The construction of researcher–researched relationships in school ethnography: doing research, participating in the field and reflecting on ethical dilemmas

Abstract

In qualitative research, the researcher’s engagement over time in participants’ daily lives entails the creation and maintenance of favourable and cooperative field relations. With this aim, it is important to build a reflexive component into the research, exploring how the researcher and researched interact with each other within the context of school and how they are challenged by political and ethical dilemmas. Drawing upon my experience while conducting an ethnographic study in an international school in mainland China, I reflected on two issues: what field relations were established in what ways, and what threads to ethics and research validity I encountered in the course of the fieldwork.

Keywords:

• the researcher–researched relationship
• ethical dilemma
• authenticity

Notes

1. This school has a relatively long history and particularly highlighted inter-cultural understanding in its philosophy. It offered rich opportunities to undertake my inquiry and was stable enough to secure the research.

2. While giving lectures, teachers of different academic subjects come to the fixed classroom according to the timetable.

3. The lead teachers are called ‘Ban Zhu Ren’ in Chinese. According to the MoE’s Temporary Regulations Regarding the Responsibilities of Ban Zhu Ren in Primary and Middle Schools issued in 1998, Ban Zhu Rens are supposed to be the leader, the organiser, and the educator of a class, who are in charge of facilitating students’ academic study, implementing classroom disciplines, organising extra-curricular activities, and keeping in contact with subject teachers and parents involved in this class. In contrast to the general situation in public high schools in China, the lead teachers in this programme do not teach any subjects at the same time as their other duties. Each of them is responsible for managing two classes.

4. In this school, the teacher counsellor was the supervisor of all lead teachers, in charge of student management.

5. All names presented in this paper were pseudonyms.

6. Each letter of the code word SPEAKING represents one of the components of a speech event to be described: settings, participants, ends, act sequence, keys, instrumentalities, norms and genres.

7. All teachers in this school were given free accommodation on campus, but many foreign teachers rent apartments in better conditions downtown.

8. According to the teacher counsellor, the role of ‘researcher’ would be very strange to most field participants because they had never had a researcher in the school before.

9. In many of the students’ eyes, the Chinese term ‘妇女’ (women) conveyed a sense of ‘aged females’. They usually refused to be called women by peers.

10. Usually, there were two kinds of feedback: one was my observation vignette; the other was my discourse analysis of their narratives in interviews. According to the procedure of data analysis, a member check of the former came first.

11. The term ‘criticising’ (translated from ‘批评指正’) was always used by Mrs Zhao to describe the nature of my feedback.