Código microcontrolador

perceptions and experiences with the curriculum

To collect data on teachers’ understanding and implementation of the curriculum and personal and contextual factors that play out on them, as well as teachers’

experiences with the implementation of the curriculum, I considered interviews to be suitable, for various reasons. In keeping with Punch’s (2009:144) recommendation, I employed one-on-one face-to-face interviews. I preferred this type of interview for the main reason that it enabled me to understand participants’ constructions of reality from what they told me in their own terms, and in “a depth which addresses the rich context that is the substance of their meanings” (see Punch, 2009:144).

Interviews are an ideal strategy to explore the various aspects entailed in all the research questions concerned with participants’ perceptions and experiences of the curriculum. Interviews provide rich data, which is needed to describe complex meanings of central themes in the experiential life world of the subjects from what they say (Wallace and Taylor, 2007:88). Interviews also allow participants to voice their experiences and perspectives (Creswell, 2008:38).

Qualitative interviewing thus allowed me to enter into the inner world of the participants (Johnson and Christensen, 2008:207) to gain an understanding of their perspectives regarding their enactment of the AIDS curriculum.

Scholars have identified various different types of interviews, which occur on a continuum, ranging from structured interviews to semi-structured interviews to unstructured interviews (Punch, 2009:145; Hobson and Townsend, 2010:225).

Several authors place the semi-structured interview midway on the continuum, between the extremes of structured interviews and unstructured interviews (Berg, 2009:105; Drew et al., 2009:192; Hobson and Townsend, 2010:225). Generally, the structured, or standardised, interview emphasises stringent interview control through pre-specified questions, with a rigid wording and order (Drew et al., 2008:192;

Hobson and Townsend, 2010:215). The opposite of this type of interview, namely the unstructured interview, generally applies minimal control over the interview process, as it employs questions whose wording and order of administration are impromptu (Drew et al., 2008:192; Hobson and Townsend, 2010:226).

Generally, structured interviews consist of prespecified questions which restrict responses to precoded categories and do not demand great depth (Punch, 2009:145). Semi-structured questions have open-ended but focused questions that elicit a greater depth of information. The least standardised type of interview, namely unstructured interviews, consist of ad hoc, open-ended questions that are devoid of any a priori categorisations that may inhibit the scope and depth of the inquiry (Punch, 2009:148).

I chose semi-structured interviews, as much because of my epistemological stance as because of their relevance to some research interests in my study.

Epistemologically, I treat participants in this study as human beings, with whom I can share insights about the central phenomenon under investigation, so that we can co-construct social reality.

Semi-structured interviews were relevant to my study, because they provide participants with a greater opportunity to speak in their own words about their true feelings and conceptions (Hobson and Townsend, 2010:230) regarding the topics of

interest in the study. I preferred the semi-structured type of interview, because it enabled me to probe and clarify interviewees’ responses and discern leads for deeper insights into the topical issues entailed (McMillan and Schumacher, 2010:358).

This type of interview would enable participants to voice their perceptions of the central phenomenon as openly as they pleased, in terms of what they thought, felt, and experienced, thereby allowing me to capture a wide range of issues.

I was persuaded to use a funnelling strategy. This interviewing strategy allows the interviewer to proceed in the interviewing process from a broad focus of the research issues through asking a few general questions, to narrowing the focus by asking more specific ones (Gibson, 2010:62). The strategy could allow the participants and me to proceed from a broad grand-tour question that would orient participants to voice their perceptions about a topic, thereby covering a wide range of issues of a general nature (Creswell, 2005:223; Drew et al., 2008:192; McMillan and Schumacher, 2010:359). Exposing participants to general questions before they could respond to more specific issues had the potential to elicit information of central theoretical and analytical interest which is relevant to the research questions (Gibson, 2010:62).

Furthermore, a change in the direction of the discussion brought about by a change in the wording and the order of the questions potentially elicited more obscure nuances about the issues being investigated, even though it was a challenge to the researcher to have to continually redirect the focus of the interview.

Semi-structured interviews were also preferred because they allowed for probing of participants’ responses in order to gain more detailed data to explain the meaning of terms that the participants might not have understood, and they allowed for clarification of ambiguous responses from participants (Hobson and Townsend, 2010:227).

Finally, the semi-structured interviews thus made it possible for me to cover the same general topics and questions with all the interviewees in different sites (Gibson, 2010:62; Johnson and Christensen, 2008:208).

However, interviews have some major shortcomings. Critics of the use of interviews in qualitative inquiry take issue with the methodological concerns of reliability and validity (Hobson and Townsend, 2010:228; Punch, 2009:152), because of the associated dangers of interview bias and reactivity.

For instance, the mere contact of the participant with the researcher may cause the participant to respond to the researcher in a manner that does not accurately reflect the facts (Hobson and Townsend, 2010:227). Research attests to the scenario where some participants do not give accurate and truthful responses to questions where the responses could be deemed socially undesirable, hence reflecting the predisposition of some respondents to present themselves in a favourable light (Punch, 2009:152). This reactivity was a potential risk to the trustworthiness and validity of the data. I attempted to minimise this reactivity by tactfully urging participants not to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear, but to tell me, as much as possible, what was actually happening on the ground.

Finally, interviews have been heavily criticised for allowing both the researcher and the participant to bring to the domain of inquiry their experiential and biographical baggage, constituting each one’s biases, with the researcher influencing both the participant and the data (Hennink et al., 2011:206; Hobson and Townsend, 2010:228). Despite the several shortcomings of interviews, they are nevertheless an effective method of collecting data.