Although the study was conducted outside the UK, it adheres to the same ethical standards as research in the UK, as required by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) Ethical Guidelines (2011). The Ethics Application Form was completed and checked by my supervisor, and then submitted and approved by the department before the commencing of my fieldwork in March 2014.
The recruitment of interviewees was based on the principle of voluntary participation, and none of them was forced to take part in the research. A consent form (Appendix VI) and an information sheet (Appendix VII) were produced in advance of the field work and they were presented to potential participants before they became involved. The information sheet provided basic information about the study in a Q&A form so that
the participants were able to be clear about the study and the role they might play in the process. Information related to the study, such as its purpose, the important role of the interviewees, the procedures used to complete the research, the ways in which data was used, to whom the results were reported, and the potential risks and benefits were fully explained to all the participants. The consent form was produced in a plain format and in Chinese so that all the informants could understand it. Signing the form normally meant that the participant understood the study and was willing to join it. They were advised of their rights to withdraw from the research at any stage of the interview if they were unhappy with certain questions. Fortunately, no participants quit the interview. I could feel that they were sometimes troubled by some questions, for example, the ones which might bring them to a meta-awareness level to philosophise or theorise something. Sufficient time was given in such contexts to answer the questions, and I did not push them or show impatience. The transcripts were not shared with participants. As stated in Chapter 2, these were very busy IET students, who were often required to take various courses all day long. Asking them to check their transcripts would inevitably cause extra work and be very time consuming, as a result of which none of them might be willing to do it. More importantly, “phenomenography seeks meaning across individuals’ stories or examples of their experiences, that is, at a collective level rather than an individual level” (Åkerlind et al., 2005, p.77). Sharing the transcripts with participants in this sense might risk focusing too much on individual students, therefore, it is inappropriate for phenomenographic studies.
Additionally, confidentiality and anonymity were the top priority. As Sin (2010, p.311) notes, “[p]reserving the anonymity of participants and their institutions by using pseudonyms and disguising locations to prevent recognition of identities are common practices”. I used codes (e.g. S1, S15) in this study as a way to maintain the participants’ anonymity and personal privacy. I also anonymised the selected university to protect its reputation. I realised that it was essential to protect everyone’s privacy if I intended to publish my findings or share them with the academic community.
To fully guarantee the safety of the collected data, I stored it on my personal laptop, which was password protected so that no one could use it for other purposes. From the very beginning, the data was supposed to be exclusively used for this study. In cases where the transcripts had to be printed, I tried to protect them carefully. However, the interviewees had the full right to read and comment on their own interview recording. Furthermore, it is good practice for researchers to inform their participants of the outcome of the research (BERA, 2011). Thus, I tried to provide them with copies of reports arising from their participation to ensure that they were clear about the outcomes.
I believe that the students were able to benefit from this dialogical process (interviews) as a reflection of their learning activities which may have helped them to improve and achieve their future goals. However, there may have been some risk related to sensitive topics, such as their academic performance, and some of the interviewees may have been reluctant to disclose this; therefore, I had to deal with this skillfully and maintain a relaxed and friendly conversational atmosphere.
I also prepared some British souvenirs consisted of inexpensive key rings with London logo on them and some British cookies as a reward to thank my interviewees for their participation and information. Since these small gifts were given in the spirit of gratitude, I was sure that they would not have a negative influence on the sincerity of the conversation and quality of the data. Moreover, I was delighted to provide relevant information about my personal experience of studying in the UK to all those who were interested.
5.11 Chapter summary
The central concern of this chapter is the implementation of the study. As a new researcher using phenomenography, I have to become familiar with this approach; thus,
trials and a pilot study were arranged in advance.
The participants in this study are purposefully selected to ensure the maximum variation and semi-structured interviews with strong phenomenographic characteristics are utilised to collect the data. The analytical procedure has been detailed in relation to the theoretical framework and a number of issues encountered and needed to be carefully considered when dealing with the data are discussed. Various solutions to address these issues are compared and I then clarify my practice in this study. Finally, certain research quality-related issues, such as validity, reliability and generalisability, are also examined in this chapter.
Some of the major findings of the research are presented in the next chapter. The seven conceptions of learning are exemplified by the interviewees’ utterances and excerpts, and interpreted using the referential/structural framework presented in Chapter 4.