Stage 2

At this stage, the young people were at the end of their final year of secondary school which covered a period from May to June 2011.

3.3.1 Participants

Altogether nine young people agreed to be interviewed again at this stage, even though during the first stage all of them wrote ‘Yes’ as a sign of agreement for the interview to be carried out again at the second stage (see Table 3.7). It should be noted that at this point in time, of all the 16 young people interviewed during the first stage, only five were still at school. Of the five, three were from School A and two were from School E which was the special school. Of the three from School A, two had decided to stay on at school and only one decided to go to college. Thus, only one was interviewed from this school, as my criterion was to interview those who were going to college. Of the remaining eight who were interviewed during this stage, two were interviewed at their respective homes, with consent given from both the young people and their parents, while the rest, including the one from School A were interviewed at their respective schools with the arrangements made by the teacher-in-charge. Five others could not be

traced even though attempts had been made to contact all of them with the help of the teachers-in-charge.

Table 3.7 Total number of participants at Stage 2

Participants Number Gender

Male Female

Young people 09 07 02

Parents 07 02 05

Total 16 09 07

As for the parents, out of 16 parents who were approached, only seven returned the questionnaire (refer to Table 3.7). Even though a polite reminder was made by telephone two weeks before the deadline, the number remained unchanged until the deadline.

3.3.2 Procedures

This stage involved the semi-structured interview sessions with the young people and questionnaires being sent to their parents. As this was the first time the views of the parents were sought, it was deemed convenient that the data was collected via questionnaire rather than through a face-to-face interview (note that the interview with the parents was undertaken during the third stage of this study). Not only did it save time, but this also avoided additional costs. As Kumar (2005) has noted, the advantages of questionnaires include that they are less expensive in terms of time, and human and financial resources. Besides, the data obtained from the questionnaire can be used to follow up with a further study via the interviews with the parents during the following

stage. As Drever (1995) states, a questionnaire survey provides the opportunity to select interesting issues or cases to be followed up in depth through interviews.

Procedures similar to those in Stage 1 were repeated by gaining the consent of the young people and their parents as well as ethical approval from the UREC (see Appendix 11). Table 3.8 shows the chronological order of data collection in Stage 2. The only difference in this stage was that the Enhanced Disclosure was not required as I had already obtained it in the first stage.

Table 3.8 Chronological order of data collection at Stage 2 Making instruments

(Interview schedules and questionnaires) (March 2011)

Approval from the University Research Ethics Committee University of Dundee (April 2011) Contacting participants (April 2011) Data collection (May – June 2011)

As for the questionnaire for the parents, all the questionnaires were sent with a stamp and a self addressed envelope via the teachers-in-charge of all the five schools (note that one school was not included because there were no young people participating in the interview). Telephone calls were then made to follow up whether or not they had received and responded to the questionnaire. In order to reduce bias in the questionnaire as participants may under-report (e.g. avoid socially undesirable responses) or over- report (give socially desirable answers) (Cohen et al., 2011), face-to-face interviews

were subsequently undertaken with the parents during the third stage so as to explore their views in more detail.

3.3.3 Interview schedules and questionnaire design

The interview schedules were again designed based on the criteria that I was looking for in my study. This time, the schedules were designed in the form of a mind map and a poster so that the young people could easily understand what was required of them. Two versions of the mind map were created (one for male and one for female participants) with slightly different pictures that were associated with the different genders (see Appendices 12 and 13). They were created using the Mind Genius software and consisted of six main themes, namely the possible places after school, the support, the activities, the review meeting, the future aspirations and the preferred college course. Each theme represented one particular topic that was then explored further with the young people during the interview session. As for the poster format (see Appendix 14), it consisted of 20 feeling icons that represented human face caricature emotions and the young people were asked to choose any of the icons that represented their feelings at the beginning of their final year at school and towards the end of their final year at school. The icons were retrieved from the following website:

https://eee.uci.edu/wiki/images/b/b0/Emotions.JPG

The decision to use a mind map and a poster format was made due to the lack of responses from the young people during the first stage when text-form and verbal interview questions were used. It was hoped that by looking at something visual, more insights could be provided by the young people. According to Lewis and Porter (2004), the use of visual or enactive methods (e.g. photograph, video) has the potential for shifting control to the participant, as the potential range of response can be wider,

indeed limitless. Likewise, the use of photographs or sketches can also help elicit the young people’s voice, which probably cannot be portrayed by words alone (Jindal- Snape, 2012).

The questionnaire for the parents consisted of nine main questions. Questions 1 – 2 required them to choose an answer from the list provided, Question 3 was designed based on a five-point Likert scale where they were asked to choose five options, namely ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘disagree’, ‘strongly disagree’ and ‘don’t know’ to respond to each of the 16 statements, while Questions 4 – 9 provided them with space to express their views in detail (see Appendix 15). In addition, the instructions also stated that they had the option of leaving Questions 3 – 9 blank.