Nalita James

Credibility, Authenticity and Voice: Dilemmas in Online Interviewing

This article explores the methodological issues encountered when using email as a web-based interview in on-line qualitative research. By drawing on two separate research studies that used this method to explore participants’ understandings of their professional experiences and developing professional identities, the researchers consider the methodological implications in using this approach. These include issues affecting the credibility and trustworthiness of the research design of the studies, and issues around the authenticity of participants’ voices and how that was affected by power and control in the interview process. Despite these dilemmas, the article recognizes the contribution that web-based approaches can make to research by allowing researchers to hold asynchronous conversations with participants, especially when they are distant from the researcher, and to generating reflective, descriptive data. It leads us to conclude that it is worth refining our methodological framework to strengthen the trustworthiness and credibility of future research studies that use email.

Ethical issues in online educational research: protecting privacy, establishing authenticity in email interviewing

Educational researchers have a responsibility to ensure that in whatever research paradigm they work, the research that is conducted is done so within an ‘ethic of respect’ to those who participate. This implies a number of responsibilities on the part of the researcher that include ensuring trust, dignity, privacy, confidentiality and anonymity. When research uses the Internet as the medium of investigation, these ethical responsibilities become more complex for the educational researcher. This paper discusses such complexities by examining the ethical dilemmas of using the Internet as a site for qualitative research. It will draw on two educational studies that used email interviewing, and will specifically focus on two ethical challenges the researchers faced when using this method: protecting participants’ privacy and anonymity, and establishing authenticity in online environments, including the way in which ownership of online research conversations and identities are experienced and expressed. In discussing such dilemmas, the paper concludes by questioning whether these issues can be addressed in an effort to construct the unattainable but pursue the utopian: fully ethical educational research.

Transforming marginalised adult learners’ views of themselves: Access to Higher Education courses in England

Adult learners on Access to Higher Education courses struggled with institutional and social structures to attend their courses, but transformed their identities as learners through them. Although asymmetrical power relationships dominated the intentional learning communities of their courses, their work was facilitated by collaborative cultures and supportive tutors, and students gained the confidence to construct their own emergent communities of practice for learning. The students attended seven further education colleges in the East Midlands of England. Data were collected by mixed methods within a social constructivist framework from students and their tutors.

Ethical issues in online research

In the last 20 years, researchers have developed their technological skills to construct a variety of online methods and sites to explore experiences and behaviour in the virtual world. Similarly, ...

Using email interviews in qualitative educational research: creating space to think and time to talk

The article explores how the Internet and email offer space for participants to think and make sense of their experiences in the qualitative research encounter. It draws on a research study that used email interviewing to generate online narratives to understand academic lives and identities through research encounters in virtual space. The article discusses how the asynchronous nature of email helps to facilitate this by allowing research participants to contribute to research in their space and according to their own preference in time, and engage in a process of reflection and interaction. However, it also argues for the construction of more collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge their right to use the temporal nature of space and time that email offers to construct, reflect upon, and learn from their stories of experience in their own manner, and not merely to the researcher’s agenda. It concludes by recognizing the importance of email as a research tool for capturing the complexity of social interaction online.

Research on the 'Inside': The Challenges of Conducting Research with Young Offenders

There is a limited literature examining the ethical dilemmas that arise when research is conducted in prison settings, and the extent to which it is possible to give voice to young offenders’ experiences, thus placing them at the centre of the research process. By drawing on a qualitative research with young offenders, the paper will discuss how prison research can be truly ethical when it is conducted with participants who are far from autonomous. This raises a number of challenges for researchers that this paper will consider. These include accessing young offenders’ lives; ensuring the credibility of young offenders’ voices; and leaving the prison setting. The paper highlights the ethical research strategies that researchers can adopt in conducting research with young offenders, and the importance of researchers adopting a reflexive approach to better understand the social context of young offenders’ lives.

In Pursuit of Ethical Research: Studying Hybrid Communities Using Online and Face-to-Face Communications.

Hybrid communities using online and face-to-face communications to construct their practices are increasingly part of everyday life amongst people who have easy access to the internet. Researching these communities raises a number of challenges for researchers in the pursuit of ethical research. The paper begins by exploring what is understood by hybrid communities and how their practices might be researched using hybrid methods to investigate the experiences of participants in them. The discussion then considers what might be an ethical framework for researching activity in these entities, giving examples from several projects that have tried carefully to embed this framework in their practices. In exploring these studies, the paper highlights the ethical possibilities and challenges that online and offline spaces offer for researchers in the conduct of their qualitative educational research.

You've got mail … ! Using email interviews to gather academics' narratives of their working lives

The paper explores how computer-mediated communication offers space for academics to think and make sense of their experiences in the qualitative research encounter. It draws on a research study that used email interviewing to generate online narratives to understand academic lives and identities through research encounters in virtual space. The paper discusses how email can provide a site where the self can be viewed reflexively and re-negotiated through a process of interaction. The paper demonstrates that the asynchronous nature of email helps to facilitate this, by allowing participants to contribute to research in their space and according to their own preference in time. However, it also argues for the construction of more collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge the right of participants to use the temporal nature of space and time that email offers to construct, reflect upon and learn from their stories of experience in their own manner, and not merely to the researchers agenda. It concludes by recognizing the importance of email as a research tool for capturing the complexity of social interaction online.

‘I always wanted to do second chance learning’: identities and experiences of tutors on Access to Higher Education courses

There is a dearth of literature on Access to Higher Education (AHE) tutors, which this paper addresses. Tutors play an important part in constructing emotional and academic support for students. Understanding their constructions of professional identity and their views of the students they teach helps to explain the learning environments they create. The empirical qualitative data comes from a study of AHE students’ and tutors’ views of their experiences on AHE courses that was collected in seven rural and urban AHE-providing institutions in the East Midlands of England in 2012–2013. It was analysed using open or inductive coding to reflect the emphases given in their interviews by participants. Emerging findings suggest that tutors’ commitment to ‘second chance learning’ arose, in part, from their own biographies and recognition of the disempowerment experienced by AHE students who were often economically disadvantaged and had had negative experiences of schooling and/or a period of work before joining the course. Tutors’ sense of agency and identity and the cultures on AHE courses were negotiated each year through getting to know the students, meeting their extensive demands for support, directing their teaching and learning experiences and contesting the institutional contexts of the courses.

‘I always wanted to do second chance learning’: Identities and experiences of tutors on Access to HE courses

There is a dearth of literature on Access to Higher Education (AHE) tutors, which this paper addresses. Tutors play an important part in constructing emotional and academic support for students. Understanding their constructions of professional identity and their views of the students they teach helps to explain the learning environments they create. The empirical qualitative data comes from a study of AHE students’ and tutors’ views of their experiences on AHE courses that was collected in seven rural and urban AHE-providing institutions in the East Midlands of England in 2012–2013. It was analysed using open or inductive coding to reflect the emphases given in their interviews by participants. Emerging findings suggest that tutors’ commitment to ‘second chance learning’ arose, in part, from their own biographies and recognition of the disempowerment experienced by AHE students who were often economically disadvantaged and had had negative experiences of schooling and/or a period of work before joining the course. Tutors’ sense of agency and identity and the cultures on AHE courses were negotiated each year through getting to know the students, meeting their extensive demands for support, directing their teaching and learning experiences and contesting the institutional contexts of the courses.