What qualitative approach is describing and interpreting a culture sharing group?

3.1 Introduction

This chapter details the research process the author employed in depth, highlighting the underpinning paradigm, methodology, methods, data analysis process, and trustworthiness measures. The underpinning philosophy, interpretivisim, is the theoretical foundation of the qualitative research methodology: phenomenological ethnography. Such a foundation not only offers an etic-emic-combined lens through which to view the research context but also a hermeneutic approach to interpreting data. As mentioned, phenomenological ethnography, which combines hermeneutic phenomenology and ethnography, is the methodology for the current research, and it requires a series of fieldwork research methods to be employed to collect data. These research methods include: participant observation online and offline, ethnographic interviews, phenomenological interviews, analysis of the research participants’ class materials and teaching diary, and using the researcher as a tool.

Just as interpretivisim in current research deters an etic-emic combined vision to read the research (that will be covered in later sections), the ethnographor’s positionality and reflexivity symbolize such a vision. The data analysis includes three stages, including a thick description, case studies, and theory generation; and in more detail, qualitative data analysis techniques, such as life histories, thematic analysis, discourse and multimodal discourse analysis, and systematic and cross cases comparison to carry out the three steps of data analysis. Positionality and reflexivity are employed to reflect the nature of interpretivist research; this lets the readers know the entire study offer nothing but the author’s interpretation of reality. To increase readability and benefit readers, the map (Fig. 3.1) has been produced.

Fig. 3.1

Map of the research design

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3.2 Philosophical Paradigms: Interpretivisim

Interpretivisim is the philosophy underpinning the current study. Interpretivisim does not argue that reality is objective and independent of beholders’ observation, but rather that the world is a complexity of multiple realities, subjectively understood according to the beholders’ values and interactions via certain social, historical, and cultural contexts (Creswell, 2013; Hammond & Wellington, 2012; Lincoln & Denzin, 2011; Yin, 2014).

When defining multiple realities interpretivist researchers pose research questions that are relatively open-ended, amiable, and exploratory, to encourage participants to relinquish their mental barriers to allow the truth to emerge (Creswell, 2013). They also ensure research is undertaken that pays attention to their own background and identity, the process(es) of interaction with the participants, and the embedded research environment, potentially influencing the data; the research they produce then offers their own interpretation of the data with some bias reflecting their backgrounds (Creswell, 2013).

Generally speaking, the difference between interpretivisim and positivism research is that the former confirms the subjectivity of the study, and is proactive about demonstrating it, while the latter attempts to avoid discussions of subjectivity. However, research cannot avoid being subjective (Yin, 2014).

3.3 Methodology

3.3.1 Ethnography

Ethnographic studies support a qualitative approach, comprising extended participant observation periods and ethnographic interviews (Christensen, 2011; Creswell, 2013), in which researchers investigate and interpret the meaning of values, behaviours, thought processes, customs, the interactions of members, and the communal language in a shared culture (Harris, 1968). EAP teachers in Shanghai, as a subculture group, lack contextualised and in-depth research for interpreting their cultural “totem”. This rationale fits well with the objective of ethnography, which is to explore the underlying meaning of behaviours and beliefs (Wolcott, 2008).

Contrasting with other forms of qualitative or quantitative research, data collection and analysis in ethnographic design is spiral, and should not be expected to be planned in a traditional order, such as when designing research techniques to data collection and data analysis, as followed by interpretation (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007; O’Reilly, 2008). Ethnography is very similar to the natural process people use to understand phenomena; understanding increases as people interpret their observations in context. Sometimes, something suddenly happens that can change established impressions. People then renew the established understanding. As O’Reilly (2008, p. 190) states, “Doing ethnography mirrors … how we all learn about things in our daily lives”.

Similar to unknown expenditure, ethnography causes researchers to remain in a state of “waiting for surprise”, although they may also prepare research questions. These are just initial directions, they may “know very little about your (their) topic (s)…might not even know who … to talk to … or where to go to… certainly might not know what questions to ask” (O’Reilly, 2008, p. 190). Faced with unfamiliarity, ethnographers might therefore be unable to produce a rigid research design; instead, as Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) suggest, they might act naturally. Similarly, when Nader (1986, p. 98) sought advice from Kluckhohn, a famous anthropologist in the US, the advice he received was, “Go forth and do likewise”.

It is therefore unsurprising that Christensen (2011) lists “researchers” as one of the three pillars of ethnographic fieldwork. Indeed, the interpersonal charisma and communication craft of the researcher determines the extent to which he/she secures access to the field and the richness of the data. Importantly, however, “Ethnographic fieldwork and writing take a long time. They depend on intimate ties and attachments, and they entail a good deal of travelling” (Scheper-Hughes, 1992, p. 534).

