CHE Principles: facilitating authentic and dialogical semi-structured interviews in educational research

This paper examines the values of the CHE principles of Connectivity, Humanness and Empathy as a guiding framework for maximizing the ethical and methodological advantages of semi-structured interview research practices. The authors draw from two separate educational studies and apply the CHE principles to analyse and evaluate the effectiveness of decision-making in facilitating sustainable relationships with the participants in each study. Findings highlight that dialogical relations with participants were evident in both studies, and identify significant junctures where decision-making and actions influenced effective rapport-building and respectful and reciprocal relationships with participants in the research. The CHE principles emerge as providing a robust framework for educational researchers to employ when auditing their decision-making prior to and during their engagement in qualitative interviews.     

Hopes and fears: stakeholder views on the transfer of special school resources towards inclusion

This paper reviews the findings and wider policy implications of an evaluation of two pilot projects for the inclusion of disabled pupils from special schools into mainstream settings in a single English education authority. These included (a) paired Partnerships between schools, and (b) the use of special school staff and resources in a Support role within mainstream schools. The focus of the schemes was to promote the inclusion of those children with more complex impairments and health conditions not ‘easily’ included in mainstream settings. The research investigated the views and experiences of all stakeholders in the process, including pupils, parents, support staff, health professionals, teachers and senior managers. Although there was shared support for the principle of inclusion, there were significant differences of emphasis and concern among the different groups. In this paper, we review the commonalities and differences in these stakeholder views and highlight six key areas for evaluating process and outcome in the inclusion of disabled children. These findings are analysed within the wider context of UK educational policy and the inclusion literature. The paper concludes that although the pilot schemes under consideration had relatively little impact, they highlight a number of important tensions in the debate over inclusion, competition and managerialism in the British schooling system under the New Labour government.     

Teachers' perceptions of national identity and its intersection with gender: a phenomenological study in a conflict society

The aim of this study is to investigate Greek-Cypriot teachers' perceptions regarding the role that national identity and its intersection with gender play in representations of the past. Drawing on data deriving from forty individual interviews and analysed through the lens of intersectionality theory, it is shown that: although all teachers were able to recognise the role of national identity in representations of the past in the Cyprus conflict, the majority of these teachers were not equally aware of the gender politics in representations of the past. The participants seemed to be willing to take responsibility for the ways in which they represented the national identity, but they were not willing to assume responsibility for their gendered representations; instead, these representations were deemed ‘unconscious’ or a ‘product of tradition’ or the ‘natural order’ and, thus, not within their control. The paper ends with a discussion of how this study informs educational research and teacher professional development, concerning the intersection of national identity and gender in relation to issues of collective memory.     

Comfort drawing during investigative interviews: Evidence of the safety of a popular practice

Objective

This study evaluated the impact of comfort drawing (allowing children to draw during interviews) on the quality of children's eyewitness reports.

Methods

Children (N = 219, 5 to 12 years) who had participated in an earlier memory study returned 1 or 2 years later, experienced a new event, and described these events during phased, investigative-style interviews. Interviewers delivered the same prompts to children in the no drawing and drawing conditions but provided paper and markers in the drawing condition, invited these children to draw, and periodically asked if they would like to make another picture.

Results

Most children in the drawing condition were interested in using the materials, and measures of eyewitness performance were sensitive to differences in cognitive ability (i.e., age) and task difficulty (i.e., delay between the remote event and interview). Comfort drawing had no overall impact as evidenced by nonsignificant main effects of condition across 20 performance measures, although more of the younger children reported experienced touching in the drawing than no drawing condition.

Conclusions

The children successfully divided attention between voluntary drawing and conversations about past events. Importantly, comfort drawing did not impair the amount of information recalled, the accuracy of children's answers, or even the extent to which interviewers needed to prompt for answers. Due to the large number of analyses, the benefit of drawing for younger, touched children requires replication.

Practice Implications

Comfort drawing poses no documented risks for typically-developing school-aged children, but the practice remains untested for younger children and those with cognitive impairments.     

School exclusion,substance misuse and use of weapons: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of interviews with children

The study presents data drawn from semi-structured interviews with five young people permanently excluded from schools in North East England. The research aimed to investigate the risk factors that lead to the children using illegal drugs, to determine the drivers and implications for drug misuse and the carrying of knives into school. The research also hoped to elicit from the young people, the solutions that could have prevented their exclusion from school. The interviews were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis to understand how a homogenous sample made sense of their lived experiences. The findings highlight the importance of prompt identification and support for children with learning and subsequent mental health needs as the evidence suggests they lead to perceived negative behaviours by teachers. The research provides further evidence that behaviour sanctions in mainstream schools such as detention and isolation booths do not improve behaviour but make it worse. Original to this research is the finding that children are consuming drugs before school to cope with their inability to access the learning, to aid their concentration and to medicate themselves to reduce the likelihood of being sanctioned by teachers.     

