Medios de comunicación en el contexto latinoamericano

3.4.1 Aim of the study

This article explores the transition of graduates into first-time employment using the development of a graduate identity as a framework. The main research question was, ‘What were the experiences of first-time entrants into the labour market during their transition from graduate to employee?’ Two sub-questions informed the main

research question namely:

(1) What strategies did these students employ at university in order to graduate successfully?

(2) What strategies did these students employ to secure employment?

3.4.2 Research approach

The research was conducted according to an interpretive qualitative approach. By conducting qualitative research we gave the participants the opportunity to describe their experiences during the transition from HE into first-time employment. From their rich, descriptive narratives we were able to gain some understanding of their unique journeys.

3.4.3 Research context

This study was preceded by a graduate destination survey of the 2010 cohort of graduates from four universities in South Africa, conducted by a regional HE consortium.2 _{The main purpose of the survey was to reveal the varied pathways into}

work for the 5 560 graduates who participated in the survey. Our study aims to investigate in more depth one of the pathways, namely the journeys of first-time entrants into employment.

3.4.4 Participants

Three survey questions were used to establish whether the graduate was a first-time entrant into the labour market: 1) ‘What was your employment status just before you started studying towards the qualification you obtained in 2010?’; 2) ‘What was your employment status on 1st of September 2012?’; and 3) ‘When did you start the job you had on the 1st of September?’. This process produced a sample frame of 1 056 graduates. From this sample frame 46 participants were purposively selected to be representative of gender, race, home province, level of qualification, field of study, the four HEIs involved, and graduates’ occupation during September 2012 (Table 3.1). Thirty-one of the 46 participants were first-generation students (FGSs) in other words students whose parents had not completed any form of tertiary education (McKay and Estrella 2008). This was established through survey data indicating the educational level of the parents as equal to or below Grade 12. Even though no

official statistics on FGS in the South African higher education system exist, one can assume that the majority of black students currently in the system (who constitute almost two-thirds of the total enrolment) are FGS, seeing that their parents would most probably have been excluded from higher education in the apartheid era when participation of blacks in higher education was severely restricted. Against this background we regarded the inclusion of a similar proportion of FGS in the study as important and necessary to obtain a realistic picture of graduates' experiences. Ethics clearance was obtained from each of the institutions involved.

Table 3.1: Summary of selected participants

3.4.5 Data collection

Individual face-to-face semi-structured interviews of approximately forty minutes each were conducted with every participant. The rationale and purpose of the study was explained to participants who then read and signed an informed consent form. An interview schedule had been developed to guide participants’ input on their experiences during their transition into employment. Although the interview schedule provided structure to the interview, it was supplemented by further probing questions on issues raised by participants in the individual interviews.

3.4.6 Data analysis

The interviews were recorded and transcribed, and the transcriptions were checked for accuracy. In the first stage of the data analysis, the transcriptions were coded by means of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, ATLAS.ti. The coding

Field of study Level of qualification Gender Race Sector employed

AgriSciences 1 PhD 3

Male 20

African 14 HE 7

Arts and Social

Sciences 10 Masters 3

Economic and

Management Sciences 12 Honours 5

Coloured 19 Private 22 Education 1 Postgraduate diploma 2 Engineering 3 Bachelors 31 Female 26 Indian/Asian 1 Public 16 Law 1 Diploma 1

Medicine and Health 5

Certificate 1 White 12 Unemployed 1

process revealed common themes in the graduates’ narratives which were then categorised according to four phases of the graduate journey namely 1) entry into HE, 2) experiences in HE, 3) transition into employment, and 4) negotiating employment. Reid and others (2008) suggest that experiences along the graduate journey towards employment shape graduate identity. By analysing and interpreting participants’ experiences in the four phases we developed a deeper understanding of the graduates’ identity formation and served as backdrop for the interpretation of the graduate trajectories. The four phases in conjunction with the graduate trajectories expounded the strategies the graduates employed to graduate successfully and to secure employment.

Despite the fact that corresponding themes could be identified within the phases, the participants’ journeys into employment showed a high degree of variability and complexity with an apparent lack of logic (Holmes 2013). These seemingly illogical journeys were clarified in the second stage of the data analysis when we mapped a trajectory of emerging identity for every graduate (Table 3.2). The trajectories from graduation into employment (up to the time of the research) were conceptualised in terms of the claim-affirmation model of modalities of emergent identity (Holmes 2015).

The credibility of the data analysis was supported by repeated reading of the transcripts as well as a comparison of the coding of the data separately done by each of us. The comparison indicated very similar interpretations of the data.

3.4.7 Limitations to the study

The most frequently cited limitation related to a small-scale qualitative study is that the findings are not considered to be generalisable to other contexts. This may be true. However, much of what we found connects to recent large-scale studies (Bhorat, Mayet and Visser 2012; Mok and Jiang 2016; Walker and Fongwa 2016) and as such adds credence to our findings.