4.3. Research Design and Methodology
4.3.1 Negotiating Access to the Research Setting
There are about 40 secondary schools in the Mafeteng district located in the southern part of Lesotho.
I was looking for a secondary school that would offer an information-rich context in which to investigate the meaning that young people attach to the HIV and AIDS messages that they receive from the school curriculum generally, and the Life Skills program in particular. Thus, from the 40 schools, I selected the Lilomo High School (a pseudonym), one of the rural high schools in the district.
In the processes of negotiating access to the school, I had to bear in mind that gaining access to the participants would have a major influence on the relationships that I as a researcher would have with them and that it would also influence the way in which they would respond (Yates, 2001). From my Masters dissertation, I had learnt that gaining access to a research site (and recruiting participants) is one of the most challenging responsibilities when conducting a study. To gain access to a research site usually requires careful planning as the researcher frequently operates through ‘gate keepers’
who can help to gain access to a site and participants or block it (Miller &Salkind, 2002). Thus, I first went to the district office to request permission to collect the research study data from the school.
Permission was granted in writing, through an official letter (see Appendices A).
Secondly, and armed with the letter of permission from the District Education office, I approached the principal and the School Governing Board of Lilomo High School to ask for permission to conduct the study. The main challenge in terms of accessing the research site was ‘selling’ the research idea to gatekeepers in the district and in the school as well as to the potential participants.
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This included giving them full details regarding the processes of my research. Luckily, for me, access to the school was not as challenging as I had envisaged that it would be because the principal was not only someone I had met on several occasions in the principals’ meetings (when I was a principal of a school myself), but the primary school that I headed was one of the feeder schools for the school.
Moreover, the principal held a Master’s degree and thus understood the benefits of research. To prepare for the visit to the school, I made a telephone call to the principal describing the study, and set up an appointment to have a conversation with her. She was very keen to support the project.
I made three visits to the school before beginning to collect data for the study. In the first visit, I met the principal and the school board and I introduced myself as a researcher and explained the nature of the study and the purpose for collecting data using that particular school. I presented the letter from the District Education Office that authorised me to conduct research in the schools in the district. The letter helped me to easily convince the principal and the School Board about the purpose of the study because it had an endorsement from a person in authority. However, I clearly explained to the principal and the school board that the involvement of participants from their school would be voluntary. The principal and the school board granted permission for me to collect data from the school (see Appendix B).
At the time of data collection, the school had 12 teachers and 189 learners in grades 8, 9 and 10. The school serves several small villages in the Mafeteng District. Many of the learners have to travel long distances to and from school. To access the school, the learners and staff have to walk about three kilometres from the main road, or use the local mode of transportation, including horses or trucks that function as local taxis to travel the rest of the badly maintained gravel road. For this reason, a
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number of the learners rented small huts in the villages closer to the school. In most cases, learners shared the huts to cut the costs and for security reasons. This arrangement seemed useful as learners were closer to the school, but it also created many challenges for the school, the community and the learners themselves.
During my fieldwork at the school, one of the biggest challenges was unplanned teenage pregnancies, which the teachers believed were a result of unsupervised dating relationships among the learners and sometimes between girls from the school and men from the village. In addition, girls living alone in these huts were also vulnerable to rape by schoolmates or villagers. Thus, in granting me access to the school and convincing the teachers to cooperate, the principal argued that even though they had tried their best as a school to implement the Life Skills Education (a subject in which HIV and AIDS education is integrated into) since 2007, their learners were still getting pregnant in large numbers.
For her, this suggested that the curriculum was not working. She argued that the school might get the answers they were looking for through the findings of the research.
For the same reasons, and informed by the qualitative research design that I adopted for this study, I believed that participants’ attitudes, behaviour and experiences are best understood in the context of their natural settings (Babbie & Mouton, 2010; Creswell, 2009; Denzin & Lincoln, 2008; Marshall
& Rossman, 2011 and others). Thus, I wanted to “stay close” to the young people’s natural setting (the school and community) throughout the research process (Babbie & Mouton, 2010, p.53). Like the learners, because of the distance that I had to travel to the school to collect data, I decided to rent a hut at the village chief’s compound. In addition to ensuring easy access to the school, this gave me the opportunity to meet with the learners, the teachers and the community members informally
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outside the scheduled times. I met most parents at the village water spring when they went to fetch water. This is where I learnt a lot about the norms and the practices in the school and village through informal communication.