Participants of the study and methods of data acquisition

The research data consisted of 11 semi-structured expert interviews. Interviews are a typical method of choice when studying social representations qualitatively (Flick et al., 2015). The qualitative semi-structured interview was seen to be the most appropriate for studying participants’ social representations and for capturing diverse meanings and conceptions involved in the participants’ social representations (Flick et al., 2015). Social representations are dynamic entities reflecting participants’ personal and professional knowledge and experiences and can be particularly useful when studying how experts think (Rochira, 2014). Interviewing allowed me to listen to the voices of the participants’ and engage in sensitive dialogue with them. The semi-structured approach allows for a disciplined way of tracing the participants’ social representations while being flexible enough to adapt to participants’ responses and let the conversation to proceed naturally (Fontana & Frey, 2000).

The national experts were selected on the basis of their knowledge and professional experience with multiculturalism and policy-making in Finnish vocational education. The general idea was to interview participants from stakeholder organizations in VET who would be willing to reflect critically on their own and others’ perspectives towards multiculturalism. Prior to starting this thesis, I worked in a professional role for a number of years as the education policy expert and advocate for the National Union of Vocational Students in Finland - SAKKI ry. It was through this work that I came to know all of the experts, which made it easy to approach them. Based on my prior work experience and networks, I selected participants that I was confident would represent a variety of different perspectives on multiculturalism, policy-making and vocational education and training in general. Twelve

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experts were contacted and all agreed to participate in the present investigation despite relatively short notice. One participant cancelled at the last minute due to illness.

The invitations to participate in the interview were sent out in early April and May 2018. The interviewees were contacted directly through their work emails. The invitation to participate consisted of a short description of the study and a polite request for the participants to share their expert knowledge. All of the participants were interviewed individually between April and June 2018. All participants were given a consent form to read through and sign. One copy of this form was given to the participant and I kept the other (Appendix 1). In the informed consent form the participants were promised that the data would be analyzed anonymously and their identities and any sensitive information that possibly emerged would be protected. After they signed the form the participants were informed that the interview would be recorded on two different devices. All participants agreed to the interview being recorded.

Most of the participants had worked with VET for more than a decade. Some participants had worked with VET for more or less their entire professional careers. The age of the participants ranged from 35-70. Out of a total of 11 participants, eight were women and three were men. The participants represent various core interests in VET, from government officials to lobbyists in various stakeholder organizations as well as upper-management in Finnish vocational institutes. All of the interview subjects were tried-and-tested professionals in the field of VET policy and administration meaning and could be seen to have a deep understanding of how VET had developed over the years and the critical contradictions and tensions involved. They all actively followed and participated in policy-making according to their personal, professional and organizational perspectives. Because they represented different interests and perspectives, the respondents also differed in the way they saw the relationship between VET and multiculturalism.

The respondents varied in terms of how closely they had worked with issues related to multiculturalism. For some, working with multicultural issues was an important part of their everyday professional duties but for others it was just one issue amongst many others. There was also variation amongst the experts in terms of how closely they had worked to the grassroots level of VET institutes. Some experts focused primarily on legislation and policy-

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making meaning that in their everyday work they rarely had a chance to visit vocational institutes. Two participants, however, were principals of VET institutes, meaning they were closer to the everyday reality of staff and students while also keeping an eye on educational policy on a national level. Table 1 represents the anonymized code of the responder, professional position of the participant, duration of interview and length of transcribed text.

Table 1: Participants of the study

Anonymized code of the responder Professional position Duration of the interview Number of pages of transcript H1 Lobbyist 1:01:56 10 H2 Principal 1:22:48 18 H3 Official 1:12:35 16 H4 Official 1:29:10 17 H5 Official 1:11:57 17 H6 Lobbyist 1:18:38 15 H7 Principal 1:30:24 19 H8 Official 1:27:00 18 H9 Official 1:19:16 18 H10 Lobbyist 1:37:46 22 H11 Official 1:01:08 14

The interviews lasted on average approximately 75 minutes, with the longest being 1 hour and 37 minutes and the shortest just over an hour. In order to familiarize myself with the data, I transcribed all of the interviews word for word. The data was also anonymized and the participants’ interviews were marked with clear codes. The transcribed interview material added up to total of 184 pages of text data in Cambria-font, font-size 12 and line space 1.

