Participant interviews

Gillham (2000) recommends the use of individual interviews where numbers of participants are not high and participants are accessible. Consequently, I planned semi- structured interviews with participants twice in each cycle: entry interviews in the first weeks of the semester as they joined the research, and exit interviews, conducted at times suitable for participants in the last week of the semester or in the break between semesters. Entry interviews were designed to build rapport with participants and to afford an opportunity to reflect on their process of getting to university. Exit interviews (see Appendix 5) were designed for participants to talk about their first semesters on campus and to share their impressions of the study group.

A note on rapport

As one of the key tenets of AR is its democratic approach to research, it was essential in this research to build rapport with participants. Rapport is essential for building trust between participants and the researcher (Ispa Landa, 2006; Kawulich, 2005). Kawulich (2005) suggests that good rapport enables participants to act naturally and lessens any effect of trying to do or say the right thing for the researcher. In addition, she observes that when rapport is successfully developed, participants feel assured that the researcher

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will report information they share sensitively and accurately. In this research, good relationships and little power imbalance between participants and the researcher (Eikeland, 2012; Greenwood & Levin 2007) would be a key for their engaged participation.

Rapport may also contribute to developing relationships – perhaps a more appropriate word would be networking – with and between participants that might well continue after the research finishes (Glesne, 1989). Bath (2009) was very aware of that possibility through her research; she foregrounded ethnographical methodology as a way to explore her context and develop rapport with participants before she invited them to participate in her research. However, Glesne (1989) has noted that, in research that relies on democratic relationships and rapport between participants and researchers, friendships that develop may skew the objectivity of the research. That was something I needed to be mindful of, particularly for Cycle One participants who elected to continue to meet through their second semesters. As noted above, many participants, but particularly those in Cycle One, developed bonds which continued outside the university context. In the research context, however, the focus was necessarily on developing rapport as quickly as possible, to establish a friendly environment in which participants felt safe to work together.

To begin to establish rapport with participants, ‘getting to know you’ activities, which included identifying features different ones of us had in common (Ispa Landa, 2006) and brief sharing about how each participant had enrolled at university at this particular time, were incorporated into the first meeting of each cycle. In addition, in order to reduce power distance between me and participants, I was careful to dress casually, as I believed the other mature-aged students might dress; I was very careful to use accessible language from the world outside of university in all my dealings with participants.

Entry interviews

Rapport that was developed in that first group meeting continued into the entry interviews. For these, I prepared interview guides (Berg, 2009; Mertler, 2012) to gain some standardised information from participants. Interviews included questions concerning how participants had come to university at this point in their lives, what writing they might have done since school, how they had prepared themselves for

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university, and any challenges they anticipated (see Appendix 5). As interviews were semi-structured, students were able to talk about anything they felt was instrumental in their decision to come to university at this point in time.

The guide gave some structure to the interviews, but as the interviews occurred after the first group meeting with its light-hearted ‘find someone who . . .’ exercise, I was able to

approach them in a conversational manner, picking up on aspects of participants’ lives they had been willing to share. In the interests of establishing rapport, interviews were a time of sharing between researcher and respondent (Ispa Landa, 2006). Where it was relevant, I shared my fellow mature-aged student status, chatting about commonalities revealed in the introductory meeting and, as Ispa Landa (2006) suggests, where appropriate, sharing challenges I was experiencing that matched those of participants: encountering new vocabulary and negotiating different meanings attached to ordinary-

sounding words, for example that writing could be “situated”, was one illustration of this. I tried to ensure the interviews were active, a time when researcher and respondent could collaborate to construct new knowledge (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995) as I guided participants to begin to reflect on their paths to university.

Exit interviews

Exit interviews (Appendix 5) were also semi-structured, to ensure essential data for the research was collected. I invited students to contribute a final reflection on their semesters by sharing high points – “lightbulb moments” – and how they felt the semesters had gone. They were invited to comment on how they found the study group and, in an oblique way, to comment on issues that had been their greatest concerns by contributing any ideas they had, based on their first-semester experiences, that they felt would benefit future mature students. The invitation also contributed to further understanding of the cohort that could be incorporated into the next iteration of the study group as it provided a way for students to identify personal weaknesses – such as time management – they had stumbled with through the semester.

Although the focus of the research widened from writing to acquiring an academic Discourse, writing is such an integral part of that Discourse that I kept the same interview questions for each cycle. Study groups maintained a writing focus, and writing remained a concern for all new participants. In addition, I wanted to maintain some consistency in the data gathered for each cycle.

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Interviews were primarily transcribed by me. A few were transcribed by outside transcribers who signed a confidentiality agreement. Participants were invited to read over transcripts and suggest changes if necessary.