The co-construction of epistemological framing in clinical interviews and implications for research in science education

ABSTRACT

Science educators demonstrated that students’ framings – their expectations of what is going on – influence how they participate, and what science knowledge they reveal, in clinical interviews. This paper complements research that explores how interviewers are likely to affect student framings, by exploring how subtler interactions can lead students to change their framings, and thus their behaviour, in unexpected ways. We present data from interviews with two students, Sarah and Omar, as they reasoned about evaporation and condensation. Sarah demonstrated spontaneous changes in how she participated over the course of the interview, whereas Omar demonstrated subtler changes that existing methods may not capture. These changes affected the nature of scientific knowledge and reasoning demonstrated by each participant, but could not be fully explained by response to interviewer behaviour. We use the constructs of footing and positioning theory to examine how students participated during the interviews, and how this affected the ways they demonstrated knowledge and reasoning about the interview topic. In both cases, footing and positioning theory allowed us to better understand the dynamic ways students engage in the interview. This paper contributes new methods for analysing complex interview dynamics, and suggests situations for which such methods are necessary.     

National monitoring in social studies: the reliability of assessment interviews

The National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) is responsible in New Zealand for the national assessment of primary school children's achievement in the essential learning areas, one of which is social studies. Individual interviews are one of the approaches used to assess students' understanding. The assessors are registered teachers, selected by NEMP, who attend a training week where they learn how to conduct the standardised assessment tasks and associated interviews. This study examines the reliability of the assessment interviews used in the 2005 round of social studies monitoring, in particular the variations between teacher administrators (TAs) in their use of prompts and probes. The extent of variation observed in the use of three kinds of prompt was sufficient to raise questions about the reliability of the assessment process. A surprising outcome was the consistent failure of TAs to clarify and elucidate students' social studies understandings through the judicious use of probes. The prompt-related variations between TAs and their failure fully to ‘tap into’ understandings assessed by interview-based tasks are serious threats to the validity of claims regarding students' achievement in social studies. This is particularly concerning as NEMP data are used as the basis for identifying and reporting national patterns and trends in educational performance and making recommendations to policy-makers, curriculum planners and educators.     

Enabling pupil participation in a study of perceptions of disengagement: methodological matters

Guidance and legislation in the UK suggest that it is becoming increasingly important to listen to the voices of pupils, to acknowledge their rights and to consult and collaborate with them in the development of personalised approaches to their education. In this article, Jackie Ravet, lecturer in inclusive practice at the University of Aberdeen, explores the methodological issues raised by a study of pupil perceptions of their disengagement in the primary classroom. She examines how an interpretative methodology was adapted to enable a group of eight- and nine-year-old primary school pupils to reflect upon their responses to learning and to express their interpretations, explanations and evaluations of their disengagement. Jackie Ravet's article details the array of interpretative methods used throughout her study with a particular focus upon a sequence of practical, activity-based interview formats designed to enable pupil communication and participation. This exposition is followed by a critique of the methodology and a discussion of its implications for research involving young children. The article closes with a call for pupils to be more effectively involved in reflecting upon the processes of participative research and in meaningful partnerships for school improvement. This article will be of interest to anyone seeking to enhance consultation and collaboration with pupils.     

A structured forensic interview protocol improves the quality and informativeness of investigative interviews with children: a review of research using the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol

OBJECTIVE: To show how the results of research on children's memory, communicative skills, social knowledge, and social tendencies can be translated into guidelines that improve the quality of forensic interviews of children. METHOD: We review studies designed to evaluate children's capacities as witnesses, explain the development of the structured NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol, and discuss studies designed to assess whether use of the Protocol enhances the quality of investigative interviews. RESULTS: Controlled studies have repeatedly shown that the quality of interviewing reliably and dramatically improves when interviewers employ the NICHD Protocol. No other technique has been proven to be similarly effective. CONCLUSIONS: Use of the structured NICHD Protocol improves the quality of information obtained from alleged victims by investigators, thereby increasing the likelihood that interventions will be appropriate.     

Disability,Riding, and Identity: A Qualitative Study on the Influence of Riding on the Identity Construction of People with Disabilities

Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were used to examine the influence of riding on the identity construction of people with disabilities. The 15 participants, three men and 12 women, were between 15 and 65 years old and have various physical disabilities. The data analysis derives from identity theory, a social–psychological theory that understands identity as an interaction between the individual and society. The findings show that: the informants either acquire a new identity as a rider or they resume with the rider identity they had before their illness or accident; riding offers a link to their previous lives; and riding helps to focus on what the informants can do, and not, as this group is often viewed by society, on what they cannot do. The findings thus show that riding can influence the identity construction of people with disabilities.     

