actitudes hacia el estudio de las matemáticas

A well-designed sampling strategy can serve as “a cornerstone of research integrity” and requires thought and consideration (Abrams, 2010: 537). Homeless people – by virtue of their transience, the instability of their daily lives, (possible) engagement in clandestine activities such as drug use, criminality or sex work, and their often poor physical or mental health – are widely acknowledged to be a ‘hard-to-reach’ and ‘hard-to-track’

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(Abrams, 2010). Given the challenges associated with recruiting individuals who are marginalised and (frequently) stigmatised, the primary initial route to locating potential participants was via a broad range of services working with female service users and offering various forms of intervention. Considerable time and effort was invested in making contact with services during the early stages of fieldwork process, with a particular emphasis placed on active engagement with the homeless and domestic violence service sectors.

A Community Assessment Process (CAP)60 was embarked upon as a first step in the data collection phase of the study. This process essentially meant that contact was made with services and face-to-face meetings arranged with senior staff members (typically managers). The rationale for initiating this process was four-fold: first, to inform gatekeepers about the study (see Appendix B for information sheet for services); second, to gain the perspectives of service providers on the women who were accessing their services (in terms of age, duration of homelessness, perceptions of what caused their homelessness, and so on); thirdly, it was hoped that this period of engagement with service providers would help to garner support for the research and, thereby, increase the likelihood of gaining access to suitable recruitment sites; finally, and importantly, the knowledge gained from these interactions with service providers (particularly, the information gleaned about the nature of the services available to women and the characteristics and profile of their service users) was used to guide the sampling and recruitment processes.

During this preliminary phase of data collection, CAP interviews61 were conducted with professionals within twenty-eight different services, including: homeless hostels; domestic violence refuges; food or drop-in centres for homeless people; transitional accommodation (specifically, transitional accommodation targeting women leaving prison and one for victims of domestic violence); long-term accommodation that accommodated individuals with histories of homelessness; and specialised drop-in support services (for migrants, victims of domestic abuse, or drug users). Of the twenty- eight services approached, all but one service agreed to facilitate the research62 and, of

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Mayock (2008: 41) has incorporated a CAP, described as “period of immersion in field settings”, into a number of studies of homelessness.

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These interviews were not audio recorded and, instead, notes were taken both during and after the interviews.

62 _{The service that declined – which is entirely self-funded – has a local ‘reputation’ for being}

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these, women were recruited from across a total of twenty-two services (including homelessness and domestic violence services) in Dublin, Cork and Galway. The recruitment of participants from this wide array of services is a particular strength given that homelessness services differ in terms of their ethos, entry criteria, the kinds of supports they offer and, in some cases, the expectations they have of their service users (Cloke et al., 2005).

The recruitment of women to the study was initially guided by a purposive sampling strategy that attempted to capture variation in terms of the types of services accessed and the socio-demographic characteristics of the women, including their age, ethnicity (that is, ethnic minorities, including Travellers), and migrant status. In other words, the sampling and recruitment of participants was guided in large part by the aim of achieving diversity of experience. An information sheet on the study (Appendix B) was distributed to all of the services, with the aim of providing women (who may have been interested in participating in the research) with accessible information about the study and what their participation would involve. In some services, staff members facilitated a ‘group meeting’ with residents which gave me an opportunity to explain the research to the women. In other cases, staff members approached women directly about the study and, if they expressed interest, I subsequently met with them to explain the research in further detail.

As might be expected, field visits to various services led to informal meetings with large number of women who were resident in these settings. Indeed, ‘word’ about the study often spread relatively quickly among female service users. In general, women were keen to participate and a large number commented positively on the opportunity that the research provided for them to share their stories and be heard. In some instances, snowball sampling was used when women referred others to the study or made suggestions in relation to where others might be recruited for participation.

Sampling and recruitment was above all else an iterative process, informed by emerging insights from field visits and from the data as the interviewing process unfolded. Towards the latter stages of the recruitment process, a theoretical sampling approach was adopted (Mason, 2010), and targeted sampling strategies were used in an effort to enlist the participation of women with particular characteristics deemed to be relevant and important. For example, efforts were made to boost the representation of particular subgroups in the sample, including women originally from Eastern Europe and women

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with a history of institutional State care as a way of pursuing pertinent themes and issues further.

The recruitment sites used were located in Dublin, Cork and Galway. While Dublin city has the largest concentration of homeless people in the country, Cork and Galway were included as they too have sizeable homeless populations (CSO, 2011). This multi-site recruitment strategy was important since homelessness research in Ireland has tended to be predominantly Dublin-based63. Each field visit to Cork and Galway (across both phases of data collection), involved spending 3-4 days in those cities, during which time I engaged intensively with service providers. Perhaps due to staff members’ awareness of my time restrictions, or possibly due to the fact that the homeless populations are smaller in these locations, service staff members in Cork and Galway actively engaged in the recruitment process. In one emergency hostel in Cork city, for example, the manager was particularly enthusiastic about the research and personally introduced me to all the residents in that hostel. In Dublin, by contrast, staff members were more likely to permit me to ‘move around’ the service independently and approach residents myself. Both approaches had advantages: while the more active approach adopted by staff enabled fieldwork to be conducted relatively quickly (the voluntary nature of participating in the study was always emphasised prior to interview) and, alternatively, gaining the trust of women in a more naturalistic way also facilitated a rapport to be built up prior to the conduct of the interview. Details pertaining to the living situations in which women were residing at Phase I Interview is supplied in Chapter Five – at which point the Phase I sample profile is expanded upon.

Women were offered a €30 gift voucher for a well-known department store in exchange for their time and the personal effort invested by them in the research process (Masson

et al., 2013). While the women responded positively to the gift, at no point did it appear that women engaged in the research in order to receive the gift voucher, nor did it serve as a disproportionate incentive for women in the sense of placing them under ‘pressure’ to participate.

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O’Sullivan’s (2008b: 17) appraisal of research on homelessness in Ireland concluded that “only very limited primary research has been conducted” outside of Dublin. This situation has not improved significantly since that time, with the majority of studies of homelessness having been conducted in Dublin where the housing crisis is most acute (Walsh and Harvey, 2015).

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