The sampling strategy used within this project was purposive rather than probability- based. In New Zealand, as noted earlier, I personally approached all but one of the participants. The last participant was included as a result of snowball sampling. In Thailand, the first stage of sampling was random. NZAID sent out letters to all potential participants inviting them to take part. After this initial contact I used snowball sampling to increase my sample size from six to fourteen. The use of purposive sampling is generally consistent with a qualitative research approach, which focuses more on “the deliberate selection of theoretically important units” (Tolich & Davidson, 1999:35), rather than random sampling, to ensure research reliability (Richie et al., 1997; Rowles & Reinharz, 1988:8). Qualitative researchers argue that rather than focusing on sample size or sampling strategy, researchers need to aim to gather sufficient data to ensure that the richness of experience, including both commonalities and diversities within a community is adequately represented (Goodson & Sikes, 2001; Ryan & Bernard, 2003).
Qualitative researchers argue that sample adequacy is achieved when you start to see consistent repetition or “saturation” of interview themes (Rowles & Reinharz, 1988:9), and you are also able to ensure that “variation is both accounted for and understood” (Morse, 1994:230). Thus, there is not necessarily any magic sample size that qualitative researchers agree on as adequate to ensure research reliability (Rowles & Reinharz, 1988:8). Ryan and Bernard (2003:275) assert that in some cases a sample of one may be enough to “display something of substantive importance”. Morse (1994:25) argues that for studies where you are aiming to produce “indepth reflective description” of experience, it is useful to have at least six participants; while she recommends 30-50 for more conceptual methods, such as ethnography or grounded research, that seek to produce taxonomies or models. Ryan and Bernard (2003:275) contend that, as a rule of thumb, research that focuses on “finding themes and building theory may require fewer cases than comparing across groups and testing hypotheses of models”.
Within my own research, I found that after ten interviews, I was starting to see a degree of sample ‘saturation’. This is despite the fact that there was a degree of cultural diversity within the New Zealand participant group, and between the New Zealand and Thai participants. After completing twenty interviews I felt that I had enough data to reasonably confidently make some observations about both commonalities and diversity within the experiences of women who take up development scholarships. I also felt that space-wise, this sample size would enable me to do justice to the depth and breadth of stories that the individual participants shared with me.
There are obvious limitations associated with both my choice of methods and sample size. Like most qualitative research projects, these limitations centre around issues of reliability or representativeness. However, because, as I have previously stated, this research seeks to address a particular gap in the literature around in-depth personal perceptions of the women’s education experience, qualitative methods were the most obvious choice of method to meet this research objective.
Unterhalter (1999) reinforces the points I made earlier, in Chapter One, about the importance of attending to this gap by using research methods (in her case autobiography) that give women the opportunity to talk about their lives:
[A]utobiographies show the ambiguities, dilemmas and contradictions entailed in schooling for a group of women whom, according to the statistical data, we should count as successful and empowered. The narratives the women construct undermine the simplistic certainties of the numbers. These figures, like women's feelings, are each only part of the picture. But the significance of these stories and the process of telling life stories has, to date, been given less weight than the statistics in formulating strategies for gender equity in schooling and carrying out our research for policy (Unterhalter, 1999:62).
From a development policy perspective, this type of in-depth research can best be seen as complementary to, rather than a replacement of, or indeed in opposition to, other, equally valuable, quantitative explorations of this type of development phenomenon. In the spirit of a collaborative feminist research practice that emphasises the value of multiple genres of critique, I offer this research as simply one – valuable, but necessarily limited – contribution to theoretical/political debates around the future of this type of development assistance.
Finally, in choosing to work with a smaller sample size, I was also cognisant of the critique provided by Kenway and Bullen (2003) about the tendency of Western researchers to homogenise the experience of female international students, glossing over the diversity that exists within this category. They offer a feminist objection to this practice, arguing that to participate in it is to “collude in the reproduction of discourses of ‘othering’ and, thus, in the establishment and perpetuation of power differentials” (Kenway & Bullen, 2003:9). Working with a smaller sample size provides greater opportunity to acknowledge and do justice to the diversity of experience within the group of women I have interviewed.