Reflections concerning validity in data management

Qualitative researchers have for some time begun to question the ethics of representing the choices of others, interpreting narrative accounts, and the privileging that occurs in the decisions that we make in the questions that we ask (or fail to ask), interpretations that we map onto (or miss) and the ways in which participant voices are portrayed and presented. (Berg, 2004, p. 2)

Several issues arose in the stage of data management which cannot easily be categorized as either pragmatic or ethical. Firstly, the outward simplicity of data collection, in that researchers collect all forms of data, but then yield them to textualization in order to analyse is problematic (St. Pierre, 2002, p. 404). St. Pierre questions this inference and this process of re-describing the world by the researcher. I am acutely aware that as the sole listener to the recordings and the sole transcriber and coder, that the topics and themes that I have identified may be different to those someone else may identify. Thus, this research cannot be a comprehensive nor objective account of the constructions of the young people in this study. Taking Berg’s concern, I am therefore making it clear that these processes that I have used were carried out with the best intentions to represent the voices accurately, but that they are my interpretations of the lived reality of the participants. My interpretations

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are informed by the literature and my theoretical approach and so this study can only be a partial and selective view of the participants’ voices.

Tensions around representation exist when we try to understand how other people make sense of the world, especially young people (Skelton, 2008). A reflective point occurred in the coding process in evaluating the tone of the students’ voices. Were they being sympathetic or did I detect some gentle mockery? Making those calls often involved listening to sections of the recording several times and then approaching it afresh the next day. Different tensions presented themselves with the interviews with the teachers. In two out of the five recorded interviews, the teachers talked about interesting pedagogical and professional issues that they themselves struggled with that were not directly related to the research topic. In both those situations I found myself in a different type of tension, one that meant that I had to stay objective and not offer counsel, yet I empathized with their concerns.

4.6. Chapter summary

For the qualitative researcher, Merriam (2002, p. 22) lists several aspects of credibility with a small project. Firstly, the data collection process needs a detailed audit trail with rich, thick descriptions of what happened and why. The size and diversity of the sample need to be sufficient and the researcher needs to have spent enough time engaging with the data to know when they have enough information. The researcher needs to present an open and critical account of the actions taken as well as providing continual critical self-reflection of any personal world views and bias. I believe in this chapter I have addressed these concerns and given a detailed account of what happened and why. There is one more area that needs further explanation. Merriam includes member checks and peer review as good strategies as they bring in added checks to the data and also encourage reflection on tentative interpretations. In this research, it was not practical for the transcripts to be returned to the students. The teachers, however, were able to see their transcripts and all agreed that they were an accurate account. They were also able to comment on the initial impressions from the aggregated student accounts and in some cases they expressed surprise at some of the findings, but did not disagree with them.

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Finally, as part of the doctoral program, my three supervisors provided opportunity for reflection and discussion, as well as my peers. Other ideas and thinking around issues concerning the fieldwork, the use of NVivo software and other aspects of data management influenced decisions in these early stages. The cumulative effect of this on-going dialogue with peer and experienced researchers meant that the steps taken in this research were rarely carried out without outside consultation and discussion.

This chapter has described the participants involved in this study and the methods chosen to collect information from them to answer the research questions. Aspects such as the logistics of data collection, gaining consent, validity and data management have been discussed. The chapter has given the reader an overview of how a selected group of young people and their teachers in five schools shared with me their thoughts and opinions about a topic. In total, there were over 20 hours of taped recordings to transcribe and 98 questionnaires to enter onto the computer. The literature and my own experiences had given me some direction and these formed the guiding research questions, but it was still a largely unknown field. The initial framework that organized the data into topics and themes was refined through the data collection process. Bringing the data to this point ends this first part of the thesis which set the questions and sought data to answer them.

The following three chapters take this framework as their structure as opposed to the research questions. This highlights a significant finding in itself: that emotion, rather than being answerable to one research question is addressed in a more holistic fashion. It became a significant aspect to this research, foregrounding how the students perceived and interacted with NGO media. Taking this framework, Chapter 5 outlines the students’ impressions of the developing world and distant Other and Chapter 6 looks at the students’ perception of their relationship towards the NGO sector. My interpretations and analysis of the students’ accounts through both the questionnaire responses and the focus group discussions is presented in these two chapters. Chapter 7 brings in the teachers’ perspectives. Chapter 8 discusses the findings and reflects back on the literature and Chapter 9 concludes this study.

91 THE DISTANT OTHER Chapter 5:

I get a sad impression because my life in New Zealand is great

[Beaufort College, class A, student 16, individual questionnaire]

For the students in this study, there were distinctive impressions that they gained from NGO media which took on certain patterns. Firstly, they expressed shock or disbelief at the chaos of life ‘over there’, followed by a feeling of sadness or pity. Secondly they held a reflective sense of gratitude that they were not in the same situation as the extract above illustrates. This confirms that they saw the developing world largely through a framework of deficiency in ‘they lack what we have’. By this process, this accentuating of difference, I argue that the young people have begun to construct their identities, as superior, lucky and as possible benefactors. This is the power of development in its choice of selective imagery at work on these young people. The NGO media provides stark comparisons reinforcing the distance between themselves and the Other, supporting Smith that “The reality of the construction of the ‘Third World’ through charity defines an uncritical notion of difference; the ‘self’ is empowered in relation to the deficiencies of the ‘other’” (Smith, 1999, p. 493).

