Download PDFMethods
I utilized a qualitative approach to carry out our research study that included conducting two focus group sessions and two intensive, individual student interviews. Additionally, I applied a phenomenological structure (Bevan) to the interview process in order gather rich descriptions about students’ placement decisions. A phenomenological interview structure involved having participants, first, contextualize their placement decision. Then, participants were asked to provide a descriptive explanation for placing into or out of a given required writing course. Finally, participants were given an opportunity to clarify their placement decisions. This method of interviewing “enables a researcher to examine a person’s experience both actively and methodically” and “provides a sound basis for interpreting experience grounded in the origin of the material” (Bevan 143). Such an interview structure allowed for the elicitation of complex but rich descriptions of placement decisions from participants. (For full list of the interview protocol see Appendix A).
Participants
Following IRB approval, I began the recruitment of participants. Since this research was focused on how students’ placement decisions could potentially be affected by their dispositions, I needed to gather interview data specifically from students whose academic history enabled them to speak to this particular interaction. In other words, it was imperative that our sampling strategy be purposeful in order to obtain the required dataset. I therefore employed a cell sampling strategy which would enable us to appropriately apprehend the phenomenon under investigation (Robinson 33). In order to obtain a representative sample, I identified three distinct academic criteria for potential participants.
- Participant Group A (4 students): Those who entered without any credit for a required course who enrolled in a WRIT 1301 section taught under the revised or the existing curriculum.
- Participant Group B (8 students): Students who entered with credit for a required course and who still opted to enroll in a WRIT 1301 section taught under the revised curriculum, or students who entered with credit for a FYW course and who opted out of WRIT 1301 and enrolled in a WRIT 2302 section taught under the revised or existing curriculum.
- Participant Group C (2 students): Students who re-enrolled in a WRIT 2302 section taught under the revised curriculum because they were unsuccessful during their first attempt (including but not limited to self- or instructor-initiated withdrawal, withdrawal for absences, or non-passing grade of F or NP).
Collectively, these participant subpopulations represent a sample universe that is homogeneous enough to effectively isolate the academic interaction I wanted to examine while also providing a diverse range of students’ initial experiences and contact across the FYW program. Participant Groups B and C all were subjected to a placement decision: “Do I enroll in WRIT 1301 or 2302?” Moreover, they experienced the effects of placement decisions in a variety of ways, which I discuss in more detail in the following section. The first subpopulation of students, Participant Group A, represents a control group of students who were not affected by existing placement procedures, since they did not have credit and thus did not have the option to make a placement choice. This student group could, however, speak to their experiences in the FYW program so as to help establish a baseline for the ways in which students were navigating the new, revised curriculum.
Recruiting students who met the criteria for Participant Groups B and C was imperative, since their academic history included the specific phenomena (placement) relevant to this study. In order to recruit participants from these specific subpopulations, I identified students who had made a placement decision using the university registrar (information available for our use under FERPA 34 CFR § 99.31). I proceeded to source our sample using study advertisement techniques. I then contacted students who met the criteria for Participant Groups B and C via email, allowing them to self-select into our research study at their own discretion. In order to recruit participants from Participant Group A, I visited each section of FYW taught in Spring 2018 at our university and again invited students to self-select into our research study via a flyer and short explanation of our study. All the participants in this research study, therefore, were recruited on a strictly volunteer basis.
In total, 14 students elected to participate in this research study: 4 students from Participant Group A, 8 students from Participant Group B, and 2 students from Participant Group C. This sample size was appropriate to satisfy the needs for idiographic research intents and enabled us to develop cross-case generalities formed from an intensive analysis of each participant (Robinson and Smith 174).
Data Collection
My data was gathered through focus groups and individual interviews. I conducted two focus groups with students from Participant Groups A and B. Four students participated in each focus group, and the meetings lasted approximately one hour each. The objective in these groups was to generate crosstalk and productive discussion in order to capture a variety of perspectives, not necessarily generate a consensus of opinion (Petty et al.; Robinson); therefore, I worked to formulate groups that distributed students’ experiences as evenly as possible. Furthermore, following Michael Patton and Jenny Kitzinger, I also structured our focus groups around open-ended questions that would provide the necessary room for participants to narrate rich descriptions and elucidate their experiences with placement. As a researcher, I sought to background my role and act instead as a facilitator of the discussion, intervening when necessary in order to redirect the conversation and ensure that all voices were given equal opportunity to be heard.
