Methodological reflections on the research

The current study employed a qualitative research approach, in which three methods---interview, observation and documentary review were adopted in order to explore kindergarten teachers’ perspectives concerning play and their implementation of play in practice in the China context. Three research methods yielded rich information to address the research questions. However, although many efforts were made in the research process, I

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recognized that no research methodology had full capacity to ensure a panoramic and perfect picture. In reflecting on the whole journey of this research, some issues arising from the process, the challenges I encountered and the strategies I adopted to address them may give some implications for future research in the same, or relevant field.

The first reflection is about research methods. The use of a triangular techniques can help researchers reduce bias which may be caused by a reliance on a single method (Cohen et al., 2007). When triangulation is used in interpretation research, it is powerful in providing sufficient information to understand the complexity of human behaviors and social events (ibid). The methodological triangulation of combining three research tools in this research, to a large extent, offered a complex picture of the dynamic of kindergarten classroom life and helped to improve the trustworthiness of the findings. The interview enabled me to get a deep understanding of teachers’ diversified perspectives concerning their interpretations of play, their experiences and personal accounts of different ways of implementation of play and their role and interactions with children in play. Observation allowed me to understand the social, physical and cultural contexts of the research, the relationships between me and the participants, and the interactions between teachers and the children. This therefore provided real data for me to compare teachers’ professional knowledge and assumption of play-based pedagogy to their actual practice, while documentary review helped me to find how the government’s attitude toward play is and how play is arranged and treated in early childhood educational practice.

However, there was also a weakness in the methods that influenced the research. The fieldwork of the current study took about 8 working days for observation in each of the nine kindergarten classes. The limited time for the classroom observation may influence the finding of types of play in kindergartens. In one of the interviews with an observed teacher (CJ), she suggested that prolonged observation might be helpful for me to observe all the different play activities in her class. Therefore, a prolonged engagement in the field would be suggested for future research to ensure dependability of the research findings. Besides, in this study, I only interviewed teachers and administrators; thus, only their view of play had

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been presented. The perspectives of play of other actors such as children, parents and government officers had not been explored. Therefore, in future research, it is suggested that interviews with children, parents and government officers may have a better understanding of play from their perspectives.

The second reflection is about establishing my role as a researcher and building my relationship with kindergarten children when working in the field. As a research instrument of a qualitative study, I recognized how crucial the processes of negotiating my identity and establish rapport with the participants were to the success of a research. Christensen (2010) indicated that “the researcher’s engagement with the detail of social interaction and the implications of social representations forms part of the process of children’s genuine participation” (p.155). In my fieldwork with kindergarten teachers and children, I attempted to adopt neither the ‘child’ role (Lærke, 1998) nor the ‘least adult role’ (Mandell, 1991; Thorne, 1993) advocated by some researchers for the study of childhood. Rather, I tried my best to negotiate my role as an ‘other adult’ (Christensen, 2010) who distinguished from teachers, staffs and parents. For example, in my first encounter with some of the observed teachers, after I introduced myself, she would react by calling me ‘Teacher Yang’. I explained that I was not a teacher, and that I preferred her to call me by my name Candy. Further, I asked for her help in not introducing me as a teacher to the children. In the research process, on the one hand, I communicated frequently with the teachers and discussed the best way of my practice, but did not necessarily follow the class rules as children did. For example, I did not sit still on a chair or join a group of children in ‘learning corner time’, but might go around and watch children playing. On the other hand, when I interacted with children, instead of behaving as an authority who helped them to solve conflicts and looked after them, I made myself into a ‘quiet big friend’ to them. I listened to their talk, shared their happiness, and exchanged gifts with some of them as a friend.

However, I was sometimes in a dilemma, especially when I responded to child-initiated interactions which aimed to tell on peers. I recognized that every subtle response I gave to children during our interaction would inevitably influence the establishment of my role as an

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‘other adult’ and impact on the ecological environment of the classroom. Bearing this in mind, I had to employ a strategy by suggesting that a child who came to me to ‘tell on someone’ should turn to the teacher for help. This kind of interaction repeated many times during the entire research process when I entered into a new class. However, once this kind of interaction occurred, children would not ask me for help and tell on again as they understood that I am not a teacher. In this way, I built up my researcher role in the kindergarten classroom and smoothed the data collection process. I would like to suggest that the ‘other adult’ role may be helpful for researchers who carry early childhood study to develop rapport and trust with the participants. It may also be useful for the researcher to reduce the reactivity effects (Shaughnessy et al., 2003) by which her or his presence would impact on the ecological environment of kindergarten classroom, and to be flexible in gathering data smoothly in future research.

