Interviewees
As I mentioned in my blog about interview questions, I have decided to ask my colleagues on the PGCERT to be my participants. This is for several reasons:
- Time constraints: my access to students on MAAI is limited to 3 hrs/week.
- I feel that asking my MAAI students to participate in action research about procrastination might make them feel judged and upset the balance of future tutorials.
- my colleagues on the course are already familiar with my project in a loose sense and will understand my intention with interviewing them.
- Power dynamics, people are more likely to share with someone who they feel on an equal footing with.
- My colleagues on the PGCERT are experiencing teaching and learning from both sides, making their perspectives on the issue of procrastination unique.
- All my participants are people with both an academic and creative practice. Particularly relevant since UAL is an art school and procrastination and creativity seem to go hand in hand and I would like to explore this further if I have time.
If I have time, I will conduct a second set of interviews with lecturers and tutors. My tutor Neil suggested that I contact Academic Support in particular about this, which I think is a really great idea. I am sure that Academic Support lecturers in particular are often helping students who procrastinate, and it would be good to get a sense of what methodologies to help/ reframe EDF are being used at UAL.
Gathering participants
I think an important element of getting people to participate in action research is a personal connection with the topic. This is something I have noticed with my own students on MAAI, if they are approaching participants who have no personal connection with the topic, they will often be unsuccessful in getting people to engage with their work. To this end, I have reached out to my peers on the PGCERT, asking them if they identify as procrastinators and if they would like to be involved in my research.
Participant breakdown
- 10 participants.
- 9 who identify as active procrastinators and 1 who identifies as a reformed procrastinator.
- Age range 25 – 50.
- 3 participants are parents to young children.
- Gender identity: 6 women, 2 non-binary, 2 men.
- Racial demographics: Black = 2, Mixed = 4, White = 2, East Asian = 1, Middle Eastern = 1
I think 10 participants is certainly enough people to collect data from at this stage, given the current state of my health, I am weary of giving myself too much work to do.
Time and Place
In my previous blog I mentioned that I will try to keep the interviews to 30 minutes long. Due to the lockdown and my own personal situation as a shielder I have decided to conduct the interviews on Zoom so I can record the interviews easily. Recording on zoom gives the added bonus of being able to download both the video and audio files separately, which might be helpful when I am transcribing, as video files are obviously larger and take more time to process than audio files.
Ethics
To protect the identities of my participants, I have decided that I will change all their names and edit out any identifying information from the transcripts of their interviews. All participants will be given a letter in lieu of a name ranging from A – J. Although this does depersonalise them somewhat, changing their names to another name may also reveal who they are. Additionally, thinking up alternative names for 10 people is probably not the best use of my time and energy at this point.