PROYECTO DE LEY DEL ESTATUTO DE LA VÍCTIMA DEL DELITO COMISIÓN: JUSTICIA

As Le Compte and Goetz observe, ‘participants who gravitate toward

ethnographers and other field researchers may be atypical of the group under investigation; similarly, those sought by ethnographers as informants and confidants also may be atypical’ (1982:38). People who smiled when I approached them at an event on a beach and happily had their photograph taken are not necessarily representative of the population of the sample area. Indeed one person I approached at both the WBBC and the Buntabout refused to entertain me on both occasions but arrived at the event I discuss below armed with surfing memorabilia and the desire to chat for half an

hour. The final sampling opportunity had to overcome problems of reluctance to participate in order to generate more reliable data.

I began to engineer small scale projects which I hoped might generate data in the form of semi-structured interviews. There were many failed attempts to gather a sample with appropriate diversity in age and gender due to the scarcity of willing participants. 'The more one is like a participant in terms of culture, gender, race, socio-economic class and so on, the more it is assumed that access will be granted, meanings shared, and validity of the findings assured’. (Gray 2013:406). In all of the categories listed by Gray I would appear very

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much in line with the prevailing demographic in St Agnes. But my outsider status as someone ‘from upcountry’ has been, and continues to be confirmed by residents of the village and of Cornwall generally, with varying degrees of good humour, regardless of my thirteen-year residence in the county. Although St Agnes is home to many whose place of birth is further afield than my own, it has a reputation as a ‘closed’ community which does not welcome outsiders, nicknamed ‘The Badlands’, a reputation that will be contextualised and

expanded on in chapter four, Space and Place. It took a year to gain the trust of the community to the extent that I could arrange a suitable event.

Silverman comments that ‘It is not uncommon for qualitative researchers to use their existing relationships and contacts for their research’ (Silverman

2013:215). Fortunately, living nearby I was acquainted with a handful of St Agnes residents before the study began, including a couple who functioned as gatekeepers into the local network. A pillar of the local community, FL teaches in a local secondary school and her husband RL, a local businessman,

volunteers as a lifeboatman with the Royal Naval Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). The three daughters of the family are all junior members of the Surf Life Saving Association (SLSA) and the entire family are active in a wide range of

community projects. It was this family of gatekeepers that granted me access to a range of events which formed the backbone of the participant aspect of the ethnography, and through them that I was able to set up the final data gathering opportunity.

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I wanted to get a much more in-depth picture of the local clothing culture and in order to do so it was necessary to carry out longer interviews with a

representative sample of the village residents. Children and adolescents were not part of the ethics arrangement here, but would make a fascinating subject for further research. Adults from late teens to retirement age were required in order to represent a good cross section in a county where retirees heavily outnumber youths. Additionally, both men and women had to be approached. I hoped for ethnic diversity, but in a county where 97% of the residents identify as ‘white British (ONS.org) I was prepared to accept homogeneity in that respect. Several means of acquiring a representative sample were considered and trialled, such as requesting respondents via postcard adverts in shop windows and community notice boards, contacting the local community newspaper and snowball sampling. These methods were all unsuccessful in generating

sufficient response to produce a representative sample.

One possible reason for the disappointing response to these requests for participation is that my research is not the first to have been carried out in the village. A small community within easy reach of the county’s only university, St Agnes had been the subject of several studies including a 2012 project entitled ‘The University of the Village’ examining potential uses of superfast broadband and aspects of the First Wave Project carried out by the National Maritime Museum from the same year. Around three years into this project, a colleague commented that reluctance to participate in my study might be attributed to the presence of too many research initiatives, or what he termed ‘the St Agnes Effect’.

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The name alludes to the widely used research term ‘the Hawthorne effect’. ‘The original studies that gave rise to the Hawthorne effect were undertaken at

Western Electric telephone manufacturing factory at Hawthorne, near Chicago, between 1924 and 1933. Increases in productivity were observed among a selected group of workers who were supervised intensively by managers under the auspices of a research program’ (McCambridge et al 2014:267). The effect concerns ‘research participation, the consequent awareness of being studied, and possible impact on behaviour’ (Ibid). If a number of studies had already been carried out in the village, the mere presence of yet another researcher in the village could skew the results. Thus a careful consideration of my status as ‘another researcher in the village’ had to be carefully considered.