By inviting a relatively small number of TAs to talk and provide written texts about their work and
experiences in a context which is neither overtly prescribed or circumscribed by national and local
policy, nor by overt institutional, hierarchical power relations, my intention is to give the
opportunity for otherwise ‘silenced’ or ‘censored’ individuals to be heard; to provide spaces in
which they can describe and discuss their subjective experiences. However, having said that, a
Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (in Denzin and Lincoln, 2008:396) contrast the differences in situations
created by the presence of the researcher in focus groups and one-to-one interviews. They
promote the view of focus groups as generative of ‘synergy among participants’ (including the
researcher) and inhibitive of ‘the authority of the researcher’ where ‘collective memory and
shared knowledge’ can be explored through listening to others making sense of their lives. In
contrast they maintain that ‘(i)ndividual interviews strip away the critical interactional dynamics
that constitute much of social practice and collective meaning making’. On the other hand, it is
important to acknowledge that a focus group can be subject to inhibitions of its own because of
the power relations and hierarchical status of some participants compared to others.
Equally, the researcher-as-participant is subject to those same power relations prevalent in the
group. My own resolution to the dilemmas and tensions created by this eventuality will be not to
intervene to give others a chance to speak since I would then be altering the dynamics within a
group of people constituted before my inclusion within the group. I felt this would also be
justified through the intention expressed in this chapter and Chapter 3 to examine the discourse
at the level of the individual and the group as well as institutionally and societally. What
therefore matters here is my ethical treatment of the resulting transcribed text of the group as a
resource for analytical and intertextual work. Although I must say that a sense of ethical ‘unease’
would remain as a result of this kind of situation because individuals may be behaving
ideologically without being aware of it, or, indeed, may be playing a role fully conscious of their
exercise of power. Thus whilst my fieldwork in the form of focus groups will be undertaken
overtly with bona fide attempts to give reassurance and transparency of intention, it could be
argued that there may be an element of ‘covert fieldwork’ (Fontana and Frey in Denzin and
Lincoln, 2008:142) to the extent that I would allow power relations between participants to play
themselves out in order to be able to examine the local level of interaction. My role would then
Concerning ethical aspects of the one-to-one interviews, Chase (Chapter 2 in Denzin and Lincoln,
2008:57-94), writing from a narrative enquiry perspective, examines the ways in which
researchers enable their participants’ and their own voices to feature in writing about their
research where some researchers put the narrator’s (participant’s) voice in the ‘limelight’ through
the use of a ‘supportive voice’ (Chase in Denzin and Lincoln, 2008:75)– a principle which is
applicable to focus groups and indeed might appear to feature exclusively in the production and
examination of my participants’ written texts. On this matter, however, Fairclough (2001) and
Potter and Wetherell (1987) point out that discourse and text are always produced in response to
a stimulus or in anticipation of the production of future discourse and text. The kinds of
questions, interjections, turn-taking and sequencing of encounters between researcher and
participant(s) may prove to be full of assumptions and presuppositions, and indeed loaded with
their own ideological assumptions – all of which may have ethical implications for my reading of
the texts in terms of their description, interpretation and explanation. If ethical dilemmas and
tensions arise in this context, I will explore them and explain my conclusions and interpretations
of the findings.
Once the transcription of interviews and focus groups has taken place and the texts have been
provided, I face subsequent dilemmas and choices in the process of description, interpretation
and explanation (Fairclough, 2001) where the ‘cultivation of productive relations’ (Kamberelis and
Dimitriadis in Denzin and Lincoln, 2008:396) between my text and those of my participants is
concerned. Reading across multiple participant-produced texts and drawing on other texts to
engage in reflection, analysis and critique is in itself an ethical process, requiring an attention to
the detail, original context and justification of intertextual links and relationships. To be borne in
mind here are temptations to make too great a claim for my findings, or to impose false
The identification and ‘isolation’ of selected national policy documents as a significant source of
influence on the formation of the participants’ subjectivity and agency was arguably a
presupposition without prior-proven foundation in the reality of the participants. However, I
justify this inclusion through the reliance and importance that society attaches to policy as a
mechanism for getting things done. Policy was also a major concern of the critiques from the
writers in my literature review. The ethical implication for my relationship with my participants
and analysis of the findings is to seek links to national policy in what they say and not to impose
‘policy’ on their words. Tellingly, Fairclough (2001) says that ‘the relationship between policy and
action is a mediated one’. In its turn this may raise ethical questions about policy and the actions
of agents who bring policy into the networks of their institutions. I may therefore uncover wider
questions about the ethics of the naturalisation of discourse and practice within social settings
such as schools.
