The completion of my PhD is an object lesson for women like myself who, when they started their postgraduate research, were already mature students in a full- time job with young children. In my case, this was further confounded by repeated periods of ill health. In contrast to students who are research-council funded and do their PhD full-time over three to four years, I had to fit my research into a life that was already overflowing with commitments and responsibilities. This impacted on my research in two different key ways:
1. It took me ultimately 11 years part-time, including periods of de-registration due to ill health and work issues, to complete.
2. I collected two empirical data sets (quantitative and qualitative) at different times so that my data sets are discontinuous.
I had an initial period of registration at Warwick University which commenced in 1993 but when I could effectively spend no time on my research as I had small children, extensive work demands and health problems. My major achievement by the end of that period was the collection of my quantitative data between 2002 and 2004. By the time I was able to spend a more sustained period on my PhD, my first supervisor, Professor Hilary Graham, had moved to Lancaster University and I followed her there. My effective date of registration for the purposes of this PhD as agreed by Lancaster University and subsequently by the University of York when my first supervisor moved there and I followed her, then became 1st May 2004. I was allowed, however, to use the survey data I had collected between 2002 and 2004.
Having re-started in May 2004, I undertook my focus groups between 2005 and 2007. I had planned to undertake all the focus groups in 2005. However, because of pressures of work and ill health I had to suspend my PhD studies from
November 2005 to September 2006. Hence that collection happened over an extended period of time, disrupted by de-registration. Then in March 2008 I had another major health issue – a severe stroke. I suspended my registration from March 2008 until October 2009 to give myself time to recover. My initial supervisor in the meantime had become head of department and the final two years of my PhD were supervised by my current supervisor, Professor Gabriele Griffin.
Although initially devastating, the period of recovery following my stroke gave me the opportunity to review my life and my priorities. Once I returned to study after my stroke, I felt I had a renewed sense of purpose and enthusiasm and managed to combine my part-time PhD study with recovering my physical and psychological strength and re-entering the academic workplace. Although there has been some research on women undertaking PhDs and the difficulties of combining this with work and home life, there is little research on the experiences of black women academics undertaking PhDs, and in particular part-time PhDs. It was helpful to read some of the published work in this field, for example Cole and Gunter (2010), which gave me inspiration, purpose and hope.
My research was partly driven by my ethnicity. I am African-Caribbean, born in Wolverhampton to two African-Caribbean migrants from Jamaica. My father migrated first in 1951 and my mother followed him in 1953.They married shortly after my mother arrived. To some extent my mother’s experience was very similar to that of the character Hortense in Small Island (Andrea Levy, 2004) as my mother hardly knew my father when she arrived in the UK. My mother had been a teacher in a primary school in Jamaica. However, when she arrived in England, her qualifications were not recognised and she was advised that if she wanted to train as a teacher she would have to start with taking her ‘O’ levels. She did not work outside of the home until after her youngest child had gone to school so she took it upon herself to teach me (the oldest of five) and my siblings before we went to school. I was therefore able to read and write when I went to nursery school aged 3. My experience at school was very different from those reported by many researchers, perhaps because of one teacher, Miss Beasley. She encouraged and supported me to the extent that I was moved up a year and reached the top class in junior school aged nine – too young to do my 11+ exam. I had to spend two years there. I took my 11+ exam at 10 and went to the grammar school of the
when I came to do my ‘A’ levels, my teachers had convinced me that the best I could aim for was to be a nurse. My mother had by this time trained to be a nurse and midwife (taking her ‘O’ levels at the same time that I took mine). All of my aunts who had migrated from Jamaica to the UK were nurses. My mother convinced me not to do nursing but to take an academic degree at a university. After repeating my ‘A’ levels at a further education college, I went to university to undertake a degree in Microbiology and Virology. My later narrative is no different from that of many African-Caribbean women who often study part-time while working and bringing up a family. It was indeed difficult undertaking a PhD while working full-time and being a part-time student. During my period of study there were significant life changes for myself and my first supervisor. However, my thinking has matured over time and so have the disciplines I have drawn on: public health, health promotion and women’s studies.
My PhD is an analysis of cigarette smoking among African-Caribbean young women in the first decade of the 2000s, with my primary data collection having been completed by 2007. The impetus for undertaking this study arose from my work as a health promotion practitioner in public health during the 1990s. One of major issues that concerned public health in this period was cigarette smoking among young people and young women in particular. I worked in geographic areas where there were sizeable black and minority ethnic populations of young people and became aware that there was no public health research on African- Caribbean young women and cigarette smoking despite the discourse about the link between cigarette smoking and disadvantage. If this explanation was correct, then we would expect to see more young African-Caribbean women smoking than white young women and I wanted to investigate whether this was indeed the case.