I also conducted two individual interviews with students who were identified as Participant Group C. These interviews lasted between 35 and 45 minutes. Participants in group C were only allowed to participate in individual interviews due to their prior history of withdrawing from or failing WRIT 2302. Individual interviewees were asked the same questions as those asked of focus group participants to ensure I was gathering similar data points from all participants. However, as Michael Bassey posits, some interviewee responses may be influenced by fear or their academic positionality in relation to the researcher (81). I was especially attuned to this possibility with participants in group C given their academic performance in WRIT 2302. I therefore worked to mitigate this by ensuring the comfort of the two individual interviewees. I stressed to these participants that I only wanted to get a comprehensive view of their experience, not judge their decisions and experiences (Silverman).
All the focus groups and individual interviews followed a semi-structured design (Creswell; Robson), and participants were asked to discuss their secondary education writing experiences and their dispositions about writing that resulted therefrom, their confidence as writers entering into the university, their beliefs about placement, their expected experiences in a FYW course, and their lived experiences in a FYW course. As aforementioned, my interview and focus group protocol loosely followed a phenomenological structure wherein I first asked participants to contextualize their placement decision by narrating their prior experiences in secondary education. I then asked a series of questions intended to apprehend their reasons for making a given placement decision. Finally, the interview questions circled back and asked participants to clarify their reasoning with regard to placement.
All the focus groups and individual interviews were recorded and then transcribed for analysis purposes. The audio recordings were transcribed individually by the principal investigator using Microsoft Word and then reviewed and checked for accuracy. In total, this research produced 65 pages of transcripts.
Data Coding and Composite Characters
Following transcription, I began using nVivo to code participants’ responses. My analysis of participants data was recursive and iterative, drawing from a grounded theory methodology (Glaser and Strauss). I began by independently identifying open, inductive starter codes for participants experiences based on the transcripts of participants responses (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). I then cross-checked the initial codes against each other and against the existing literature on transfer and placement in order to further condense and categorize the data. A second round of coding in nVivo was then conducted wherein the themes of “linear” and “liminal” student dispositions were identified.
In brief, a student with a linear disposition views writing instruction, and by extension placement decisions, in non-recursive ways. For example, consider the participant who described her history of writing history thusly: “All writing was is figuring out how are you going to take what you learned in this course and apply it to the end of course exam, which is going to determine whether or not you make it to the next grade or not.” For this student, writing amounted to passing a standardized test, checking off boxes that would allow her to proceed to the next set of check-able boxes about writing in the following grade. Their linear habitus prevents her from seeing any value in taking a course for which she “already has credit,” such as WRIT 1301.
Conversely, a student who embodies a liminal perspective approaches her placement decision in a much more iterative fashion; that is, she is able to identify potential gaps between her prior knowledge and her present situation. A liminal student is much more recursive. An instance of liminal thinking is found in this response from another study participant, who, explaining her placement decision, said, “I had a credit from my AP English exam from senior year, but I still chose to sort of start baseline just to get a feel for the school. And I actually am glad that I did that, because it gave me a second to be like, wait, this writing might be different.” Here, the student acknowledges that there might be an incongruity between her history and the current writing situation.
Following the second round of coding, a third round of coding was conducting to generate composite characters of the two dispositional habituses identified across study participants. A composite character is an empirical, but nevertheless fictional, persona that is directly grounded in real data provided by participants lived experiences (Solorzano and Yasso). Thus, the composite character is not truly “fictional,” but rather is a rigorous methodological practice that draws together data patterns that are located in and across individual data points. Moreover, researcher bias in the generation of the characters—while admittedly unavoidable—is held in check as the voices used to construct it are real, not fictional. Composite characters have found purchase as a methodological tool in critical race theories precisely because, as April Baker-Bell contends, they “allow researchers to merge data analysis with creative writing to expose patterns of racialized inequality and deepen our understanding of . . . the lived experiences of people of color as individuals and as groups in schools” (44, emphasis added). The key point about composite characters that critical race theorists like Baker-Bell and Daniella Cook make is that they are able to speak to both a collective experience and, in this case, the cumulative impact that dispositions can have on students’ placement decisions. Importantly, composite characters are not meant to detract from individual or differentiated experience; instead, “the use of composite characters turns the focus from individual participants to the larger issues faced by groups” (Cook 182). Therefore, the voices of Caitlyn and Gabriella that follow narrate two distinct patterns of student dispositions—linear and liminal—that affected students’ understanding of and orientation toward placement.