Liverpool Hope University

About: Liverpool Hope University is a education organization based out in Liverpool, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Higher education & Context (language use). The organization has 735 authors who have published 2113 publications receiving 29650 citations.

Interviewing Elites: Addressing Methodological Issues

Abstract: This article focuses on the methodological issues arising from interviewing elites, with an emphasis on gaining access, acquiring trust, and establishing rapport. I argue the central importance of preinterview preparation, which is essential to enhance the researcher’s knowledgeability. The success of interviewing elites hinges on the researcher’s knowledgeability of the interviewee’s life history and background. It enhances the researcher’s positionality and decreases the status imbalance between researcher and researched. The researcher’s positionality is dynamic; it shifts over the course of research. Moreover, positionality is not solely determined externally in the context of an insider/outsider dichotomy but is on a continuum that can be proactively influenced by the researcher. These issues are discussed with reference to recent research on postsocialist transition in Estonia, which involved interviews with political and economic elites. These experiences will be of interest to social scientists working on elites because it focuses on meeting the challenges of interviewing elites from establishing contact through to postinterview follow-up.

Teachers’ beliefs and intentions concerning teaching in higher education

Abstract: A questionnaire measuring nine different aspects of teachers’ beliefs and intentions concerning teaching in higher education was distributed to teachers at four institutions in the United Kingdom, yielding 638 complete sets of responses There was a high degree of overlap between the participants’ scores on the subscales measuring beliefs and intentions, and analyses of both sets of scores yielded two factors reflecting an orientation towards learning facilitation and an orientation towards knowledge transmission However, teachers’ intentions were more orientated towards knowledge transmission than were their beliefs, and problem solving was associated with beliefs based on learning facilitation but with intentions based on knowledge transmission Differences in teachers’ intentions across different disciplines and between men and women seemed to result from different conceptions of teaching, whereas differences in teachers’ intentions across different institutions and between teachers with different levels of teaching experience seemed to result from contextual factors Teaching intentions thus reflect a compromise between teachers’ conceptions of teaching and their academic and social contexts

Achieving saturation in thematic analysis: development and refinement of a codebook.

Abstract: Reaching a saturation point in thematic analysis is important to validity in qualitative studies, yet the process of achieving saturation is often left ambiguous. The lack of information about the process creates uncertainty in the timing of recruitment closure. This exploratory study was conducted to demonstrate a rigorous approach to reaching saturation through two-stage establishment of a codebook used for thematic analysis. The codebook development involved inductive analysis with six interviews, followed by a refinement of the coding system by applying them to an additional 33 interviews. These findings are discussed in relation to plausible pattern in code occurrence rate and suggested sample sizes for thematic analysis. Read More: http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/03.CP.3.4