The last point about the wider social world within which my research sits leads naturally to other
themes often included under the broad topic of ethics, namely whether the research is valid,
reliable and generalisable. In this context I will take steps to ensure that the validity and reliability
of the research findings are aspects of my academic and professional ethics in relation to the
treatment of data and theory. Drawing on ideas from Silverman (2000: Chapter 13) I claim
validity and reliability for my account as a bona fide attempt to represent accurately the social
phenomena to which it refers. I attempt to ensure this through seeking comparisons and
contrasts between internal factors within the texts and between them and in their relationship to
the theoretical perspectives outlined in Chapter 3. For a qualitative approach to data analysis the
implication in the achievement of validity is that all cases in the data should be included in that
analysis to avoid any criticism of anecdotalism or of making spurious claims for the findings. This
then a relationship sought to the findings of others. Indeed, as I discussed above, deviation and
variation are important in illuminating new perspectives and problems
To support the validity and reliability of my research, I aimed for a consistent categorisation which
stemmed, in the first place, from the words of my participants themselves. In my discussions in
Chapters 5 – 7, I also relate these to the theoretical perspectives outlined in the preceding
chapter and, where appropriate, to the findings of the researchers included in my review of policy
and literature. Validity and reliability were supported through the full transcription of interviews
and focus groups (Silverman, 2000), but excluded from this work for ethical reasons of anonymity
and confidentiality. Silverman (2000) illustrates and amplifies the point of transcription through
the example of tabulation by reference to the terms employed by the speakers: this maintains the
analyst’s access for reflection and comparison across transcripts whilst at the same time providing
a framework of reliable cross-references. In the case of my research I have either quoted directly
from the words of the participants in Chapters 5 - 7.
‘Generalisability’ is often an outcome required of research. Most often the word is associated
with the more quantitative, ‘scientific’, rationalistic approaches to research where the purpose is
to identify general trends for large populations. In this project I am expressly exploring the
experiences of a very small number of people at particular moments in time; government-
sponsored research projects have already explored large populations of TAs, some of them over
an extended period of time (e.g. Blatchford et al., 2009b), and individuals are rendered mute in
large-scale projects. My sample of participants is geographically diverse, sector-diverse and
gender-diverse – females predominate, reflecting to some extent the composition of the wider
school workforce. In terms of precedents for my approach, small populations, or even an
individual, feature widely in this type of qualitative research (Erben, 1998). Engaging with a small
number of participants enables the researcher to attempt to lay bare the effect of commonly
This is in itself an ethical endeavour. The findings from the data generated by this project are not
generalisable to whole populations of members of the wider school workforce. However, they
are indicative of the kinds of experiences these individuals have had. On the other hand I hope
that the theoretical underpinning of my methods together with the application of my methods
will be replicable and therefore might be generalisable to other projects of this type and scale.
Ethical considerations therefore apply to various contexts of this work and reflect the earlier
theorisation of individuals as agents in networks and the contingent mobilisation of human and
material resources to meet diverse purposes (Latour, 2005). In effect a consideration and
application of ethical research procedures and processes is an attempt to ensure that immutable
and combinable mobiles are drawn upon and created in valid, reliable and transparent ways that
do not harm the participants or distort their words. The ethical treatment of the participants is a
central concern that is important both for the interview and focus group settings, for the
subsequent analysis of their texts, as well as for the wider dissemination of the findings from this
research.