Chapter 3. Methodology

Given the longitudinal nature of this research it has been possible to undertake a detailed study of the effect of various processes and events on a cohort of students; and, because of the wide perspective taken, a pragmatic approach in choosing those methods most appropriate to studying different aspects of the project, was adopted. A variety of sociological tools were used to generate data and, as initially there were only 40 students taking part in this project, it was possible to survey this number of respondents without assistance.

Nevertheless, it was recognized that, because of the small numbers involved and because the research was entirely carried out at CCAT, no generalisations could be made, It was, however, hoped, that a description of how the project was approached and developed, it could be repeated elsewhere and so add to the knowledge of how m/s cope with a system mainly used by s/1.

Much detailed qualitative material was collected over the three year span of this work which may provide some insights into the dynamics of an on-going group of m/s engaged in educational activity at degree level. I propose to describe the steps taken at each stage of the research as well as delineating my own position within the parameters set by geographical and temporal limits, where this may have a bearing on the results. Different course structures do undoubtedly generate different types of experience for mature (and other) students. But, in many ways, the courses at CCAT are typical of the majority of first degrees so that it might be reasonable to suggest that some of the findings presented here are likely to be found elsewhere.

My first priority was to obtain permission from the authorities to carry out this research at CCAT, - to get access. In the Summer term of 1983 I approached the heads of the various departments of the college ort the tutor in charge of admissions to ask for their views and to get their collaboration. I was encouraged by the response which was entirely supportive and affirmative. Then I wrote to the Principal, reporting this response and permission was accordingly granted. I was prepared to use my first year's work as a "pilot" scheme and repeat it with adjusted specifications if this was indicated. In practice this turned out to be unnecessary. There was enough flexibility in the system for material of different kinds to be added, the number of interviews was adequate to generate data and the range of topics seemed to cover all, or most, aspects of the research.

The second task was to identify and make contact with those students who would come within the category of m/s reading for a first degree at CCAT who were over 25 years of age in October, 1984.

Unlike the universities, who use the UCCA scheme, there was no central admissions system for degree courses in colleges of As/ed. such as CCAT (although this is being established via PCAS in September, 1987.) Thus there was a last minute flood of applications received by the College's Admissions Office when the "A" level examination results came out in mid-August after the first rejects from UCCA had been received. CCAT could accept a student who had also applied to other colleges and it would not be known until the last minute whether there were any unfilled places. For this reason I was not able to obtain firm information about those enrolling until a few days before term began.

I was however, able to contact those who lived in Cambridge itself and had applied to enrol at CCAT earlier in the year. This enabled me to interview 16 students before they started the course which was extremely helpful in establishing their initial feelings about the course before it had actually begun. At this stage I heard some anxiety and apprehension expressed, as the following remark demonstrates:

I have a huge list of fears and worries. I have worries
on the financial side. The money I earned before was quite
a bit in excess of what I get on a grant. I'm not sure how 
I can adjust my life.

My third task was to gain access to staff at CCAT. This presented few difficulties. Those members of staff who had been contacted initially about the feasibility of the project agreed to be interviewed once a year. This was to be done in the second term of each year when it was expected that the pressures of administrative work would not be so great. The interviews explored aspects of the year's work and brought up issues that had been discussed previously with the students in their termly interviews. It was particularly important to hear accounts of the same situations from the different view points of students and staff.

Soon after the project started it became apparent that it would be necessary to see a sample of s/l to act as a comparison and help determine whether the experiences of m/s were unique or were merely either greater or lesser in degree than those experienced by all students. I chose to interview 10% of s/l admitted at the same time; they were picked out by random sampling methods using a sampling table.

Each student was sent a letter of explanation describing the project. (Appendix 4). As with the m/s there was 100% acceptance. However some difficulty was experienced in contacting them. Many failed to respond to notes asking them to make appointments for interviews; others had changed their address in Cambridge. All were eventually seen although many did not keep the original appointment. One s/l had to be contacted three tomes before the interview actually took place. The same questionnaire was filled in as was used with m/s and the same technique of a structured interview was used.

It may be useful at this point to discuss my own position in this research project. I saw my role, when interviewing students, as an overt participant observer. I was also a student at the college, albeit a post-graduate student, and so I was seen in the canteen and the library,as well as taking part in Student Union affairs as secretary to the "C-Kitten" Day Nursery.(1) But the background reading for this research had alerted me to some of the dangers inherent in sociological research as pointed out by Stacey (1969):

   The researcher is  placed in a role by those being
   observed . . . be  awareof the extent to which the
   presence of the observer alters the research itself.
                                              (p.56)

Inevitably a role was placed upon me by the respondents whom I followed over a three year span during which they went through many new experiences and, perhaps, some unexpected situations. This role may be best described as that of a "counsellor" even though the students I was researching were aware of the fact that I was a post-graduate student doing a sociological project based on their own experiences.

The training in counselling whichI had undergone prior to this project helped me to interact in an appropriate way as different demands were made upon me.Some found it useful to ask my advice which I tried to give to the best of my ability. Others were able to use my presence as someone in whom they could confide, as a neutral observer, who was ableto understand their worries and fears, yet was not directly involved either within CCAT or the family situation. Yet others were trying out ideas and needed a "sounding-board" to help them decide whether these were viable or not. Being older than any of my informants meant that I was not seen as a "threat" or a "rival" in any situation.

