Chapter 4: Research Design and Methodology
4.7 Reflections on the research process 107
4.7.1 Experiences with getting access to data 108
Negotiating access to data can be time-consuming, difficult and testing on one‘s patience, creativity and flexibility (Taylor, Millei, Partridge & Rodriguez, 2003;
Matthiesen & Richter, 2007). As a novice researcher in the project that has been facilitated by experienced academics, it never came to me that I needed to familiarize myself with literature on getting access to data (Matthiesen & Richter, 2007) as I never anticipated any obstacles in the process. This was also caused by the fact that I had been working with the team on issues such as the preparation of applications for ethical clearance and I would not be responsible for all steps that had to be followed. When it came to negotiating access to data there were institutions that were assigned to me and I had to communicate with the gatekeepers including the deans of faculties of Education and the librarians in those institutions to request their consent to come and make copies of theses and dissertations.
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In this process I learnt that there were power dynamics inherent in accessing data and that power is something that a researcher needs not to only be aware of, but to negotiate in the process of research (Merriam, Johnson-Bailey, Lee, Kee, Ntseane & Muhamad, 2001).
These power dynamics proved to have a lot to do with the researcher‘s identity and the mode of communication the researcher uses in the process. There were cases where I got no response to the emails that I sent to some institutions concerned. I then communicated the problem with one of the project leaders, a professor, who then communicated with the institutions, to whom they responded. His power as a professor worked for the good.
The impression I got from the responses to the leader was that my email address had a lot to do with poor response from the institutions. It was beginning with a student number, which is how student email addresses are in our institution. Therefore it revealed my identity as either ‗a number‘ or a student, depending on the interpretation by the recipient of the email. Both these possibilities put my emails in a position that made recipients reluctant to respond to. I also found from literature that the form of communication one uses when negotiating access to data has implications for whether one gets consent or not. For example, Matthiesen & Richter (2007) mention three of these and indicate that emails tend to be too informal and may not be appropriate to rely on except for initial queries; telephone calls are warm and personal and one can verbally state the request, but have a possibility of leaving out some points; written letters are the most formal and professional approaches to use. In most cases I ended up combining these three forms of communication, that is, emailing and attaching a detailed letter of what the projects is about and then calling the dean and the librarian to make them aware that I have sent those electronically and asking for their response.
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My other experience with negotiating access to data related to the issue of being an outsider in the institutions where I went to collect data for the PPER. An outsider is described by Breen (2007) as a researcher who does not belong to the group under study.
When referring to the concept of outsider, literature mainly focuses on issues of gender, race, sexuality, and socio-economic status (Breen, 2007; Merriam, et. al, 2001;
Matthiesen & Richter, 2007). l could not find information from the literature I reviewed about the challenges I could experience while trying to find data from the libraries of institutions to which I was not a member. However, the experiences I encountered during this process are worth discussing. They relate mainly to the issue of having not found all the theses and dissertations I needed because of limited knowledge of where else these might be located except in the libraries.
From all the libraries I visited, I received warm welcome from the librarians, with some even having collected the theses and dissertations that were within the study period, 1995 to 2004. In some libraries I had to go to find these from the shelves by myself. In both ways of accessing these however, there happened to be a problem that not all were in the shelves that were open to the public. Some were locked in the protected archives; while some were in the lists that the libraries had but were missing from the libraries with no explanation of where they might be. It was sometimes suggested that they might have been kept by supervisors in their offices, some of whom had either retired or left the institutions. Some were in transit from the different campuses that merged and therefore could not be accessed. This meant that not all data I needed was available. It also happened in some institutions that there was more than one library where theses and dissertations were kept, but this information was not given to me by some librarians
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concerned. This information was only found from some supervisors that were interviewed in those institutions, which implied extra costs of going back to make copies of those that were missed during the first phase of data collection. This is the kind of knowledge I would have had if I had been an insider in those institutions.