4.4 Data Analysis Procedures
4.5.5 Locating Myself in the Research Process
The researcher plays a vital role in the production of knowledge in any study. Largely, the researcher determines the kind of knowledge constructed. It is therefore vital for the researcher to be aware of his/her power in the research and to willingly examine her/his values, knowledge, position and purpose in order to uncover how he/she sees his/her influence in the construction and production of research knowledge. This is where the researcher brings forth the practices that can implicate her/him as a subjective research agent. In this study, I brought my own positioning as a parent, an educator, an affected community member, with values, power, strengths and weaknesses that might have influenced the data generation and analysis in this study.
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This study adopted a critical stance to examine HIV and AIDS education programmes for young people in Lesotho, the policies that guide such interventions and meaning attached to such interventions. This, together with the HIV and AIDS curriculum in teacher training institutions and schools for teachers and learners respectively puts me beyond the “binary of insider/outsider polarity and familiarity and strangeness” (Atkinson and Hamersley, 1998, pp.110-111). My identity in this study, therefore, involves a hybrid of insider-outsider position. This position conjoins the outsider’s critical theoretical perspective informed by the policies that protect education and insider’s knowledge of the teachers’ roles in the HIV and AIDS era and the high HIV prevalence among the youth of school going age.
In this study, I was an ‘insider’ because I grew up and attended rural schools in Lesotho. I was trained as a teacher at the National Teacher Training College (NTTC) now known as the Lesotho College of Education (LCE). I taught at primary school level for 33 years, and was the principal of a rural primary school for 15 of those years. Concurrently, I worked as a part-time adult educator for 14 years at the National University of Lesotho (NUL) before I joined the university as a full-time lecturer in 2014. This is where I had the opportunity to experience the emotional and psychological pains of HIV and AIDS. I saw my family members, community members, colleagues and my students’ parents getting ill, suffering and sometimes dying of AIDS-related illnesses. Learners got ill, became orphans, dropped out of school to care for their sick parents. This meant that they were deprived of their childhood in order to head families, to hunt for jobs and to care for their siblings. Very often, I watched some of these young people die as well. I have also been aware of the plethora of interventions that have been implemented to curb the spread of the virus. As I argued in Chapter One and throughout this thesis, I have also noticed how infections seem to be increasing, particularly among the school-going adolescent population. These experiences motivated me to find out what was
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wrong and why the many HIV and AIDS interventions are not contributing to behaviour change that can help to reduce the prevalence of HIV in the country. These experiences led to my interest in unearthing the meaning that individuals (especially young people) make of HIV and AIDS education interventions, their lives and the challenges that are brought by the epidemic.
While I was born and continue to reside in Lesotho, as a research student from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, I was an outsider to the school and to the community. In qualitative research, the researcher acts as the most important instrument for data collection and data analysis (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). His/her capability and understanding are important features in the research process. When collecting qualitative data, researchers must truly immense themselves into the population that they researching on. This makes it easier for them to fully understand the people and institutions that they are conducting research on (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). This is so because people are their very real selves when they are in their natural setting. To minimise my outsider status, as discussed above, I lived in the community for the duration of the data collection period. This provided me the opportunity to interact with community members and other participants outside the school.
By so doing, I was able to learn about the culture of the school and the community. Epistemologically, I construct my research to be situated and located to examine the curriculum policy, informing the teaching of HIV and AIDS education to the teachers, the youth and me. I explored the content to find out how it contributes to the meaning that the young people attach to HIV and AIDS and how it influences their behaviour change that can help them to avoid risky behaviours that can expose them to HIV infection.
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The study took as its point of departure, the notion that young people in schools, including those from rural schools, are capable of making sense of their own worlds. Based on this notion, I located the study within the Interpretive Research Paradigm which posits that knowledge is socially constructed, therefore it is dynamic and changes according to how people make meaning of their situations and that it is fluid and accurate. In other words, young people’s voices and participation in search of meaning is central to interpretive paradigm. I have used the interpretive paradigm. It is for this reason that I used participatory methods such as role-play, focus group interviews and letter writing to solicit participants’ views of the phenomenon under study.