As I was very careful to be as neutral as I could and not appear to give value judgements, I found that students felt free to confide in me and were very open with their views. In the third year students were asked if this project had made any apparent difference to them and the great majority reported that it had not. A small number claimed that it had been helpful to have somebody to talk to, who knew what it was like having done a similar course. While I was aware that this kind of question could only elicit a subjective answer, and that therefore one might expect a range of responses, from a methodological perspective, the question was raised of how much my respondent's views, and the data I obtained from them, was influenced by the research process itself.

This problem - the so-called "Hawthorne effect" - is endemic to this kind of research which of necessity involves a close and sustained exchange between the researcher and the respondents where the researcher may unintentionally affect the outcome by his or her participation. In order to balance any such tendency - impossible to quantify - the project used other techniques as additional checks on the data. Inevitably, when long-term interactive links were established, some matters arose which may only have had some indirect bearing on the research itself. If these were of a particularly personal nature, it was quite a simple gesture to indicate this by turning off the tape recorder.

On the two occasions when I wrote a more detailed account for a section on life histories, I asked the two students concerned for permission to do so and then showed them what had been written with a request for any comments or changes they might like to see. This worked well. I had promised in the first interview to do just this, and any mistakes on my part could be easily rectified.

The main method of obtaining data from the students was by a structured interview once a term which was tape-recorded on cassettes. This enabled a useful reservoir of material to be built up for use in direct quotations as and when required. It was necessary in this respect to label the cassettes carefully so that the right material could be recalled. The data from the cassettes was transcribed into note form which was held in individual files for each student.

In the initial interview I obtained details of the respondents' family and educational background.(See Appendix 2.)

Subsequent interviews were used to monitor the students' progress as well as to ask them to anticipate or reflect back on the various aspects of the course. For example, at the end of the first year I asked students how they responded to the Continuous Assessment part of the course that was due to take place in the following year. At the end of the second year it was possible to compare these results with their views after actually experiencing Continuous Assessment in practice.

Interviews were personalised to pick out relevant details for each individual which might need to be be followed up. e.g. worries about essay writing,financial worries or the effect of a bereavement or divorce. During the second term of the second year I asked each student to fill in a "diary" form which consisted of a box for each hour of the day and night for seven days. Each box needed to be filled in with one word that described the main activity of that hour. This turned out to be an informative source of material discussed in more detail below.

I kept a journal for the first term making observations of students in groups or individually in such places as the library or canteen. Despite good intentions I failed to continue this record. However I found that I was making mental notes of who was sitting with whom or whether the members of a group who always tried to sit at the same table in the canteen changed or not.

I thought it useful to allow my informants to see me using the library or canteen myself. In this way I picked up information about the day to day routine of the students which did not come directly from the interview situation. An example of this was the problem of those students who had to wait for a train or country bus for perhaps an hour or two after a lecture, tutorial or seminar. There was no place for quiet study or a common room where they could spend the time, as they might wish, in discussing a question with another student or writing essays.

I was also able to observe spontaneous reactions such as comments of elation or depression. Thus I heard the relief of a first year student on handing in her first essay which had cost her three weeks of worry, as well as the delight of another who had been so pleased by the way he had just presented material for discussion in a particular seminar.

As the secretary of the C-Kitten Day Nursery, I was brought into contact with another group of students as well as the maintenance staff, which turned out to be valuable experience. It widened my appreciation of the pressures both on students with young children and on the college authorities. The former had an on-going problem of balancing the demands of the course work with their family responsibilities; and the latter, with a small, inadequate work force and a continually declining budget, were bombarded from all sides with requests to mend, clean and supply a variety of departments.

In this kind of research there is a need to keep a balance between the use of quantitative and qualitative data. There has been an attempt to do so by using the variety of techniquesdescribedabove. The quantitative data base was built up from the empirical material on respondents' backgrounds,college records, diary forms and structured questionnaires. The more open-ended elements of the latter also generated qualitative data as did the observations that were made as part of the experiences of being a participant observer during this period. As an example of how some of the data for this research was collected and used I will now describe the procedure carried out when the students were asked to fill in the diary form. (See appendix 6)

The Diary Form

A diary, as a tool for sociologists, can fulfill different functions, as decribed by Burgess (1986). I hoped that here it could be used as a resource to raise further data. It could also be useful in involving respondents in a more active role in the research project in contrast to the more usual passive answering of questions put by the research or repsponding to an interview where the researcher has tken the initiative in selecting items to be discussed.

In November, 1985, (the first term of the second year) each m/s was given a diary form to fill in. It consisted of a chart for each hour for 24 hours of a week. They were asked to fill in this chart with one word describing the main activity of that hour. This would cover their timetable at CCAT, extra hours of study spent, for example, in reading a text or essay writing, as well as time spent with family or other regular commitments. As a result a great deal of material was presented, which did not always disclose a very clear picture as there was a great variety of ways that m/s spent their time.

