According to Vogt (2008), choosing tools for research method is inherently value- laden. This study addresses subjective judgements on personal aspects of
learning and professional development experience so there was a need for sensitive, subtle and caring data collection. As previously noted, by using semi- structured interviews, I could exchange views with students, recognising the centrality of our interaction for knowledge production and emphasising the social situatedness of my research. Chase (1996:45) explains that by listening to stories told by individuals and groups, researchers can ‘gain deeper
understandings of the social resources (cultural, ideological, historical and so forth) that they draw on, resist, and transform as they tell their stories’. Thus, a central question of my research method was how I listened to participants and interpreted and wrote about their stories. Following Chase’s (2013) narrative approach, for me the experiences these students described and discussed were
95 not ‘facts’, ‘realities’ or ‘truths’, rather the accounts were viewed as ‘the
people’s stories about everyday experience’ (2013:56) which ‘act as a window’ (2013:57) to understand how these students make sense of reflection in their learning. Following Fontana and Frey (2003), I opted to use qualitative methods drawn from established social science research in order to probe beneath the surface of student expression and to examine less overt aspects of student practice like motive, meaning and self-view. Specifically, I used two semi- structured interviews with four level 72 (first-year) students and four level 103
(fourth-year) students studying business to explore issues about the nature, process and purpose of reflection in their learning. L7 students were chosen for this study as for many of these students, reflection might be a new experience to be added to all the other new experiences of their introductory year as HE students. In addition, I was persuaded by the QAA call that ‘The first year as an area of policy and analysis needs to have the same prominence within
institutions as other policy areas, such as the research agenda’ (QAA
2008:online). In contrast, L10 students were chosen in order to explore the experiences of undergraduates at the end of their chosen programme and before commencing employment. I hoped the two cohorts would offer opportunity for comparisons to be drawn.
As previously discussed in Chapter One and further detailed in this Chapter, the students’ understanding of and use of reflective concepts were key to the interview process. Individual interviews were loosely structured around the themes presented in Chapters Two and Three, that emerged from my analysis of literature and questions were created to create opportunities for responses about the life-world of the student in relation to reflective learning. This
allowed me to gather deep and rich stories, anecdotes and examples of the more personal aspects of reflective learning e.g. values, assumptions, beliefs and discomfort. By recalling lived experiences, the students answered my research questions about their reflective learning. In this way, the interview process had a hermeneutic thrust; it was oriented to sense making and interpreting of the notion of student experience of reflective practice. Shopes explains that:
2 L7 is mapped to Scottish Credit Qualifications Framework and refers to the first year of an undergraduate programme http://www.scqf.org.uk/framework-diagram/Framework.htm.
3 L10 is mapped to Scottish Credit Qualifications Framework and refers to the final year of an undergraduate programme http://www.scqf.org.uk/framework-diagram/Framework.htm
96 Interviews are hermeneutic acts, situated in time. Meaning is
conveyed through language, which in turn is shaped by memory, myth and ideology…Interviews thus offer clues into narrator subjectivities (Shopes 2013:134).
According to Watson (2008), this is how interviews form texts to be interpreted by the interviewer and others. Wolgemuth et al. (2015) also claim that there is a growing body of literature pointing to the potential value of interviews as opportunities for self-reflection, catharsis, being listened to, responded to emphatically, and to being validated and this appealed to me, as it would offer an opportunity for each of the students to be heard. However, I was also aware of the limitations of this approach in terms of inconsistency of mutual trust, social distance from one interview to another resulting in ‘unreliability’ (Watson 2008:367). I recognised that if my questioning was too deep or uncomfortable, it might have prompted avoidance techniques from the students and that some of the meanings, which were clear to one party, might have been relatively opaque to the other. However, I argue that such factors are less inhibiting if the accounts of the students’ experiences are viewed in the way I discussed above as fictions or as Gubrium and Holstein’s ‘assembled realities’ such that:
Respondents’ answers and comments are not viewed as reality reports delivered from a fixed repository. Instead, they are considered for the ways that they construct aspects of reality in collaboration with the interviewer. The focus is as much on the assembly process as on what is assembled (Gubrium and Holstein 1997:127).
Thus, the knowledge created or assembled by this study is produced by interaction between me and the students I interviewed. All interviews were conducted on university campuses during working hours and involved me meeting with the students, in a one to one setting, to explore their personal experiences. I explore the limitations of the interview method more
extensively in section 4.4.1 of this Chapter.
With these criticisms in mind and following MacFarlane et al. (2015), I worded and sequenced questions in advance to ensure all student participants were asked questions oriented to the themes identified from my literature review. In particular, the different facets of reflection highlighted by analysis of literature helped me identify ways in which I could probe student accounts of reflection. I was not expecting ‘correct’ answers from the students. Rather initial responses
97 by students to broad questions were followed up where answers resonated with my conceptual understanding of reflection. For example where students spoke about reflection as troublesome or problematic, I would follow up this aspect of experience using my understanding of Brookfield (1995, 2010) as a guide. The wording of questions (Appendix 4) was translated into the more every day, colloquial language of students in order to generate rich descriptions and authentic data (Geertz, 1973). This required me to develop skills in handling interviews to enable students to talk freely and emotionally and to have candour, richness and depth about their experiences. I believe I developed some of these interpersonal, interactional, communicative and emotional skills in my trial study discussed in section 4.5.
