The relationship with participants
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the relationships which I already enjoyed with the young women participants were an important aspect of my research. Because these relationships had been based upon mutual respect, awhi (support), and love, the trust and rapport that would enable my participants to comfortably share their stories in our interviews were already established. This also meant that the young women were not especially interested in the Consent forms, and I had to ensure that they were fully informed of their rights, and of my responsibilities to protect these rights.
My relationships with the young women were also closer and more egalitarian than conventional teacher-student relationships (as data from the young women corroborate) and, as a result, the power disparities which normally exist within the contexts of school, and of academic research, were less present in my study. I was particularly conscious of encouraging the young women to openly express their thoughts and opinions of the School without concern, on their part, that this may upset or offend me.
I was also anxious that the teachers, with whom I’d worked for many years, should feel
unconstrained in the expression of their thoughts and opinions. I have included a research journal entry, in which I reflect on my own (complex) reactions to the expression of critical perspectives
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of the School by an early childhood teacher in our interview, as an indication of my awareness of this particular challenge of participant or insider research.
Research Journal entry: Feb 2011
During the interview with the ECC teachers, when L talked about the shortcomings of the School (my School) regarding bi-cultural practice, I felt uncomfortable and a bit upset. I had several reactions to what she said: 1. That it was true. I agreed with her. 2. How would she know because she wasn’t really party to what happened in the School setting. 3.
Uncomfortable because this was an aspect of my work that I felt very strongly about – passionate about, in fact, and to acknowledge that it hadn’t been a very successful part of the School, in L’s eyes, was uncomfortable for me. 4. The discomfort of hearing that this was being done better now than when I was directing the School. 5. The relief I felt that this was being done better now, because it was an area of our work that I was concerned may not be strengthened by change of leadership. So conflicted feelings indeed!!
I wrote many such entries in my research journals, reflecting upon my emotional involvement in the research process and my personal responses to participants’ interviews.
The ethical implications of these pre-existing relationships, which are a component of insider research undertaken in educational institutions, have been well-discussed in the New Zealand research environment. Cullen (2005, p. 254) defines the need for a “relationships paradigm”, which broadens the focus on individual rights in academic research to include context-based relationships between individuals and groups. This is well-articulated in Māori research approaches and is described by Bishop and Glynne (1999) as whakawhānaungatanga – the building and maintaining of relationships. This ethical approach, which I endeavoured to bring to my own research, was consistent with the practices and culture of the Teen Parent School, as identified by its members, and with the theoretical frameworks of my study. I was particularly influenced by Smith’s (1999) discussion of the need for humility on the part of the researcher:
Insider research has to be as ethical and respectful, as reflexive and critical, as outsider research. It also needs to be humble. It needs to be humble because the researcher belongs to the community as a member with a different set of roles and relationships, status and position (p. 139).
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One unanticipated consequence of my already-close relationships with the participants was that, mostly, we avoided talking about the significance of these relationships. In some ways this ‘silence’ constitutes a small, untold story in the study of the School. Because I was a party to these relationships, I knew how important they had been and how they had enriched each of our lives. A number of the young women had regarded me as their School ‘Mum’, and I had
regarded them as my School-based family. I have included a research journal entry in which I reflected upon this untold story in my research.
Research Journal entry: 9/06/10
The untold part of our shared experience as members of the School family is our own personal relationship. Because I am interviewing them, and maybe because we are all rather reticient ‘kiwis’ (New Zealanders) when it comes to talking about our feelings for one another, we refrain from discussing our own relationship because it is too
embarrassing, too intimate, too personal. The young women talk instead about their relationships with other members of staff. At moments, this reticence comes out in
interesting and amusing ways: Jade –“‘Jenny’ was a bit soft”; Sam –“the Schools would only work if they had a ‘Jenny’”. And I similarly play my part by not asking them to elucidate.
Participant confidentiality
Another challenge of insider research, especially in a small country such as New Zealand, is the need to balance participants’ rights to privacy and anonymity with the importance of
disseminating one’s research findings. Because I am known in the field of teenage parent education, it will be difficult to maintain the anonymity of the School in my study, and this may also make it hard to conceal the identities of some of the participants. This is also a challenge of narrative research studies, in which intimate details of the personal lives of participants are revealed. The implications of this were fully discussed with the participants, who chose their own pseudonyms (sometimes reluctantly) and read and approved the transcripts of our
interviews. The pseudonym for the School, Pumanawa College, was inspired by Macfarlane’s Educultural Wheel (2007).