One conclusion that was possible to draw was that there was a wide range in the number of hours spent on extra study outside the scheduled timetable of study set for all students. The average time spent in extra study came to 22.5 hours from a range of 9-36 hours, a wide band of difference. The average time for those with families was only a little less at 20.2 hours and the range here was 9-30 hours. But it was apparent that those in the lower range of extras hours spent in study either had burdensome family commitments e.g.the s/p families, or had other outside interests e.g.a political commitment or editing a poetry magazine. As m/s they felt that they should be involved in outside interests to make themselves more rounded indiviuals, although a small number said that the course completely took up all the time that they had available - all other commitments would have to wait until the course was finished.

What was clearly shown was that the average timetable spent in classes at the college for those on a Hum/Soc. degree course added upto a total of 11 hours per week, whilst those taking a science based course spent at least 16 hours per week at the college because of the extra time spent in practical laboratory work. This was balanced by the fact that Hum/Soc. students had longer essays to write and a heavier load of text reading although science students had to write-up more frequent reports on their practical work. Five students took p/t work on a regular basis to bring in some much needed extra income, but even with this added burden they managed an average extra study time of 20.4 hours whilst time spent on the job averaged 14 hours per week.

When discussing the findings of this exercise with individual students it was useful to define the concept of "study" outside the tuition timetable either at CCAT or in the home. There was a general consensus that this term was valid for any topic concerned with the degree course such as reading set books, planning essays, writing up notes or preparing mkaterial for seminars. However, one has to be aware that a respondent may not perceive the concept of "study" in exactly the same way as the researcher and there was no way that the validity of this exercise could be verified.

When I asked the students themselves to comment on the result of their individual timetables the great majority knew exactly how their time was allocated. Time is a very precious commodity for m/s and the greatest complaint brought out by this diary exercise was that the course was over-loaded and that students were given too heavy a reading commitment, particularly on the E.T.L. course. It was described as:

An impossible burden.

In further discussion, more light was thrown on the need some students found for unusual bursts of activity in order to get an essay assignment in within the specified dead-line laid down. Most students organised their time very carefully, but those with children mentioned the occasions when illness struck or other domestic situation had arisen which caused their plans to go awry.Indeed,tutors have given this as a reason for some m/s to 'drop-out' in the past as the student has never been able to catch up on the time lost. It was noticeable that equal numbers of younger students and those without family responsibilities either always handed in their work on time or always had difficulty in doing so. This may indicate more a difference of personality which affects their organisational ability than a lack of motivation.

About 10% of the m/s expressed surprise at the total number of hours they devoted to their studies when it was added up. But the great majority claimed that they did not begrudge the time spent in this way. It was what they decided was necessary to perform as well as possible on a course which they had chosen. This commitment seems to be connected with the necessity so many m/s felt in that it was important for them to do well, partly for their own self-esteem and partly to justify themselves in the sight of their families or their fellow-students.

The diary "exercise" provideed some measurable evidence of what was involved in their undertaking the role of a stduent as well as their other roles within the family unit such as a parent or spouse.

The Writing-up: reflexive monitoring.

Initially the amount of information generated by these various methods was somewhat daunting, but the volume of data also helped to formulate the decisions which became necessary. For example, the development of a rational categorization of students occurred at the beginning of yeartwo afterthe writing of a report on the results of the work of the first year of the project. Herethesocial grouping of m/s as well as an individual look at the respondent'sbackground,combined to point the way towards the final outcome.

Throughout the four years of this project all written work has been discussed with my tutors and helpful advice has enabled me to be more critical of my work. Specific aspects were looked at in turn, and a pool of written work to draw on was built up. This included exploring the literature and gaining experience in collecting data. Ideas for generating data for future interviews grew in a natural way as areas for more investigation, or where extra material was required, were identified. The changes that took place over the three year span was also more clearly revealed by being able to compare the material of individual interviews over this period of time.

Good use was made of the advantages given by the longitudinal aspect of the research in this way. The use of "multiple strategies" as described by Burgess (1984) (2) helped to test the validity of this research, and the nature of the project enabled all the elements collected by the data to be fitted into a context and a time-scale so that changes and developments could be more easily charted.

When all the material was finally collected there was, already, the basis of an outline of chapters to cover all aspects of the research. This thesis is based on the fifth draft of a plan of chapter headings with sub-sections covering the data and its analysis. The first draft consisted of eleven chapters which quickly became consolidated into eight to make the second draft. The third draft was again cut down and the order changed. At this stage the final title was chosen which entailed some change in analysis by placing more emphasis on the "career" aspect of the data. So the fourth draft kept the seven chapter headings of the third draft but some juggling was also done in order to keep chapters from becoming grossly uneven in length. This final draft was arrived at after a "pilot" print-out of the whole thesis was looked at for the first time in its entirety.

An attempt was made to use as much material as possible from the repeated interviews kept on cassettes, reproducingthe authentic voice of the respondents, and also to make the thesis interesting by demonstrating the full range of material available.

Footnotes.

1. See Chapter 4 p 73
2. See Chapter 2 Burgess R 1984 In the Field
3. NUS Report August 1986.