Identifying and accessing participants

I used a number of routes to identify and access participants, although this again was a significant challenge as the removal of the ESOL with citizenship route meant there was no longer a specific site at which naturalisation ‘training’ took place. In mid-2014, I began working as a voluntary advisor at the City’s main refugee and migrant support centre, a role which involved giving advice and support on a range of issues including asylum support applications, housing, and benefit entitlements. The people that I saw in the centre varied significantly, and included newly arrived asylum seekers, undocumented migrants who had been living ‘illegally’ in the UK for many years, and naturalised citizens. I took the decision to work at the centre due to my own particular interest in working with and advocating for asylum seekers in the City; the decision was not, therefore, related to the PhD project. That said, individuals at various stages in the process of naturalisation did attend the centre for advice, making it a useful site at which to meet participants. Given my responsibilities as an advisor however, I sought to keep my position as researcher distinct from my role at the centre, principally because I did not want people to feel pressurised to take part in the research in return for my support with their queries and anxieties. As such, rather than trying to ‘recruit’ participants at my desk, I put posters up in the reception area of the centre outlining the project and giving my contact details (see appendix D for my advertisement).

Along with this, I discussed my research with the small group of lawyers from the City’s law centre who visit the refugee centre once a week to run free advice sessions on legal issues. Occasionally, individuals arrived seeking support with their naturalisation applications and, as such, I left posters and flyers in their office, and asked the lawyers to circulate these when they thought it appropriate, and to take a set of flyers back to the City’s law centre for further circulation. I also made a short presentation at the weekly staff meeting at the refugee centre, introducing my

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research and asking staff at the centre to pass my contact details on to anyone they felt may be able to take part from within their own networks.

The FE College in the City at which I had previously planned to conduct classroom observations was also a useful site for identifying citizenship applicants. Having been employed there as an EFL teacher for some time in 2009, I was familiar with the processes and structures at the college and also had access to the appropriate gate-keepers with whom to engage. As such, I contacted the Programme Area Manager and other teachers responsible for ESOL provision, asking for their support in identifying individuals who were going through the process of naturalising. Through this process, I was invited by the staff in April 2015 to meet with seven citizenship applicants. While I had intended at this meeting to find individuals with whom to conduct 1:1 interviews, it transpired that these ESOL students were in fact keen to discuss their citizenship applications there and then. There followed, therefore, an impromptu but very informative focus group discussion, lasting approximately one hour. This was unrecorded but I wrote notes as the discussion progressed and added to these entries as soon as our discussion was over. I have not included all the individuals in this focus group as participants in the thesis; however I have drawn on some of the content of our interaction in my analysis.

The final, principal sites for meeting participants were the citizenship ceremony and the test, where I spoke to individuals as they mingled after the events. I felt that it would be inappropriate to try to recruit participants in the midst of a tense or ‘high- stakes’ situation, and thus exercised a good deal of caution, waiting until the events were complete before I introduced myself. I certainly found a willingness to interact, and I believe that attendees tended to invest a degree of trust in me, perceiving me as non-threatening perhaps on account of my gender, my presentation as middle-class, or my demeanour. However, I did note a definite reticence on the part of many individuals to take this interaction any further. Some declined to take part in my research there and then, while others shared their email addresses but then chose not to pursue my subsequent message. One woman even arranged a meeting

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on two separate occasions and both times failed to arrive. Certainly this reticence is inevitable to some degree in all research; however, I note that Byrne (2014) encountered similar difficulties in recruiting participants for her comparable study, and find her conclusion – that individuals involved in the citizenship process can experience a real sense of unease around perceived officialdom – rather persuasive. Indeed, several of the people who agreed to interviews with me did admit to a feeling of anxiety in doing so, and my contact at the FE college told me that he had had to give significant assurance to the ESOL students that I was not a government officer attending to verify their immigration status.

In terms of the interview data, I conducted 1:1 interviews with twenty individuals in total. This included eight officials – the Lord Mayor, Deputy Lord Mayor, two Superintendent Registrars, one Deputy Lord Lieutenant, one Administrator, one Senior Administrator, and the Administrator to the Lord Mayor; an unrecorded interaction with one testing centre Administrator; and in-depth interviews with twelve citizenship applicants. Although this is a relatively small number of participants, my intention (as explained in sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.2) was not to identify a representative sample from which to draw generalisations, and I believe that I was able to gather and construct a detailed insight into the phenomenon even from a small but heterogeneous group of participants. Further, from my time in the field, I ascertained that the eight citizenship officials with whom I interacted were in fact the key actors within the ceremony and testing sites: these were the individuals who made the procedural decisions, who presided over the events, and with whom applicants were likely to interact. They were, therefore, the main figures central to naturalisation practices within the City.12

12 _{I should note that I did endeavour to contact individuals from the Home Office for this project. In} 2014, I spent several months conducting an internship at the Department for Communities and Local Government, through which I met several key policy advisors working on issues around integration and migration. However, while a number of DCLG colleagues were willing to take part in an interview (I have not included this data in the PhD as it is not directly relevant to this study), I found it impossible to secure any interviews with individuals at the Home Office.

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In terms of interview location, this was dependent on the requirements of each individual. I conducted interviews with citizenship officials during work hours and our interactions therefore took place within their offices. As regards citizenship applicants, this varied depending on their own particular requests: interviews either took place in a public space in the city, for instance a café, or, if preferred, at the participant’s home. With each participant, I outlined the project verbally and emailed the information sheet and consent forms (more on which in section 3.3) prior to the interview, giving each individual time to ask questions and clarify concerns before organising a date and time to meet.