The interviews were carried out in Finnish. Most of the interviews were conducted at participants’ workplaces during working hours but a few were done in cafés. Almost all of the interviews were conducted in Helsinki but a few took place in other cities in Finland. The

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interviews began with a brief overview of the subject after which participants were offered a chance to ask any questions. A few participants wanted to know more about the precise subject of the interview and the background and focus were explained to them.

Each interview began with a simple word association warm-up exercise followed by a series of questions. The warm-up exercise and interview framework (Appendix 2) were modeled after Andreouli and colleagues’ (2016) focus group topic guide, which first invites individuals to reflect individually on their general views of racism and then shifts to asking questions about local community and school context. I modified this framework to better suit the context of this study and the individual interviews. The idea of the warm-up exercise was the same as for Andreouli and colleagues – to prime the participants to gather their thoughts and come up with different perspectives. The participants were told that they have three minutes time to write down onto a blank piece of paper keywords and sentences that come to mind when thinking about “multiculturalism in the context of vocational education”. After the three minutes was finished, they were asked to go through the list and select the words and sentences that they felt were the most important. The researcher collected the word association exercises at the end of each interview before which they were at the participant’s disposal. In several interviews participants used the word association exercise papers later on to illustrate and visualize their ideas. The key words and sentences that the participants wrote down functioned as a kind of mental blueprint for the ensuing conversation. Aside from the warm-up exercise, the only other stimuli were the interview questions.

The interview framework was divided into three different sections: 1) myself and others, 2) expert’s organizational perspective and 3) multiculturalism in vocational education on a general level. The purpose of the first section was to invite participants to reflect on how they understand their own role and position in regards to multiculturalism. In the second section they were asked to reflect on how these positions fitted in with the organizational perspectives of their employers and other organizations. In the final section respondents were asked about multiculturalism in the context of Finnish VET on a general level. The questions were open- ended to allow for flexibility and a wide-range of topics.

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The semi-structured nature of the interview meant that there was a loose general structure (including sub-questions in each theme or section) that I tried to follow in all of the interviews. During the interviews I tried to pick out specific questions from the framework that would fit the rhythm of the interview and topic that the participant was discussing. If the participants emphasized or kept coming back to a certain point of view or idea then I would ask follow-up questions related to this. In order to uncover the metarepresentational level of the participants’ social representations, they were asked to reflect on what they thought relevant others might be thinking about these questions and how they in turn feel about this.

The word association warm-up worked well in getting the conversation started. After the first few interviews, I realized how important it was to keep coming back to the topic of multiculturalism throughout the interview because it easily faded into the background. Especially with some of the more policy-oriented participants, multiculturalism often served as a kind of backdrop against which larger systemic issues such as the VET reform were framed. It was important to keep discretely reminding participants of the focus of the study by asking how what they were explaining was related to multiculturalism.

Approximately half of the data set revolved around educational policy in VET and the current reform process. The other half was related to different dimensions of multiculturalism. Naturally, these two are mutually interdependent and weave their way through the interviews. In some of the interviews the discussion went very deep into the legislation and politico- ideological foundations of the new reform and its implications for VET. Sometimes the interviews would be dominated by technical perspectives on the new legislation, for example about the way that the new system of funding works affects students with a migrant background and whether or not this is fair. Other times moral, political or philosophical perspectives on the history and development of VET were brought up. All in all it could be said that the range and depth of the collected data proved robust enough to shed light on how the experts understood multiculturalism in the context of VET from multiple points of view.

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