A researcher’s role and ethical considerations

The conceptual, theoretical, methodological choices made at the beginning of the study indicate how I, as a person and a researcher view social reality, a phenomenon under study, and knowledge production. In this section, I reflect upon my role as a researcher in conducting this qualitative study, a relationship with participants in the study and ethical implications. Interpretivist scholars insist that researchers are not “detached” (Miles and Huberman, 1994). Cunliffe (2003) suggests that a radically-reflexive approach to research treats the researcher as a social participant and a social participant as researcher. Such a relationship between a researcher and a participant is natural to the interpretive inquiry like this study. In such studies “a researcher and a participant are engaged (and collaborating) in ‘making meaning’ and ‘producing knowledge’” (Silverman, 2006, p. 147). My bias, experience, expertise, and insight towards the phenomenon under study as well as my actions, taken-for-granted suppositions, linguistic practices, analytical skills, interpretation of texts and subject’s meanings are all part of co-creation of meanings. In a qualitative study, like this one, knowledge is produced through my direct engagement and interaction with participants during face-to-face interviews, their encounter with me throughout the study, sharing of experiences,

and reflecting upon them, providing me with certain data and perhaps leaving some out. The researcher’s role and relationship with the subject in the study raises certain ethical implications that I needed to be aware of. Below I identify some of ethical implications and study limitations as well as discuss the ways to minimize their effects.

One of the limitations in the study is that it is conducted by a single investigator.

Thus it was highly important to consider and question my values, bias and assumed beliefs, explicate them to the reader and to reflect upon those throughout the course of the study. As suggested by Cunliffe (2003), the reader needs to be aware of my assumptions’ impact on the study and its findings. For instance, one of my assumed beliefs about the phenomenon of quality and its activities in HE is that such activities are improvement-led. Thus a question raised in the study is on how quality practices in JP affect quality enhancement. Also, in the study I treated agency as praxis, a particular form of social engagement with inherent transformative capacity. However, as the literature review points out, intentional actions vary, thereby I had to be alert to research subjects’ intentions in relation to JPs and their quality-driven activities.

Since data collection in this case was also dependent on respondents’ willingness to share information and their experience, it was of vital importance to establish with them a relationship of trust and openness, as well as treat participants of the study ethically throughout all stages of the project. Before active data collection each participant received a ‘Participant information sheet’ and a copy of an informed consent form which was signed prior to participation in the study. These documents served two primary purposes. First, to ensure that participants are provided with sufficient information about the research, its purpose and scope, the person collecting the data, and also their role in the study and time commitment required. Second, I wanted to assure participants of confidentiality, the anonymity of their personal data as well as their organization’s details. Such information was properly coded when processing and storing data, and even more importantly, needed to adequately be protected during the stage of reporting and disseminating research outcomes. It is both a legislative and ethical issue to protect this kind of data.

In line with the constructivist orientation to inquiry, this study aims to expose the complexity of the environment under study and the multiplicity of viewpoints of the subjects. In order to achieve this, Bryman and Bell (2011) suggest that “the author must de-centre [oneself] as a privileged voice…, instead allowing multiple voices to appear and disrupt each other” (p.701). In the phases of document

analysis and active data gathering, such as interviewing, it was important not to make value judgments and/or impose my viewpoint of quality phenomenon. Even though interview questions and probing inescapably lead participants to focus on and discuss certain issues, I have chosen semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions to let participants tell their story and what they feel is most important in relation to quality-driven activities. In the analysis and interpretation stages, I was careful to express myself clearly and write the story, to consider which data gets included and excluded, choosing whose voices I select to represent and whose voices to leave out.

A comprehensive and consistent data analysis in qualitative studies sometimes is considered by researchers as ethical. Rigor of analysis and transparency, e.g. of the procedures employed, a detailed account of the process leading to research findings, helped to establish the trustworthiness of findings. In this kind of study, when the research project is carried out by a single investigator, it was important to engage supervisors in the various stages of data analysis and interpretation in order to question the procedures used as well as challenge interpretations and inferences.

To briefly summarize this chapter, a multi-level study was designed consisting of document analysis at macro-level and a single, real time, in-depth qualitative case with embedded units at meso-micro levels. Research in this dissertation is carried out from a constructionist ontology basis and interpretivist epistemology. The phenomenon of JPs and their quality practice is studied as inter-subjective reality, constructed via actions and interactions that are open to multiple interpretations.

The qualitative approach to data analysis included both inductively and deductively driven coding and categorization, merging and constructing them into higher-order, more abstract thematic threads. Principles of trustworthiness and ethics guided the research process in order to build a credible, confirmable, dependable, as well as a transferable research account.

V. MACRO-LEVEL DEVELOPMENTS OF JOINT STUDY