Procedures for data collection 1 Survey questionnaire data

The survey questionnaire was piloted at a primary school in a neighbouring suburb of the school where the main study took place. The pilot study was conducted with 30 Grade 7 learners, 15 boys and 15 girls, from a primary school in Lentegeur, which is a suburb in Mitchells Plain. All the learners in the pilot study were Coloured. The social, cultural and economic context and environment of the learners in the pilot study is similar to that of the learners in the main study. The learners also have similar personal and biographical characteristics to those who were involved in the main study.

The pilot study was conducted to test the design of the research in order to expose any deficiencies so that these could be rectified before the questionnaire was used in the main study. It was aimed at developing a modus operandi with regard to the practical implementation of the questionnaire and at ascertaining whether there were any major flaws with regard to the level of language used in the questions, whether the questions were easily understood, the grammatical correctness of the questions, the time it took to complete the questionnaire and the structure of the questionnaire itself.

The fieldworker, a Coloured woman, who conducted the pilot study and the subsequent in- depth interviews with four learners who participated in the pilot study was also required to make comments on the efficacy of the questionnaire and the presence of any design flaws which could become obstacles to the eliciting of responses from the learners. Aside from minor grammatical and numerical errors, and structural issues relating to the spacing of the questions, the comments from the learners involved in the pilot study indicated that there were no serious problems with the

questions and the structure of the questionnaire itself. It was, however, deemed necessary to give the learners some information about the reasons for the research and the background to the drawing up of the specific questions of the questionnaire.

With regard to ascertaining the relevance of the questions in eliciting responses about science, the questions in the pilot study exhibited a clear gender-based difference. In-depth interviews were conducted with four learners, two boys and two girls, from the pilot study group. The records of these in-depth interviews are also included with those of the main study and bring the total of learners involved in the qualitative section of the research to 26. Statistical indications arising from the analysis of the statistics from the quantitative section of the pilot study were used to focus on specific responses emerging from the main quantitative survey questionnaire.

The final survey questionnaire that was used in the study was duplicated in hard copy format and the learners responded to the questions on this form. The responses were entered manually into a computer using a spreadsheet programme, the Microsoft Excel software programme. The 200 Grade 7 learners were seated in the school hall. Young, male and female, experienced teachers were with them to administer the questionnaire and to do any trouble-shooting. The same procedure was followed with 200 Grades 8 and 9 learners currently at the school where the research was conducted. Learners were all brought to the same venue, the school, which made logistics easier. They were excused from their normal periods to proceed to the school hall to complete the questionnaire.

When learners had completed the survey questionnaires, teacher facilitators who had administered the process, collected them.

4.5.2 In-depth interview data

All the interviews took place on the same day and measures were taken to ensure that the learners were safe in coming to the interview and returning to their schools. The recordings of the interviews were transcribed by the interviewers and the transcriptions as well as the recordings were handed to the researcher. The aim of the interviews was to explore participants’ attitudes to, beliefs about and perceptions of science and what appears to influence these attitudes, beliefs and perceptions, in the context of the group’s social, educational and economic profile. The in-depth interviews also sought to explore differences in the attitudes, beliefs and perceptions of the learners towards science and related matters from year to year and grade to grade in the GET Phase of education.

The in-depth qualitative interviews of the 26 learners were conducted by two young, Coloured research assistants, one male and one female, who are teachers at the school. They have similar ethnographic, cultural, social and religious backgrounds to the interviewees in order to compensate

for the possible intimidation of the girl learners by older, male interviewers from a different ethnographic grouping and of male learners by female interviewers. The reason for this approach was to make the interviewees feel emotionally comfortable and trusting when they responded to questions regarding their attitudes to, beliefs about and perceptions of science, science education and choice, or not, of science as a subject in the FET Phase of their education. The in-depth interview also sought to ascertain whether a career choice in a science field might have been subject to parental or other adult influence. This was done to elicit responses from the girls in particular, to take cognisance of, in the opinion of Kelly, Burton and Regan (1994, p.28):

“…the complex interplay of multiple sources of oppression (and areas of privilege) in women’s lives.”

Edwards (1990, p.486) refers to this contextualising of the interview situation for girls as a “sex- based trust” between women researchers and women interviewees.

The aim of utilising young, same-sex interviewers was also to foster interactional dynamics which would promote responsiveness amongst the interviewees, to break down any hierarchical relationships which might develop if older interviewers from one sex only were used, and to develop the intersubjectivity suggested by Kelly, Burton and Regan (1994). In keeping with this, the boys were interviewed by a male and the girls were interviewed by a female. The latter-mentioned authors go further with this interviewee contextualisation and refer to a set of presumptions, namely:

 that women find it easier to share their experiences with other women;  that this is always of personal benefit, and

 that the sharing of gender will enable any difficult or painful accounts to be dealt with sympathetically and effectively (Kelly, Burton and Regan, 1994, p.35).

The consideration for using young interviewers of the same sex as the interviewees in this qualitative data-gathering phase of the research was also guided by Edwards (1990) and Wolf (1996), who refer to the exploitative possibilities of the unbalanced power situation stemming from differences in gender in fieldwork. The use of the interviewers in this research thus attempted to avoid a ‘crisis of confidence’ and an unequal power relationship on the part of the interviewees towards the interviewers.

The need for interviewers to be selected from the same socio-cultural context of the interviewees, in this research, from the Coloured community, was also for the interviewer to be immersed in the culture of the interviewee as also recommended by Warren (1988), who terms the practice ‘cultural contextualisation’. Warren (1988) mentions the skin colour of the field worker as a crucial factor in the interviewer’s need to fit into the culture of the interviewee. This approach in the research’s qualitative data-gathering phase is further substantiated by Wolf (1996), who restates the

idea of cultural immersion as a way of downplaying privilege and difference in the in-depth interview in feminist social science research. Wolf (1996) goes on to state that race may dominate interaction between the researcher and the person or group being researched if its potential impact is not moderated.

The in-depth interview was structured in the sense that interviewers were briefed before the time about the modus operandi of the interview. A semi-structured interview schedule (see Annexure B) was used to guide the interview. The interview was focused on the views of learners on women and their entry into traditionally male careers, men’s entry into tasks and careers traditionally regarded as careers meant for women, the media’s depiction of persons in science-related careers, experiences in science classrooms and perceptions of science teachers. The interviewers were fully briefed regarding setting the scene for the interview, what questions to ask, and the context and reasoning behind the questions. Interviewers made the interviewee feel comfortable, introduced themselves, completed the demographic information required from the learners, and noted the date and time of the interview. They established the social, economic and cultural context of the interviewee and were requested to limit the questions to those that were printed with the instructions. Interviewers were requested to establish the decision-making hierarchy in the interviewees’ homes and whether there was a history of any family members being scientists. Interviewers were remunerated for conducting the interviews and transcribing the audio into hard copies.

4.6 Analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data