Facebook Group Recruitment
The process of recruiting students to participate in the Facebook group required two stages:
The first stage of recruitment involved a brief presentation at a pre-placement guidance lecture that second year students attended at the end of June 2015. The lecture was delivered by the head of the placement team and involved guidance regarding what to expect and how to behave whilst on placement. Before beginning the research project, I met with the head of the placement team and sought her assistance as the ‘gate-keeper’ to the computing and engineering second-year cohort. It was within this preliminary meeting that I was invited to present my request for participants at the guidance lecture. At the time I was informed that the lecture was to be delivered to all second-year students across the computing and engineering courses, but later learned that the computing students were not in attendance. I was asked to wait until the end of the two-hour lecture to explain what my study would entail, and unfortunately by this point some of the students had left and many of those who remained appeared to be flagging. At the end of the two-hour lecture I explained what my study would involve and requested student participation. I had previously been informed by the head of the computing and engineering department that I could not send blanket emails to the students and so upon explaining my research intentions I was only able to provide the students with an email address through which they could express their interest, I could not follow up with a reminder email to the
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students, nor could I email the computing students who were not in attendance. Unfortunately, only two students responded to participate in the research in response to this call for participants.
Requiring more participants for the Facebook group I began my second round of recruitment between July and August 2015. Following my previous participation request, a departmental rule change had come into effect which stated that research requests could not be made through the university. I could no longer promote my research in lectures in addition to being unable to promote through university internet-based services such as emails and the intranet. The only remaining option for recruitment was social media. Earlier it was mentioned that a limitation of using social media as a method of data collection would be its potential to limit participation opportunities for those who do not use the social networking site. Unfortunately, the restrictions on additional recruitment opportunities meant that this also became a limitation of recruitment. The university’s computing and engineering department provided details of social media pages through which I could gain access to potential participants. This included the departments official Facebook page in addition to pages for affiliate groups such as the university computing society and engineering society. On each of the pages I posted the following request:
“Hi everyone…I’m wondering if you would like to take part in my research project looking at experiences of placement participation for Computing and Engineering students at *university name*. This could be a great opportunity to hear about the placement experiences of others and potentially keep up with people from your year group. And it’s a chance to contribute to an under-researched area with your own experience. You are invited to participate provided that you are participating in a sandwich year work-placement this year and attend *university name*. The commitment is minimal, it will simply involve joining a closed Facebook group and filling out a consent form. Once every fortnight I’ll ask everyone in the group a question relating to the placement and I’d like you to discuss your experience in relation to this question. You are under no obligation to answer the questions and you can leave the group at any time. Feel free to post your own questions/discussion starters relating to placement participation as often as you like. I’d be really grateful if you would consider taking part and help me to complete my PhD”.
Included in these posts were my contact information and a link to the closed group. By following the link students could request to join the group, and as group admin I had to accept their request before they could see the groups content.
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Interview Recruitment
Recruitment for interview participants commenced in November 2015, roughly four months after data collection began through the Facebook group. The staggering of data collection in this manner enabled the opportunity to use the preliminary Facebook group discussions to begin to build a picture of the key areas that would benefit from further exploration in the semi-structured interviews.
Recruitment of interview participants once again utilised the computing and engineering department’s social-media pages. On each of the relevant pages I posted the following request:
“Hi everyone…I’m wondering if any of you might like to talk to me about your recent work- placement year experience to assist me in my PhD research project? Our interview would take place at the university at a time and date convenient to you. Your contribution would be a massive help for me in completing my research and it’s a chance to share your experience, contributing to research in your industry. Thanks for taking the time to read this, please private message me if you think you might be interested or for more information ”
This message was reposted two more times over the course of the academic year at infrequent intervals to avoid saturating the groups’ page with participation requests. I additionally posted on the research Facebook group requesting for members to mention the interview invitation to their friends.
Sample
Facebook Group Sample
The total number of students who joined the Facebook group peaked at 38. By the end of the study 18 remained. The majority of these participants were male, with only two female participants electing to join the group, one however became one of the most frequent group contributors. The group was constituted of a mix of both computing and engineering students. Each of the students were undertaking a sandwich placement during this phase of data collection, with the exception of one student who had completed his placement in the year prior and chose to answer questions retrospectively. This student also took part in a semi-structured interview.
Interview Sample
In total 12 semi-structured interviews were conducted. One of the interview participants had participated in the Facebook group. Two other students had in addition also offered to participate in an interview, one female and one male, but ultimately decided not to go ahead. The majority of interviews were conducted with students who had recently returned to the final year of their course. In four instances the participants had recently graduated and were now in further study or full-time
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employment. Once again, the majority of participants were male with only one female accepting the invitation to be interviewed. Two of the twelve students were international and three were mature students, the remainder were UK domicile males under the age of 21 at course commencement. The majority of the participants interviewed studied a mechanical engineering course, other courses included energy engineering, computing studies and automotive and motor sport engineering In total 49 participants were recruited for the study and only three were female. Though it might be argued that this imbalance may be representative of the gender disparities existing in the subjects under study I had sought to gain a greater number of female participants. In addition to asking my existing participants to inform their friends about the research project and highlighting in particular the need for female participants I also posted an additional social media request across all the pages I had been informed of by the department, in which I stressed the importance for female participation within the project.
In addition to these measures I also made contact with a student who I had come to learn had created a social group for women in computing for herself and her peers and requested (with permission from the school’s ethics panel) to observe and record their meetings for the purposes of my research. The meetings were intended as opportunities for female computing students to support one another with matters of their education including experiences of work placement participation. Though I gained permission to record these meetings they were unfortunately in their early stages and did not produce data pertaining to the placement experience and so regrettably the decision was made to discard this method of data collection.