3. Methodology and Research Design
3.4. Data Collection /Procedures
Having read McKay’s Researching Second Language Classrooms (2006), I made some unwise choices, given that I am writing for a Norwegian institution and this was an American author writing about American conditions. I will come back to this later in this section.
3.4.1. Before the Interview
Prior to carrying out the research, I asked the headmaster of the school for permission to invite students to participate in my study. I then approached the students. All the invitees were informed about the study based on the template (appendix 12). There was no joint meeting for all invitees, however some days after the initial conversation all ten invitees were given the participant debriefing form and the consent form. Most of the invited students were immediately positive and agreed to participate, a few wanted to give it some thought. I set a final date for the signing of the consent form. Seven students signed, and the one student who was not yet 18 had acquired his parent’s signature as well.
Once the consent forms were obtained, a presentation of the project was sent to Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) for approval. I also informed NSD that I had received the consent forms from the students. This proved to be a problem, as the contact should not have taken place before I had contacted NSD and had their approval for my study. Thus, my choice of handbook, turned out to be unwise, as it provided me with the wrong recipe according to Norwegian procedures. This probably prolonged the process and caused me to have to wait for close to eight weeks for the reply from SND.
The project was eventually approved, but this gave me a rather difficult start, since the approval came only a few days before Easter, which meant a further delay. In addition, all, except one of the students were seniors, which made it very important to carry through the interview as soon as possible after Easter. This is because during the month of May, seniors in Norwegian schools are very busy with celebrations and exams2 and have little time for other activities. However, as soon as I had the approval, the pre-interview questionnaire (appendix 4) and some additional information about power (appendix 3) were handed out to the seven participants who had agreed to be part of the study. The students were asked to answer the questions very briefly, as there were relatively many of them. They were also told to skip what they could or did not wish to answer, but remember to mark these questions through a sign or letter, to distinguish them from questions that had been overlooked. Meanwhile, season three of GOT had started, so the students had watched the new episodes and they were
2 The senior students in Norway celebrate the end of 13 years of schooling between April 30th and May 17th, also called “russetid”. This includes wearing special uniforms, carrying out organised and spontaneous pranks in and outside school and consuming a considerable amount of alcohol. There are late nights on school nights as well as weekends, and this may be a challenge for teachers, as the exams begin directly after 17th May and the school year does not end until a month later.
very excited. Two of the participants did not hand in the questionnaire before the interview.
The compiled answers are found in appendix 8.
3.4.2. The Interview with the Boys’ Group
We agreed to arrange the interview immediately after Easter, when the students were back in school again. The date was set to 27 April, which was a Saturday, to stress the fact that this was not school work. Consequently, two of the participants forgot, and both of them were girls, which resulted in an all boy group. Waiting for the girls was no option either, as the boys were on a tight time schedule and had a ferry to catch. It was decided to go through with the interview without the girls.
I chose to record the interview and supplement with notes, as I wanted to make certain I could trust the result was not coloured too much by my formulations. This also made it easier for me to be attentive as moderator. It would have been very difficult to both take notes and ask questions as well, and many good points would necessarily have been lost, given that there were so many participants in one group. With the recording I felt certain I would have enough material to work with and that the actual language used by the participants was available to me (McKay 55). There is always the risk that the participants will be disturbed by a recorder, but the reliability of the findings is nevertheless more at risk if the notes from the interview first have to be interpreted and then written down.
The recording took place in one of the classrooms in school, and the recorder was in plain view on the conference table. The first ten minutes were set off for introduction, clarification and ground rules for the interview (appendix 15). Some of the participants in the boys’ group were perpetually afraid of spoilers because two of the participants had already read all or most of the books. Usually it was sufficient to ask them to cover their ears for some seconds, but at one point it was necessary to let three of the boys take a quick break whilst the other two delved into the discussion of relevant examples. The responsibility was felt heavily by those participants who had read the books since they did not want to ruin anything for the others.
I generally asked the questions from the interview guide (appendix 10) without directing questions at a particular participant, so that the participants could volunteer answers. In some cases, however I asked direct questions, since some participants were more outspoken than others. There were also follow-up questions that were not in the guide, but which were necessary for clarification.
The interview included the viewing of four scenes from the television series, of which each lasted no more than three minutes. This caused the interview to last for two hours and 15 minutes, which according to Grudens-Shuck et al. is a little more than is advisable in a focus group interview (3). The last part of the interview was carried out with some time pressure due to the ferry schedule, but since most of the last questions also appear on the post-interview questionnaire, this did not cause too many problems.
3.4.3. The Interview with the Girls
The intention had been to carry out one interview with all seven participants present, and a second interview would not have been organised if two of the boys had missed the appointment. However, with the gender perspective lost, I conferred with my supervisor and the girls, to see if a second interview was an option. The girls wanted very much to participate in an interview and we agreed to meet on May 1st, a bank holiday, at the same venue.
This means I have carried through two gender specific interviews, and though this was entirely coincidental, it still complicates matters, and even though I attempted to make both interviews as similar as possible, as will be seen in the transcripts (appendices 5 and 6), it is simply not possible to run two identical interviews. Additionally, the girls’ interview lasted for a little longer than the boys’, given the absence of time pressure towards the end. Other than that, the same questions were asked and the same scenes were shown, and everything was done in the same order, with two exceptions: The order in which the scenes were watched and discussed was coincidentally not the same in both groups, and I provided the girls with an overview of the characters (appendix 1), since unlike the boys, they had problems remembering names. I will come back to this in the Findings and Analysis section.
3.4.4. After the Interview
About two weeks after the interviews, I handed out the post-interview questionnaire (appendix 7), which was answered by all students except one. A compilation of the answers to these questions is available to the reader, in appendix 9.