Escobar’s claim that the image of the humanitarian campaign of the starving child is “the most striking symbol of the power of the First World over the Third”(1994, p. 103), is about a construction of the Other. Taking Smith and Yanacopulos’s (2004) reflections, it is useful to consider a Gramscian18 notion of hegemony, as power can be conceived of less as a structure and more as a process. This chapter presents an argument that supports Edward Said’s claim that the construction of the Orient was less about the Orient and more about the identity of the West (as discussed in Gregory, 1994). The students saw not just the Other, but themselves as ‘not the Other.’ The NGO image presents a world that is far removed from theirs, but this helped them to construct their own world and their place in it. What my findings shed light on is that the young people recognized this power at work and questioned it. Although they lacked the language to identify this process, they showed a questioning spirit.

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I am referring here to Murphy and Augelli (1993) who refer to Gramsci to describe international development institutions who reinforced industrialisation through civil society in a coercive process post decolonisation.

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This chapter answers research questions one and four, analysing both forms of the students’ responses to entail a mapping of the students’ meanings and impressions.

RQ 1: What meanings of development and global relations do students make from visual images of the poor that are produced by NGOs for campaign or educational purposes?

RQ 4: What impressions of the developing world do students develop from using NGO material in the classroom?

The responses from the young people are mapped out according to my interpretation, as detailed in the methodology and from this mapping I build the case for my argument. The chapter is structured with three broad classifications of the students’ responses: section 5.1, impressions of the developing world; section 5.2, their connectivity to the Other and section 5.3, questions around what constitutes development. I also discuss outliers in the dataset and comparisons across the schools that are relevant. Throughout the chapter, I present examples from the students’ responses and discuss how the findings support many of the concerns voiced in the literature, particularly those of postcolonial and postdevelopment commentators.

5.1. Impressions of the developing world: Chaos and difficulty

From the student responses in both the individual questionnaire and focus group activities, the overwhelming impression of the developing world was that it was a place of difficulty and technological backwardness and it experienced a lack of basic infrastructure. A least a quarter of the students responded with very stereotypical impressions. For example, in the individual questionnaire, to the question ‘what do you think of when people say the words ‘developing world’? Young black kids with

torn clothes is one answer. These stereotypes and generalisations about regions and

people were often challenged in the group discussions, but generally the students saw the developing world through a negative deficit framework, supporting the concern of many critics as discussed in Chapter 3.

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This negative framing is often focused on economic reality and physical hardship. In exploring geography textbook images of the developing world, Robinson (1987) found that a negative framing was prevalent. He noted that in 1987 little had changed over the past twenty years in terms of stereotypes of the developing world, despite significant changes in many places. Poverty was a ‘catch-all’ image. A good proportion of the developing world does struggle with infrastructure and many do live in poverty, but this is not the case for all. The grim images are often backed up by the statistics used in development discourse that place countries and people in an order of development progress as discussed in Chapter 3.3 The NGO images tend to highlight economic need and so in many ways the developing world is portrayed through a specific framing of need and ‘catching up to the West’. The students had a basic understanding of development as technological progression.

Before seeing any images, the opening questions in both the data collection activities asked the participants what they thought of when they heard the term ‘developing world’. Chaos was the term I eventually used to group together their words about the lack of infrastructure that caused life to be difficult. Coupled with material poverty it was clear that the students specifically viewed a lack of technology and infrastructure as key elements of developing world conditions, and in their talk, the developing world is often described as ‘catching up’ in technology to the West. For most of these students, the developing world was several steps behind a Western standard of material development, as these extracts illustrate:

B2: I reckon the term developing world is used to describe countries...like for people who are not as technologically advanced as Western countries like Britain, New Zealand, Japan, and America.

B1: Yes, I was thinking of that too, as well as poor and stuff.

[Treeview College, group A]

I am stunned at how poor their quality of life is/how hard it is to live

[Cameron Heights College, student 3, individual questionnaire]

Many comments indicated that technology was key to development when they were asked to consider who or what was the ‘developing world’:

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Someone is struggling to make a living, and feed their family. Their technology isn’t as advanced as ours.

[Northern Plains High School, student 6, individual questionnaire]

I think of countries with a slight lack of resources that struggle with population. Not as advanced technology

[Cameron Heights College, student 13, individual questionnaire]

People in Africa and places where there is very little technology

[Treeview College, student 6, individual questionnaire]

The difficult living conditions produced strong emotive reactions of disbelief and incredulity concerning the lack of basic amenities. The students found it difficult to comprehend how and why things were so bad ‘over there’. In the following extract a student is recalling the topic they studied in class, using NGO material about water issues in Niger. The student cannot fully comprehend the situation and in this discussion the distance travelled to fetch water becomes hyperbolic in his memory of it.

B1: However, if you go further into it out of the main cities...it’s like all poor and stuff and where you have walk for half a million kilometres by the sound of it just to get like two litres of water…like...seriously, that’s just dumb [whispers] yeah, really dumb.

[Treeview College, group A]

In this response in the questionnaire, the effort required to live in these places seems very high to this student, from the same class.

The places look dry and hard to live there. A lot of work to put in everyday just for a drink or something that only takes us 30 seconds to get

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For many people in the developing world physical hardship is common, but by becoming the only lens through which they are shown, they can be reduced to ‘unfortunate types’ that struggle. Through these images, critics have argued that the people portrayed become frozen, voiceless and passive. Their culture and historic struggle for their own identity is reduced to the current issue of deprivation, according to critiques such as Alam, (2007), Bell (1994) and Mahadeo and McKinney (2007) amongst others. Within education, critics of geography and NGO texts as discussed in Chapter 3, are cautious of images that stereotype and reinforce the difference of the Other. Many note that even when changes are made, critical analysis of images can still point to underlying messages that stress the importance of economic development, denying or limiting other ways of knowing about people (Bryan & Bracken, 2011).