The third reflection pertains to the use of video camera in the observation. As I used video camera in the research to help me record teacher-child interactions in play activities, I needed to establish trust with the participants and ensure they were cooperative and willing to be filmed, thus to ensure good quality of the collected data (Heath et al., 2010). During ‘warm up’ time, I discussed the issue of video-recording with the teachers and clarified my interests, which were to focus on their natural interactions with children, rather than assessing their practices, knowledge and procedures. The recording would only be used for the research, and “in no circumstances will the data be broadcast, appear on the web or be used for commercial gain” (Heath et al., 2010, p.17). More importantly, I told them that I would make a copy of the video episodes undertaken in their class for them, if they wished to have one. This exercise helped me to allay teachers’ concerns and develop the trust necessary for collecting video.

Furthermore, as Walsh et al. (2007) indicated, good research involves preparation and spending time in the field before beginning to video. It is necessary to allow the participants to get used to the video recorder’s presence. In order to do this, I introduced the camera to the children in the initial meeting with them by recording everyone’s smile and then showed

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the recording to them. This exercise not only helped me to become more familiar with the children promptly and to make them accustomed to the presence of me with the camera, but also gave them a clear idea of what I am doing. Although during the later observation, some children showed curiosity in regards to the camera, they came to me and asked about the working of the camera. Some of them made faces and grinned to the lens, and behaved in a friendly and polite way rather than disturbing the recording. Walsh et al. (2007) indicated that the camcorder and the researcher can never become invisible, but that strategies can be used to erase the attraction and distraction of them. I found that being directly present, introducing the camera to children and operating it in front of them in the first meeting would help children to build an understanding of the relationship between the researcher and the camera, and speed the process of getting used to them. This may be useful for future research, which involves using a video recorder in fieldwork with young children. Moreover, it would help the researcher to minimise some possible distractions which the camera may generate.

The fourth reflection is about the strategies of research data collecting and analysis. From the literature, it is suggested (Cohen et al., 2007) that researchers may go back to respondents to check that their transcripts of interview have not been misinterpreted, in order to ensure the dependability of the research findings. However, as my research generated as many as 60 interviews with teachers and administrators, it was not feasible for me to employ the member checking strategy to confirm the information of interview after I transcribed them. With advice from my supervisors I adopted an immediate respondent validation technique instead for establishing dependability. In each interview, I confirmed frequently with the interviewee that I had understood their response correctly by retelling their earlier statements and answers. This strategy provided an effective, immediate opportunity for the respondents to check answers and confirm the interpretations which generated from our dialogues (Lincoln & Guba, 1999). I believe that the immediate respondents oral checking during interview may be useful for the similar research which involves a great amount of interview data.

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Besides, during the class observation, I took field notes to record the settings, time duration of play, events, conversation between teachers and children and their behaviors. In some circumstances, I stood by to observe play activities and took immediate notes in my notebook. On other occasions, it was not possible for me to record everything immediately on a notebook. Some of information was written down from memory a short time later. However, in order to record information in as rich and timely a fashion as possible, I brought a digital recorder with me and spoke to it to record some of the data, such as the context and settings where taking written notes was not feasible. I transcribed them into written notes after finishing each day’s observation. I would like to recommend that future research could use this strategy to help with recording observation data where it is not possible to take timely written notes.

A further reflection of the current research is that I planned to utilize the Nvivo package to help with the analysis of the interview and video transcripts of observations in order to compare the themes generated by using Nvivo with those from my manual handling, and to provide complementary themes to my manual analysis. However, considering the large amount of the data and the prerequisite of using Nvivo---all the data need to be translated from Chinese into English before input them into Nvivo which would inevitably take much more time than I can manage to translate and check, the package was not adopted in final data analysis process. Moreover, as Robert and Wilson (2002) pointed out, the researcher’s manual handling of qualitative data often involves reflection and understanding, which allows him or her to develop a more thorough, flexible and detailed understanding of the data and to provide creative and deep interpretation which most computer software has difficult to handle. Therefore, manual analysis rather than electronic analysis was employed. It might be worthwhile trying to use software to analyze the qualitative data in similar studies in English language in order to offer supplementary analysis.

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