As this group of managers had met before and the focus group took part at the end of a regular scheduled meeting, I did not need to introduce the participants to each other or to gain any background information on the individuals as they were all known to me. I did, however, open the discussion by clarifying what would be discussed (to provide a framework for their thoughts) and to ask if anybody had a mentoring system in place. I then asked if anybody had teachers going through the training process and whether they had a mentor. The aim of these questions was to ground the discussion clearly within the role of ITT mentoring. The responses were quite short and
issues of introducing mentoring in your settings?’ This immediately generated interaction and the discussion became more self-directed. I did not ask directly any more of the questions on my prompt sheet as the participants were covering these points with the thread of their discussion. The focus group seemed able to raise questions, bounce thoughts and ideas to each other and progress lines of thought without much intervention. Whilst this approach allowed the group to tackle issues of interest to them rather than being driven by my research interests this made it more difficult for me during the analysis phase as I did not necessarily have ‘answers’ to my research questions. Whilst I would not expect neat responses that I could fit into boxes and the unexpected answers are often the most illuminating, it did mean that I had more comprehensive data for some parts of the research than others, something which I could not control using the tools of grounded research. As such, I was more aware of the need to look for links to my research questions in the interviews even though I was not able to use my chosen research tools to mediate for this unevenness of response.
Analysis
An initial analysis of the focus group transcript highlighted four recurrent themes which link to the research questions:
1) confusion as to what was expected or needed, how to define mentoring, what was already happening and what would work
2) the role and characteristics expected of a mentor, particularly in relation to the concept of support as a key element of mentoring
4) the specific nature of the VCS in relation to ITT mentoring and how this affects the experience of mentoring
The participants were generally in agreement about the issues facing the VCS, particularly the potential barriers. However, where there was disagreement, this has been noted and examined to ensure that all views are valued and offered to illuminate the research questions.
The above themes linked to the research questions although it should be remembered that some of the responses can only be associated by researcher interpretation and inference so may be influenced by my particular interests. To provide a structure for analysis and to acknowledge the issues that were of importance to the participants, I have grouped their responses within the four themes identified above and then analysed them against the research questions.
Even though there is a wealth of data in the focus group transcript, there is very little which directly addresses the third research question regarding the models that are already in use. This is partly due to the ‘newness’ of mentoring and partly to my line of questioning. As I had chosen not to direct the discussion, I did not ask questions that would have elicited more data on what the participants considered to be existing mentoring activities. This is a weakness in the data. Similarly, there is limited data for research question 2 regarding the activities that are currently taking place which would be defined as mentoring because I did not guide the discussion to cover this area. Again,
this is a weakness in the data but is as a result of my chosen research approach. To compensate for this, the flow of the discussion is driven by the interests of the participants rather than my interests thus making the emerging data less susceptible to researcher influence. Also, the lack of data on issues I would like to have explored in more detail means that there is more data on the areas of interest to the participants, which is a better reflection of the current concerns of managers and practitioners affected by issues of mentoring. The data is therefore more representative than if I had attempted to direct it and by presenting the data reflexively I aim to create transparency throughout the analysis (Mason, 2005:149).
Although I used themes to structure the analysis in the first instance, this led to multiple over-lapping strands when I came to write the analysis. This appears to be due to the confusion permeating the discussion and lack of existing mentoring models. This became even more problematic when examining the data from the one-to-one interviews. This may be due to the ‘newness’ of mentoring for ITT, or it may be because the VCS are less engaged with current discourses or it may be because the VCS is fragmented and does not have the opportunity to share thoughts and ideas in the way the focus group allowed. This is discussed further in Chapter 5. I therefore decided to take a pragmatic approach and, for purposes of clarity and comparison, I chose to use the research questions as my ‘themes’ for presenting the data in order to provide a more coherent framework. This led to a double layer in terms of thematic analysis; the themes that I identified as
emerging from the data and the overarching themes contained in the research questions. I will now examine each research question in turn.