The Interviews

4.12.1 The First Set of Five Individual One-to-One Interviews As discussed above, for the first interviews, I created an interview guide adapted from the questionnaire I used for the IFS study (please refer to Appendix A)

combined with the Study Skills Checklist (please refer to checklist in Appendix D) that I use during my practice with new students to determine areas of academic weakness. The rationale for creating an interview guide based on the checklist, is that it is meaningful for participants as their expectation is that their reason for attending dyslexia support is due to requiring development on areas of cognitive weaknesses. Therefore, I decided to start earlier interviews by asking about academic tasks first to fulfil student expectations and to enable familiarity and rapport building, which then enabled me to approach asking about the emotional responses to study tasks. The interview guide was then amended twice to allow for a more inductive approach. The first interview guide was therefore developed to capture data on: emotional responses to academic tasks; strategies used to cope with the task; and strategies used to cope with the emotional response to the task.

Additionally, before this interview guide was created, research was undertaken into looking at interview questions that had been used in other similar published studies. I evaluated items that had been used in a 33-item emotional intelligence scale in the study by Schutte, Malouff, Hall, Haggerty, Cooper, Golden, Dornheim, (1998). For instance, item-22 on the Schutte et al., (1998) scale ‘I easily recognise my emotions as I experience them’, influenced me to create the question on the first interview guide: ‘do you, or do you not, have an emotional response to….?’ followed by each of the study tasks I investigated. That is because I wanted to delve into the participants’ recognition or understanding of their emotions in direct relation to the experience of having to conduct the various study tasks. This then led to my prompt question of ‘do you know why you feel that way?’, to examine whether a student felt a certain way about a study task due to cognitive difficulties, or other elements, associated with the task. Furthermore, item number 31 on the Schutte et al., (1998) scale – ‘I use good moods to help myself keep trying in the face of obstacles’ informed my question on the first interview guide

‘do you have any strategies for coping with the emotional response?’, as I wanted to find out whether students’ were actually using any strategies, such as good moods, etc., indicated by the item above to help with overcoming any negative emotional reactions presented by the academic tasks.

I was also informed by survey questions used in the Topham, Moller and Davis (2016) study. Although Topham et al., (2016) had focused specifically on social anxiety, the interview schedule for their study was still useful for shaping one of the final questions on the first interview guide used in this study. Topham et al’s (2016) final question ‘what do you feel could have been done to help you to reduce your social anxiety in learning situations?’ was reworded to ‘what kinds of techniques could be taught during your support sessions that would help you personally to cope more effectively with dealing with anxiety at university?’. This, I considered as an important additional closing question to obtain from the student perspective what they thought could help them to cope more productively with anxiety at university. This is because student responses to this question, if feasible, can be directly implemented into my practice. The first more structured interview guide was used during individual interviews with the first five participants to generate enough data to be able to identify any consistent themes. During these first five interviews, I stuck to a prescriptive list of study tasks and only fleetingly asked at the end of the interview whether there were other tasks / experiences encountered at university that raised emotions for participants. The justification for adhering to a prescriptive list of study tasks, is that as a dyslexia study skills practitioner, I am interested to establish the types of academic tasks that prove to be more problematic in terms of inducing unfavourable emotions for dyslexic students. Questions were therefore structured around targeting the retrieval of data on whether individual participants had any emotional response in relation to a list of academic situations / tasks normally required by university

courses, such as reading tasks, exams, presentations, seminar discussions, writing essays, etc.

4.12.2 The Second Set of Ten Individual One-to-One Interviews The second interview guide (please refer to Appendix F), had the aim to be more flexible and to capture not only consistencies, but also unexpected issues. This was still based on individual study tasks, yet asked more open questions, such as: ‘how do you feel about reading tasks, etc?’ to obtain a more instinctive response of positive and negative reactions. This was in contrast to the first guide which used the more formal question: ‘do you, or do you not, have an emotional response to reading tasks, etc?’ Additionally, because it had become clear from analysis of the first five interview transcripts that reasons for negative emotions connected to specific study tasks were based more on unpleasant childhood experiences, such as feeling embarrassed at school when reading aloud, rather than on current cognitive difficulties with the task, I focused more on delving into reasons for a particular emotion by asking with prompt questions: ‘do you know why you feel that way?’ and also asking ‘can you give any particular examples?’ to enable the participants to discuss any negative academic experiences that had led to the emotion.

4.12.3 The Third Set of Five Individual One-to-One Interviews As the first stage of five and second stage of ten individual interviews had used a prescriptive list of study tasks, for the third stage of the final five interviews, I wanted to use a more inductive, flexible interview guide, which was only partially referred to during the interviews. For the guide (please refer to Appendix G) although I had tasks listed for my own benefit, I did not go through these in a chronological order with participants, but instead asked each participant to randomly pick any of the tasks. Once the task was selected the only two questions I asked were: what emotion the participant instinctively felt about the task, and

their reason for that emotion. This enabled an identification of tasks particularly problematic. I had no prompt questions on this interview guide, as I wanted the interviews to be unstructured and to be more of a spontaneous open discussion, whereby the information divulged from participants was followed up with questions developed during the interview, rather than by pre-existing questions. Additionally, as I had no set structure for the final five interviews and no expectations as to how the interviews would unfold, I did have some backup questions to ask, with the plan of either using or not using them, dependent on how the interview developed. For example, as I had asked, only if time had allowed, at the end of the first and second stage of interviews whether there were other tasks or experiences at university that raised particular emotions for participants, I used this third stage, to ask this question. Furthermore, from analysis of the transcripts, it became apparent that participants had a lot of self- blame, anger and frustration targeted towards themselves if they took longer than expected to do a task, or found it challenging. Therefore, in the last five interviews, I opted to explore expectations that participants set for themselves and how they felt if they struggled to meet their goals, by investigating these areas through additional questions.