R ESEARCH M ETHOD

I need informants in their natural settings which means I will have to meet the students at school, at home and in the environment of their work. Gathering material from the parents involves going to their homes. I choose to have few informants and collect data through in depth interviews. The collected information has afterwards to be analysed through reducing the large amount of data into themes or categories.

Hence this research calls for a qualitative approach.

“Qualitative research is grounded in the assumption that individuals construct their social reality in the form of meanings and

interpretations, and these constructions tend to be situational. The methodology consists of discovering the meanings and interpretations by studying cases intensively in their natural settings and by subjecting the resulting data to analytic induction.” (Gall, Gall and Borg , 2002).

My research is not about studying cases, but the phenomenon school life quality.

Among several research traditions within qualitative research phenomenology is one.

The central focus of a phenomenology is on understanding a concept or a

phenomenon. The main aim of this research is to get an understanding of the concept quality of school life for working children and do so by focusing on their own

experiences related to how their school life quality may be influenced by school, work and parents. On the bases of this I have found phenomenology to be relevant for my study. Phenomenology has the following characteristics (Creswell, 1998):

• It studies how people experience a phenomenon

• The informants describe their everyday lived experiences

• The information is collected through interviews with a small number of informants

• The analysis of the findings follows certain procedures

3.1.2. The Philosophical Background of Qualitative Research.

Educational research involves different approaches. These are based on different philosophical assumptions that guide the studies and which speak of different ways of understanding knowledge (Creswell, 1998). The ontological assumption addresses the nature of reality. Reality is constructed by the individuals taking part in the

research. All involved have their own reality and the researcher needs to report these realities. Through the information I get from the informants every individual

expresses its own experiences and its own reality, which is my task as researcher to report. I have to be aware of the fact that multiple realities exist. Apart from the realities of all the informants, in this study being the students, the parents, the

teachers and the two principals, there is my reality as a researcher and also that one of the reader of the study. It is my aim to get a diversity of perspectives on the

phenomenon of school life quality for working students. In the analysis of the

material this diversity is shown through presenting quotes and themes and reports of multiple statements representing the diverse perspectives on school life quality. This is one characteristic of a phenomenological study.

Epistemological assumptions ask what the relationship is between the researcher and that being researched. In qualitative research the researcher interacts in different ways with the participants of the study. By applying in depth interviews I will as a

researcher minimize the distance between myself and those being researched.

Spending much time in the school and also visiting the students and parents at home brings me to the natural setting of the interviewees.

This close distance between me as a researcher and the informants has implications for the role of values in the study, referred to as axiological assumption. As a researcher I admit the value-laden nature of this study. Being a regular teacher with experience from secondary school in Norway has implications on the study. My task is for myself to be aware of my own background and to report about it to make the reader of this text aware of it. The information gathered from the field is also value-laden in its nature.

From these various distinctions about reality methodological assumptions emerge, which ask what the process of research is. Within qualitative research knowledge evolves, emerges and is tied to the context in which it is studied. The researcher works inductively, which means that he or she develops categories from the informants rather than having specified them in advance. In the analysing of the

collected information the individual statements of the interviewees about different topics are detailed before the next step which is moving to the meanings and clusters of meanings and ending up with a description of the phenomenon.

These assumptions have been investigated into by philosophers for centuries and led to the development of different schools. They have their scientific bases in post positivism which assumes that social reality is constructed by the individuals who participate in it (Gall et al., 2003). Based on this my study has its focus on the experiences of the informants themselves among whom the students are the main ones. In the next sub chapter the concept of experience will be discussed.

3.1.3. The Concept of Experience

According to the ontological assumption mentioned in the previous section every individual expresses its own experience and construct its own reality. Since this is in focus in this research I find it necessary to describe the concept of experience in more details. When the approach of this research is called phenomenological it means that this simple question is asked: What is it like to have a certain experience? (Van Manen, 1990, p 44-45). Phenomenology has different directions so I will explain my understanding and use of the concept. Theoretically the key of the concept

“experience” is meaning. I am interested in what kind of meaning the students, the parents and the teacher attach to their experiences, to situations or to relations that is related to the students’ school life quality. What does school mean to them? How do they interpret their experiences?

In daily speech we talk about experience as something that has happened and that we are thinking about and reflecting on which implies to be aware of. This experience does not get meaning until it is actively reflected on. This claims the use of our memory. Lived experience gains its meaning only reflectively as past presence. This is in line with the phenomenological understanding which is focusing on the

meaningful experience. The aim of the phenomenology is to transform lived experience to a textual expression, to be able to express the essence of lived

experience which is a quality that is acknowledged retrospectively (Van Manen, 1990, p.36). It is “the meaningful experiences” that Tangen (1998) seeks to reveal in her study. That is also what I aspire to do in my research.