3.3.2 Phenomenology

Phenomenology emerged as a critical reflection of the popularity of “scientism” in philosophy in the nineteenth century, echoing the ancient Greek philosopher seeking wisdom (Stewart & Mickunas, 1990) and drawing a stark boundary between the natural-physical sciences and people’s lived experience. Within phenomenology, there is a process of division between transcendental/psychological phenomenology, which objectively seeks descriptive phenomena, forsaking the researchers’ hermeneutic experiences (Creswell, 2013; Moustakas, 1994) and interpretive/hermeneutic phenomenology, confirming the subjective hermeneutics of the phenomenon itself (Riazi, 2016; Van Manen, 2014). In the current study, the phenomenology under discussion draws on both interpretive and hermeneutic strands.

Derived from Husserl’s belief that the human consciousness is free from any presuppositions, phenomenological researchers admit the “social world is nothing other than our interpretations” (Pring, 2015, p. 99). They further acknowledge that people’s experiences of the world are often selective, and dependent on the needs of consciousness; especially on whether an experience is one of joy, pain, or danger. Thus, experiences hold significant meaning, according to how an individual realises them. However, the experiences of different people could be perceived differently according to their consciousness. That is, the world cannot be interpreted with objectivity (Pring, 2015). In other words, everyone’s perception of the world differs.

The nature of individualised consciousness means each person makes sense of things according to their own personalised life experiences. Experience therefore works as a len, filtering everything that one perceives. As Schutz (1964) analogised, when an individual is a newcomer, he/she already carries with him/her preconceptions based on his/her previous life experiences. The result can often be a failure to understand the meanings of what is taking place in unfamiliar contexts. Thus, in order to survive in a new place, an individual need to learn to express the novel preconceptions of local people.

Generally speaking, the hermeneutic phenomenology paradigm belongs to interpretivisim, confirming people or social actors living in multiple realities and living by their own rules for survival, also having the following features (Curtis, 1978, in Cohen, Manion, and Morrison, 2011, p. 18):

1. 1.

   A belief in the importance, and in a sense the primacy, of subjective consciousness;

2. 2.

   An understanding of consciousness as active, as meaning bestowing; and

3. 3.

   A claim that there are certain essential structures to consciousness of which we gain direct knowledge by a certain kind of reflection. Exactly what these structures are is a point about which phenomenologists have differed.

Phenomenology was not considered a research methodology until recently (Van Manen, 2014). However, it has been widely adopted for use in the disciplines of sociology, healthcare, psychology and education (Creswell, 2013). It supports researchers acknowledging subjectivity in human lived experience and psychological experience, and phenomenological studies are concerned with interpreting the social actors’ common experiences in a phenomenon (e.g., experience of having cancer) (Creswell, 2013) via in-depth and multiple interviews, observations, and documentary analysis (Van Manen, 2014). More precisely: “phenomenology concentrates on the need to study human consciousness by focusing on the world that the study participants subjectively experience… (in order to achieve) deeper insights into human nature” (Maggs-Rapport, 2000, p. 221). As has been stated in the research rationale, all EAP teachers hold different epistemologies concerning relevant concepts, as well as personal recognition and experience of the pedagogical transition, and clarifying the insider teachers’ interpretation of their experience, and ethnographic decoding the cultural totem of Shanghai EAP teachers, enriches their understanding as a cultural group.

3.3.3 Phenomenological Ethnography

Adaptations of ethnography have evolved in recent years; for example, critical ethnography, feminist ethnography, linguistic ethnography, interpretive ethnography, narrative ethnography, and phenomenological ethnography (Wolcott, 1999). Drawing on the characteristics of both approaches, phenomenological ethnography makes it possible to “discover how people construct their own cultural and political subjectivity within the context” (Gabay, 2015, p. 8). Sorrell and Redmond (1995), and as Van Manen (2014) once stressed, highlights the distinctions between the two approaches: with ethnography probing the rituals of a culture, phenomenology unveiling the meaning of a phenomenon; and ethnographers acting as observers in the cultural field, while hermeneutic phenomenologists interpret research participants’ experiences of phenomena.

