The ability to access, recruit, and interview sufficient participants face-to-face was of central importance to this research and so the consideration of potential research sites happened early in the research process. For geographical convenience I made the decision to restrict the number of universities to source potential research participants from and collated a list of potential sites. As has been previously mentioned, one consideration for the direction of the research was to undertake a comparison of student experiences from two different higher education institutions: one campus rural based university, and one campus based city university. While I had decided that this approach was not the most appropriate to meet the aims of the research, I still wanted to capture a variety of student experiences. Semi-structured qualitative interviews had been deemed the most
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appropriate data gathering technique, and this ultimately dictated the practicality of which universities to pick as I intended to conduct face-to-face interviews rather than via telephone. After much consideration, I chose two universities as research sites: Keele University and Manchester Metropolitan University.
Keele University
As a PhD student at Keele University, I primarily chose it as a research site for reasons of convenience. Firstly, I thought that being based in Keele would afford me flexibility in the recruitment and interview stages of the project. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I thought that my own experiences as a Keele student had given me a good working knowledge of the Keele undergraduate experience and local area, and thought that this knowledge could provide me advantage in interviews with students. As the recruitment and interviews stages progressed simultaneously I found (for many practical and reasons), that being in close geographical proximity to Keele and having been an undergraduate student at the university had both its advantages and disadvantages6.
Manchester Metropolitan University
As conducting face-to-face interviews was a key aspect of this research, I was somewhat limited in my options for a second research site. Access was at the forefront of my mind when making the decision, and so I assessed the pros and cons of the shortlist of universities in close geographical proximity to Newcastle-under-Lyme and thought Manchester Metropolitan University to be the most appropriate option. Manchester is easily accessible by public transport, and relatively affordable to travel to.
For more information on the research sites, please see Appendix B.
6
An in-depth discussion and reflection of these stages can be found in section 5.6 Participant Recruitment and 5.7 The Interview Process of this chapter
64 5.6 Participant Criteria
As previous research has demonstrated, undergraduate students experiences of the transition to university differ dependant on a number of factors, including but not limited to: choice of university, age of the student, whether the student leaves home to attend university, where the student lives during their first year (i.e. in student halls of residence or shared housing), and ultimately the individual personality and circumstances of the student. Taking into consideration the aforementioned, once I had made the decision about which universities would be used as research sites in the study, I turned focus to deciding upon participant criteria.
During the process of mapping a potential criteria framework I turned back to my literature review for inspiration. As previous research has demonstrated there are variations in how students experience the transition to university. I thought it was important to take into account that there are a variety of factors which can have influence over the nature of a students‘ transition, particularly factors concerning the individual self, personal circumstances and choices made regarding the transitionary period. In particular, for those who make different choices about their transition to higher education or those who belong to a marginalised group, this undoubtedly has the potential to influence their overall undergraduate student experience. For example, mature students, non-British nationals, commuter students, students with a disability, and students from different ethnic backgrounds could all have differences in their transitionary periods. Thus, their experiences during the transitionary period of entering higher education and the challenges they face and how they manage these could also be different. Given that student experiences of the period can be affected by multiple factors, in order to be able to view the cohort as a somewhat homogenous group and compare ‗like-for-like‘, I decided that a tight framework for participant criteria was essential. The following were therefore mapped out as the framework:
1. ‗Home‘ students
2. Aged between 18 and 20 and left further education in the 2013/14 academic year and entered higher education in the 2014/15 academic year
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3. Moved away from home to attend university and were living in student halls of residence, and prior to moving to university had always lived with their parent(s)/in the family home 4. Had at least one social media account and accessed it on a daily basis
I made the decision to focus on the experiences of ‗home‘ students and to exclude EU nationals and international students from the research as I thought that international geographical location was a factor which would have to be taken into account in the analysis and would add further complexity to the research. Further to this, I was personally interested in specifically exploring the experiences of students with a university experience similar to my own which I could relate to. This therefore involved focusing specifically on students who had entered university at 18 and geographically relocated to university (as opposed to being a commuter student). As the period of living is halls of residence has been identified as a space of semi-independence for transitioning students, I wanted to capture the experiences of students where university was the first time they had lived independently. Further to my personal preferences, as previous research has revealed, the experiences of commuter students can differ greatly and as such I felt that their experiences may not have the opportunity to be fully explored and fairly represented in the research. Finally, after consideration that the scope of the research would include an exploration of how students use social media during the transitionary period to maintain and make social connections, it was decided that that this would form part of the criteria.
All of the individuals that were interviewed met the above criteria. However, my rigid enforcement of this framework presented some challenges in the recruitment process. A full discussion of this can be found in 5.8 Participant Recruitment.