Because of this, I think it would be beneficial to spend some preliminary time during the early stages of my research networking amongst colleagues and schools through conversations, in order to assess whether anyone knows of potential participants. Whilst nothing can be committed to writing before the ethical application has been accepted, I feel if I am able to begin conversations around the topic at an early stage I am more likely to gain an adequate number of potential participants. I also need to consider the possibility that I find it difficult to gain access to one of the groups of participants in particular. In this instance, I feel this would have the least impact if a parent(s) participant was difficult to recruit, or I only managed to gain access to one young person. However, I feel that the key topic of my research needs to have access to at least one young person and an adult from an educational/school background. Whilst ideally, I would have access to teachers, if this became particularly difficult, I feel the research aims would still be met if I were to use another member of staff in a school, for example a Teaching Assistant. With regards to the young people themselves, I am hopeful that at least one young person will be willing to discuss the topic with me. I feel it may also be useful to plan for the event that I am unable to gain all my interview data during the summer. In this case, it would most likely be useful to utilise my time in the summer to organise another area of my research, such as the methodology. This would still mean that I would have little time for data collection and analysis in the autumn, but at least some of my time would have been freed up by having already completed my methodology.
Because of this, I think it would be beneficial to spend some preliminary time during the early stages of my research networking amongst colleagues and schools through conversations, in order to assess whether anyone knows of potential participants. Whilst nothing can be committed to writing before the ethical application has been accepted, I feel if I am able to begin conversations around the topic at an early stage I am more likely to gain an adequate number of potential participants. I also need to consider the possibility that I find it difficult to gain access to one of the groups of participants in particular. In this instance, I feel this would have the least impact if a parent(s) participant was difficult to recruit, or I only managed to gain access to one young person. However, I feel that the key topic of my research needs to have access to at least one young person and an adult from an educational/school background. Whilst ideally, I would have access to teachers, if this became particularly difficult, I feel the research aims would still be met if I were to use another member of staff in a school, for example a Teaching Assistant. With regards to the young people themselves, I am hopeful that at least one young person will be willing to discuss the topic with me. I feel it may also be useful to plan for the event that I am unable to gain all my interview data during the summer. In this case, it would most likely be useful to utilise my time in the summer to organise another area of my research, such as the methodology. This would still mean that I would have little time for data collection and analysis in the autumn, but at least some of my time would have been freed up by having already completed my methodology.
Exploring%20the%20childhood%20and%20educational%20experiences_Final.docx