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New Zealand researcher, Sue Middleton (1993) dealt with this same challenge in the following manner:
I had to use different names for the same women when discussing different aspects of their lives … After the thesis was completed I did what most academics do: wrote academic papers for publication. Each time I used a woman’s story, I asked her permission; I described the journal and the audience and showed her the paper (p. 79).
Although the young women participants in my research do not, as yet, share the high profile of the participants in Middleton’s research, respect for their right to privacy and confidentiality is still important. I nevertheless felt conflicted about disguising their identities by changing aspects of their personal stories because this would compromise the integrity of their ‘voices’. However this was less of an issue when those details were not integral to the understanding of their stories, and I used this approach on several occasions.
Cultural safety of participants
Another ethical issue, confronting me as a New Zealand Pākehā researcher (of European
descent), was that of the cultural safety of my Māori participants. A number of Māori researchers have challenged Pākehā involvement in research with Māori participants because the Pākehā “point of view of Māori is filtered through their own values, circumstances, research training, privilege” (Cram, 1997, p. 50). This has resulted in the deliberate exclusion of Māori from research undertaken by some Pākehā academics, in an attempt to meet the ethical principle of ‘doing no harm’. This choice was not possible for me because Māori were important members of the School’s community, and their voices were a necessary component of the richness and diversity of my research.
I attempted to manage this issue by consulting with Angus MacFarlane, Professor of Māori Research at Canterbury University, throughout the conduct of my research, and by endeavouring to ensure the cultural safety of all my participants by sensitive and respectful interviewing. I had considered asking for assistance with some interviews by a former member of the School’s staff who was Māori, but this was too difficult to arrange within the time constraints of my study. I was also guided by the reflection of Tolich (2002, p. 175) that:
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Cultural safety is the effective research of a person/family from another culture, by a researcher who has undertaken a process of reflection on [her] own cultural identity and recognises the impact of the researcher’s culture on [her] own research methods. In the end, I decided to exclude data from several of my Māori participants’ about their experience of the cultural context of the School, as Māori, because I was well-aware that my own identity as a Pākehā (European) may have affected what they felt comfortable to share with me.
Positive benefits of the research experience
It was important to me that the research experience would be positive for all of my research participants. This was not simply because of the ethical requirement of research to do no harm, but because of my personal and philosophical commitment to the well-being of the young women who had given of themselves and their time so generously for the purposes of my research. I was careful to be respectful of the young women’s privacy in our interviews and avoided what Stake (2003) referred to as “low-priority probing of sensitive issues” (p. 144) . As part of the interview process, I asked the young women how the experience of being interviewed had been for them. Although they had sometimes spoken of difficult and painful memories, none of them acknowledged feeling upset or disturbed by the experience of revisiting these memories, and a number observed that it had been helpful to reflect on and talk about experiences that they had not shared with others. Tatiana, for example, stated that she had gained new understanding of her sister’s feelings and behaviours, when we discussed traumatic family events in our third interview. Zena said: “Yeah, it’s been good, some things I don’t really talk about that often, like childhood.” And Kate observed that: “It’s been interesting looking over my life.” When I asked her if it had been upsetting, she replied: “No, I thought it might be but I’m in a different part of my life now”. Andy was very positive about the experience of being
interviewed, saying: “It’s been a pleasure and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to say what I think”.
During the interview process I often reflected on the reciprocal nature of the research
relationship, and its possible effects on the lives of my participants. I include here a research journal entry on this issue, which is an important aspect of feminist research (Skeggs, 1994).
109 Research Journal entry: Oct 2009
An issue of interest that came up yesterday in discussion with [two of my research
colleagues] was the influence of the researcher on the lives of participants. After my initial interview with Jade about work and also about her lack of contact with the School, she decided to approach her employer about training – something she’d been avoiding doing, and was pleasantly surprised that her employer said she would like to train her. As well she visited the School and the early childhood teachers with her son, having avoided doing so since she withdrew from her training earlier in the year. These actions were most likely influenced by the interview process and by comments I had made to her outside of the interview context. Because they were positive events, they comply with the ‘do no harm’ ethical guidelines, and are an inevitable aspect of our pre-existing relationships.
I was also able to offer support and advice to other young women participants on issues which were challenging or concerning to them, such as Zena’s worries about changing jobs. To support her in this process, I offered to act as a referee for her, an outcome which was only made possible by our contact through my research.
Several of the young women said that they were honoured to have been asked to participate in the research and keen to give something back to the School. They welcomed the opportunity to express their understandings and to have their voices heard. Several, such as Andy and Emma, also observed that the process of reflection had made them realise just how far they’d come in their lives. I felt reassured that the research experience had been positive for them, as it certainly had been for me.