of meaning making. As such to meet the study aims it was necessary to supplement the breadth of contemporaneous data gathered through the social media group with the detailed, reflective insights that interviews afford.
Tracy (2013) states that interviews are interactions that are underpinned by a purpose, and the nature of this purpose has consequences for the way the interview should be structured. Structured interviews, typically involve an interview schedule which is strictly adhered to. This form of interview, she argues, are advisable when the research purpose is to compare and contrast data across a large sample. However, highly structured interviews lack flexibility and depth. Semi-structured interviews in contrast, are more flexible and organic (Tracy, 2013). Though often still involving an interview guide, this guide is less structured, its purpose is to stimulate discussion as opposed to dictating it and as such, interviewers can be more adaptive and rescind some of the control over the discussion to the participant. Interviews of this nature allow for the generation of more emic, emergent understandings
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(Tracy, 2013). Less structured interviews enable a focus on topics that emerge as being most interesting and potentially important facilitating the collection of more complex data (Tracy, 2013). There is however, a debate with regard to what can be claimed of interview data. Yeo et al (2014) suggest that the different traditions in qualitive research have contributed to a diversity of perspectives on interviewing. In particular, debates centre around to what extent knowledge is constructed within the interview or is pre-existing. Citing Kvale and Brinkman (2009 p48) they describe two perspectives. In one, the interviewer uses the interview as an interaction from which they acquire and access participant’s pre-existing knowledge. This perspective they argue falls within the positivist or post-positivist paradigm, where knowledge is viewed as waiting within the participant to be unearthed, the interviewer’s role is to uncover this knowledge “unpolluted” by leading questions. Researchers aligned with the positivist paradigm thus ascribe importance to conducting a ‘pure’ interview which is intended to reflect the reality of the social world (Silverman, 2004). From the second perspective knowledge is viewed as something which is created and negotiated in the context of the interview, with both the interviewee and researcher actively participating. The researcher therefore contributes to the development of meaning and the interview holds the potential to be transformative for both parties, this they argue fits within the constructivist paradigm. From this perspective therefore, knowledge of a single reality in the social world cannot be gained through interviews (Silverman, 2004). This positioning of knowledge as created within the unique context of the interview has caused some to question the value of interview data (Yeo et al, 2014) as, if interview data is generated through an interaction, what meaning does it hold beyond that interaction? Many researchers, Yeo et al suggest, take a pragmatic view, acknowledging that while interviews involve knowledge which is created through an interaction, it continues to hold meaning beyond that interaction. They argue that while an interview will entail interaction between the participant and a researcher and this interaction must shape the form and features of the data it generates, participants must still be able to share their experiences during this interaction in a way that remains meaningful. The data generated, must still offer a way to better understand people’s lives. Relatedly Silverman (2004) argued for a position from which information about the social world is suggested to be attainable through use of interviews, albeit only partially. These sentiments resonate with my own beliefs and are thus adopted for understanding the use of this type of data within the current project. Silverman suggests that whilst research cannot perfectly reflect the social world, it can provide access to the meanings that people form in relation to their experiences and their social worlds. Silverman (2004) argues that people can create and maintain meaningful worlds and the suggestion that these realities beyond the context of the interview cannot be explored should be challenged, as the roots of these realities are more pervasive than can be accounted for by this view. While interviews can never
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fully explore and elucidate the lived experience of a person, they can be used to “describe truthfully delimited segments of real-live person’s lives” (Silverman, 2004, p129) and in doing so get closer to their lived experience.
When electing to conduct a qualitative interview therefore, a researcher seeks to understand the understandings of others and explore their subjective points of view, the task upon doing so, is to then describe these understandings in a depth and detail that represents the participants views fairly (Silverman, 2004). The insights gained through interviews however must always be partial, stories cannot be infinite in length, there are time constraints to consider in addition to norms in conversation that dictate that no person would ever discuss every detail in recounting an experience or sharing a perception. Further, the process of analysis exacerbates partiality. Coding and categorisation, and a restricted focus on certain aspects of stories will always contribute further fractures (Silverman, 2004). This latter limitation is one I seek to address through use of multiple methods of analysis, including the use of narratives through which I attempt to produce a less fragmented picture of the placement experience than could be produced through use of thematic analysis alone.
Interviews, though in some ways limited, also offer benefits to the qualitative researcher. A key benefit of interviews is their depth of focus on the individual. This depth of focus, alongside the opportunity for clarification and detailed understanding mean complex experiences are best addressed through such direct exchanges (Lewis and McNaughton Nicholls, 2014). Interviews were thus an appropriate and necessary method in order to meet my aims of conducting a sociocultural exploration of the students’ subjective understandings of their placement experience, the emergent practices that served to influence learning on placement, and the relationship between the placement experience and identity.
In the present study therefore, the use of interviews means that following Facebook interactions, matters of interest can be carried forward and probed in greater depth through interview discussions. Combining methods for this purpose is not uncommon, Ritchie and Ormston (2014) suggest that focus groups for example are often used in the initial stages of research for beginning to identify and explore relevant issues, which can then be taken forward and subsequently explored in more depth through use of interviews.
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The Context
The University
The study focused on the experiences of students enrolled on either a computing or engineering course at one university in Northern England. The university ranks highly within the UK for its provision of paid industrial placements.
The Department
The University’s computing and engineering department was split into two sub-divisions covering a range of subject areas within multimedia, computing, engineering and technology. The Computing and Engineering department were in the top 10 UK providers of sandwich courses. All full-time degree