‘It’s important for the students to meet someone like you.’ How perceptions of the researcher can affect gaining access, building rapport and securing cooperation in school-based research

Abstract

Based on research conducted in a secondary school with 13- to 14-year-old students, this article describes and analyses how gatekeepers’ perceptions of the researcher determined access, influenced rapport and cooperation with the students, and defined expectations regarding the researcher’s role within the school. The article also takes into consideration which intersecting social categories gatekeepers, the researcher and the research subjects highlighted and made visible, and which ones were ignored or rendered less visible in the different researcher/gatekeeper and researcher/researched interactions. Social categories were important for understanding how all of the actors in the research process (researcher, researched and gatekeepers) viewed the researcher’s positionality vis-à-vis the young research participants. A type of ‘sliding door’ (‘now you see one, now you see another’) deployment of categories such as race, class, gender and ethnicity framed gatekeepers’ assessment of the possible benefits in enabling researcher access, and impacted on the researcher’s ability to remain reflexive during the research. In addition, the way that gatekeepers perceived the researcher also determined the type of role the researcher was expected to fulfil during the time she spent at the research site. Such expectations affected the researcher’s attempts to build rapport with the students in order to ensure their cooperation during the course of the research.

Keywords:

• school
• young people
• gatekeepers
• social categories
• positionality

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for very constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank Isabel Crowhurst for sisterly cooperation and patience as we worked on editing this Special Issue together.

Notes

1. This concept in borrowed from Nash (2001), who wrote about the ‘undecidability’ of women within liberalism, as a way of explaining the uneven development of their citizenship rights in the British context since the seventeenth century . Nash argued that women represent one part of the public/private binary on which liberalism depends, whilst also being the factor which disrupts this binary (Nash, 2001, p. 255). Similarly, I suggested in my thesis that difference (racialised, ethnic, religious and cultural), represents a key factor in British and French national self-image as tolerant of diversity, whilst also being perceived as the factor which most threatens national cohesion.

2. Following Reeves (2010), I refer to ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ gatekeepers at the school in which I conducted my research: the former occupy formal/official positions of authority (Head Teachers or school Governors, for example), and operate on the ‘front stage’ of institutional school life (Goffman, 1959). Whether or not a researcher gains access to an institution or to ‘vulnerable’ research participants would depend, to a large extent, on formal a gatekeeper’s consent. ‘Informal’ gatekeepers operate on the ‘backstage’ of everyday school life and do not generally have the authority to refuse access to a research site or constituency, but they do have the power to hinder or facilitate the research in a number of ways (teachers or teaching assistants, for example) (see Wanat, 2008, for a discussion of how different ‘back stage’ or informal gatekeepers can hinder or facilitate research at different levels).

3. Students in Year 9 in London were aged 13–14.

4. I could not actually start conducting my research until I had obtained police clearance to work at the school after a Criminal Records Bureau check had been done, to ensure that I had no previous criminal records, which would effectively bar me from being around or working with, children. The check came back with ‘the all clear’ three weeks after the school submitted an application on my behalf.

5. I do acknowledge that my impression of a power shift between my different roles in the classroom might only have been symbolic and might only have been perceived by me and not the students, because irrespective of whether I was in the role of ‘the teacher’ or just a student/researcher/observer, I remained an adult and the students remained children.

6. According to the 2001 UK Census, 54.71% of the area in which Valkries School was located was comprised of people who self-identified as ‘Black’ or ‘Black British’ and 25.73% who self-identified as ‘White’ or ‘White British’.

7. See for example Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Giddens, 1991.

8. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/apr/06/fashion. topstories3, last accessed on May 22nd at 07.19.

9. See http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/huge-new-posh-primark-on-oxford-street-delights-shoppers-and-opens-early-to-avoid-stampede-8159918.html, last accessed on May 22nd at 07.26.