The experience of pregnancy: a hermeneutical/phenomenological study

The aim of this study was to describe women''s experience of pregnancy. The setting was the Alternative Birth Center at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Göteborg, Sweden, from 1996 to 1997. Anonymous diaries were written by 12 women and analyzed using a hermeneutical/phenomenological approach. The essential structure and interpretation of women''s experience of pregnancy can be expressed as “transition to the unknown,” which includes three themes: (1) meeting one''s life situation, (2) meeting something inevitable, and (3) preparing for the unknown.The essential structure and interpretation of women''s experience of pregnancy can be expressed as “transition to the unknown” …     

The submergence and re-emergence of gender in undergraduate accounts of university experience

Gender distinction has been shown to characterise both undergraduate experiences and outcomes. Yet research recounted in this article supports work that shows that young people are often unaware of such trends, subscribing instead to individualist perspectives that foreground equality of opportunity and agency. This article examines the gender continuities and divergences in 64 undergraduate students' accounts of their experiences, and constructions of peers and lecturers, in higher education. Concepts of heteroglossia and monoglossia are applied to gender to explain how students submerged ‘structure’ and inequality in their accounts, but how discourses that presented the genders as distinct (and in which the masculine is elevated over the feminine) nevertheless ‘bubbled up’ in their articulations. The students tended to reject the notion that gender and other structural differences impact their experiences and outcomes; yet their broader discussions frequently reflected (often stereotypical) monoglossic constructions of gender difference. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the sociology of education and for higher-education pedagogy.     

心理学研究中定性研究与定量研究的定位问题

在心理学研究中,有定性研究和定量研究之分,或者有质化研究和量化研究之分。定性或质化研究通常被认为是一种人文社会科学的主观研究范式,定量研究或量化研究通常被认为是一种实证自然科学的客观研究范式。在心理学的历史中,有过定性研究占主导的时期,也有过定量研究占主导的时期。出现过定性研究对定量研究的排斥,也出现过定量研究对定性研究的排斥。在心理学的理论中,重要的是寻求定性或质化研究与定量或量化研究的关系定位。在心理学的方法中,重要的是寻求定性或质化研究与定量或量化研究的研究定位。     

The Use of Interviews and Focus Groups in Teacher Research

Despite posing a number of benefits, teacher research might be something classroom practitioners avoid engaging in due to inadequate research literacy. Part of this literacy consists of the knowledge and skills required to use popular research methods. Given that teachers might find it useful to read about how their peers have attempted to use such methods in a systematic fashion, this article describes my experience of using interviews and focus groups to better understand students' attitudes, beliefs and practices.     

The question of quality and qualifications: Writing inferior poems as qualitative research

The reflective and interrogative processes required for developing effective qualitative research questions can give shape and direction to a study in ways that are often underestimated. Good research questions do not necessarily produce good research, but poorly conceived or constructed questions will likely create problems that affect all subsequent stages of a study. In qualitative studies, the ongoing process of questioning is an integral part of understanding the unfolding lives and perspectives of others. This article addresses both the development of initial research questions and how the processes of generating and refining questions are critical to the shaping of a qualitative study.     

《质的研究及其设计》:院校研究应读的一本好书

《质的研究及其设计》是质的研究中十分重要的一本著作,从研究方法的角度看,对院校研究的开展亦很有助益。院校研究中,定量研究是长期、普遍甚或主要的方法,质的研究则可以其独特的优势弥补定量研究的局限,成为院校研究的重要方法。质的研究在文献综述、问题陈述、材料收集等方面为院校研究提供了诸多启示,其五种研究传统皆可成为院校研究的具体方法。运用质的研究方法,将为院校研究开辟一个新的天地。     

教育研究中的解释学取向

解释学方法有着久远的历史和丰富的内涵。解释学研究范式作为一种人文科学的研究方法,强调理解的主观性、历史性、相对性和整体性,对教育研究方法论有很大的指导意义。当代教育研究应继续关注解释学在教育研究中的引入,与其他教育研究方法相得益彰。     

Rethinking vocational education: a case study in care

The authors explain how development of employability and educational interest might be enhanced by a radically different division of labour between FECs (Further Education Colleges) and the institutions in which students live and work. They argue that, rather than looking for ways in which FECs could teach vocational knowledge in a more relevant way, the role of FECs might be to develop students’ educational interest through analytical reflection on their life and work. The authors tried out these ideas with 25 adult returners to formal education who hope to secure jobs as professional carers. The theoretical perspective known as situated learning is contrasted with one which implies that transfer of learning from classroom to workplaces is relatively unproblematic and that cognitive operations are relatively unaffected by culture.     

The Teacher as Researcher: Developing the Skills with Pre-Service Art Specialist Students

This paper details a project which involved a group of art specialist Diploma in Education students, two lecturing staff plus a group of primary school children in a series of planned art activities for two terms. The Saturday Morning Art programme (S.M.ART) was developed to enable the students to systematically focus on art learning in these classes by using largely qualitative research processes within a case study framework. By introducing these pre-service trainee art teachers to research techniques which they can then use, we believe we are preparing them to be self-evaluative and reflective practitioners in the classroom.     

Neo-democracy in educational policy-making: a critical case study of neoliberal reform in Massachusetts

This paper explores changes to the educational policy-making arena through case study analysis of a Massachusetts law passed in 2012 that limits seniority-based job protections for public K-12 teachers. I use data from interviews with policy stakeholders, observations of public meetings, and policy artifacts to explore struggles over democratic engagement in what unfolded as a highly undemocratic policy development process. Using the policy cycle framework, I explore the ways that political pressure and political discourses shaped the policy development process through various contexts of political struggle. Ultimately, I argue that the case is indicative of what I am calling ‘neo-democratic’ decision-making, in which high-level interest group conflict leads to narrow forms of democratic engagement.