Initial answers were followed up by more open-ended discussion. For example, the students were initially asked about their understanding of reflection, some answered in terms of using reflection at work, others talked about experiences in the learning context, whilst others spoke about the concept in an abstract sense. The individualised responses given by the students allowed me to follow up their account of the concept in ways that mirrored the student’s frame of reference and allowed me the opportunity to explore areas which resonated with theoretical insights. I believe this approach allowed the participants to share more detailed experiences. In order to provide greater clarity about the approach, an extract of interview questions is provided in Appendix 4. As a method, following up initial responses gave the interview a more fluid structure, opened up narrative accounts to readings I otherwise might have missed, served to highlight some of the nuances and hidden textures of experience, and gave me a richer appreciation for participant experiences (Hartman 2015). In order to capture responses, I sought agreement from the students to use a digital audio recorder and to take brief notes. Before moving to explain data analysis, I consider the strengths and limitations of my chosen method below.
4.4.1 Strengths and Limitations of Methods
Many qualitative research methods texts such as Luttrell (2010), Denzin and Lincoln (2013) and Savin-Baden and Howell Major (2013) provide criteria for judging the quality of interviews. However, there is no consistency in the terms used in relation to the assessment of quality of qualitative interview research.
98 For example, Mishler (1986) cites representativeness, reactivity, reliability and replicability, Kvale (1996) discussed ‘validity’ and Rubin and Rubin (2005) use the terms ‘credibility’ and ‘thoroughness’. According to Roulston, (2010b) debates surround the issue of establishing ‘validity’ in this kind of research method and I address this more fully in section 4.7 of this Chapter.
Critics of the qualitative interview as a method of data creation include Potter and Hepburn (2005) who challenge the ‘use of the interview method as a
transparent means to elicit data that will inform understandings of the meanings that participant’s make of their lived experiences’. According to Pinsky (2015), interviewing is constrained by a ‘positivist legacy in which the interview
interaction is seen as the singular locus for data production’ (2015:281). To some extent, standard procedures for interview studies are still limited by a positivist model of a distanced researcher rigidly following a predetermined research design, and thus, there may be little room for reporting on the actual messiness of methodologies. This positivist legacy leads to the assumption that interview data are pure and factual and can be abstracted from their broader context. St Pierre’s (1997, 2012, and 2016) work complicates the issues of data, words and the production of knowledge. She questions the ability of language to ‘secure meaning and truth? How can language provide the evidentiary warrant for the production of knowledge in a postmodern world? (1997:179). I have already intimated earlier in this Chapter, that for me, the interviews were akin to the creation of an account or stories, which students shared regarding their experiences of reflection.
According to Shopes (2013), data and the relationship between meaning and language are contextually situated; unstable and capable of infinite
reinterpretation. In order to make sense of the student descriptions of experience I needed to weave between conceptual and empirical analysis regularly to interpret experience in a lively way. Having undertaken the first interviews with both cohorts of students, and following Carlsen et al. (2014), I opted to add an alternative technique for student participation, in order to delve more deeply into the context and focus of reflection.
I selected a modified projection technique (Catterall and Ibbotson, 2000) as a way of overcoming some of the response barriers associated with direct
99 questioning and as a way of ‘involving practitioners in theorising’ (Carlsen et al. (2014:294). Analysis of responses given in first interviews suggested two
particularly interesting contexts for student reflection: reflection in learning and reflection on employment. I therefore decided to follow the initial interviews with a second individual session where I presented the students with the codes and themes I had created from literature and first interviews. There were 87 themes in total, created from all the first interview transcripts and these are detailed in Appendix 5. Following Carlson et al. (2014), each student was asked to select approximately 6 to 8 codes, which they associated with the
contextualised reflection. According to Carlsen et al. (2014:295) the use of material artefacts (cards) in researcher–participant interactions can make research more ‘co-generative’. Each of the students also commented that they found the technique involving and fun, stretching their imagination and
generating new ideas and new perspectives to augment the interview discussion. In this way, the technique was used to create a deeper understanding of the nature of the student experience in the light of different contexts. Having made choices, the students were asked to analyse choices and clustering’s of
concepts, noting order or groupings. I invited the students to help me understand their groupings so that the research process and output became multi-faceted and multi-layered by mixing analytic techniques. Specifically, student contributions to the interpretation of data opened up interesting avenues to explore and helped me imagine individual differences in both reflection contexts. This helped solve some of the issues raised by the trial study, which was undertaken in order to enhance my research experience. The trial study mimicked methods, in order to reflect on the experience of using the same methods of data collection, analysis and interpretation. The study
informed the dissertation in diverse ways and I discuss these below.