Despite the potential differences between their affordances and objectives, these two approaches share a wealth of similarities, justifying the significance of phenomenological ethnography to the current study. As two of the three sub-branches of naturalistic or interpretivist philosophy (Cohen et al., 2011), both are exploratory research and welcome multiple realities in the subjective sense (Gabay, 2015). Ethnographers do not base their studies on armchair hypotheses, nor do they use data to support a decontextualised research hypothesis (O’Reilly, 2008), rather, similar to phenomenologists, they suspend all their presumptions before approaching data (Creswell, 2013). Both approaches require researchers to clarify their preconceptions of studies, and their positionality and reflexivity (Creswell, 2013) in order to demonstrate the limited nature of the researchers’ interpretation, showcasing studies as revealing the subjective hermeneutics of the participants and researchers (Harper, 2012; Riazi, 2016; Van Manen, 2014); the procedures when handling these studies are generally similar, both adopt interviews, observations, and documentary analysis, and both require the researcher to act as the instrument of data collection (Christensen, 2011; Gabay, 2015). However, differences exist in terms of the necessity for naturalistic fieldwork, as phenomenological methods do not demand the researcher to enter the field (Gabay, 2015), and the impromptu and on-site nature of ethnographic interviews differ from the repetitive and prolonged off-site interviews demanded by phenomenology (Gabay, 2015; Ogden & Roulon, 2009). There are notable possibilities and potential benefits for combining the best practices of both methodologies into phenomenological ethnography.

Maggs-Rapport (2000, p. 223) claims the following as advantages of phenomenological ethnography:

1. 1.

   Both researcher and participant are empowered to play an important role in the research study for both are essential elements of data collection analysis;

2. 2.

   The provision of a more holistic outlook;

3. 3.

   Offers both an element of descriptive narrative and wider interpretation (data triangulation); and

4. 4.

   Promotes both methodological and data triangulation suggesting a more thorough research base.

Traditional ethnography relies on ethnographers’ contextual observations, and the entire data set being produced as the result of the researchers’ second hand interpretation (Christensen, 2011; Creswell, 2013); whereas, phenomenological ethnography includes the hidden voices of the research participants when deriving meaning from contexts to which traditional ethnography would not afford equal importance. Phenomenologists are concerned especially with how people comprehend their own social world, and how they describe their experiences in reference to context (Sorrell & Redmond, 1995). This thereby empowers the researcher and participants to contribute to the research. Traditional ethnography has been criticised for dwelling on researchers’ observations at a fixed time and space, with insufficient consideration for either the past or the future: “phenomenological ethnography interrogates the approach of simply studying a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time” (Gabay, 2015, p. 8). Therefore, inviting the contributions of research participants who have experienced the past and are involved in planning for the future should make the study more holistic. Just as Pring (2015, p. 101) claims, “one might go further and seek to explain why people behaved in the way they did by trying to re-enact their life history, of which this particular action is part” in order to surpass superficial understandings of phenomena and encompass alternative possibilities.

Data and methodological triangulation are defined by Lincoln and Denzin (2011) as two of the four basic instruments of triangulation in social research, intended to ensure research is both ethnographic and phenomenological, and enriched by data comprising a naturalistic narrative, and leading to an understanding of culture and its actors both contextually and historically. Hermeneutic phenomenology, which differs from a structured data analysis of transcendental phenomenology (Creswell, 2013; Moustakas, 1994), “cannot be fitted to a rule book, an interpretive schema, a set of steps, or a systematic set of procedures” (Van Manen, 2014, p. 31), as it could fail to capture the subtlety and complexity of human consciousness. Therefore, merging phenomenology into ethnography would not alter the procedures for doing ethnography, it would just add to the research by requiring one or two methods, such as repetitive and in-depth unstructured interviews and analysis of the participants’ personal teaching blogs; although all the results would be pooled together and discussed thematically.

In a current study of teachers transiting from teaching EGP to EAP, the data benefited from combining both ethnography and phenomenology to contribute to the research rationale. The ethnographic data derived from participating and observing the EAP teachers’ teaching and their contexts complemented previous decontextualised studies in EAP teacher development; while the phenomenological data came from tracing the EAP teachers’ professional experiences in a demographic and historical manner, seeking an understanding of their transition more metaphysically and personally, rather than from the onlookers’ angles. This explains how phenomenological ethnography is utilised in context.

3.4 Fieldwork Methods

3.4.1 Participant and Non-participant Observations

Participant observation can be regarded as the foundation of ethnography as Christensen (2011) implied; the researcher enters the field and deduces information independently. For example, Harper (2012, 2016) ate, slept, and worked with homeless people in the US to interpret the status quo of that subculture, representing a model of participant observation, and Patrick (2013), a former teacher, assumed the role of a member of a gang in Glasgow, attending gangster gatherings and participating in conversations and other activities to understand them. As is the case with espionage, without entering and becoming a participant in the field, an ethnographer will not be able to gain an insider’s view.

In this study, the researcher followed and sometimes participated in EAP teachers’ daily activities, both online and off-line. Apart from the already established relationships with EAP teachers, which were maintained by frequently seeing and speaking with them, the researcher was invited to join a WeChat (a social media app) friends list and participate in chat rooms (designed for EAP teachers to communicate with each other and with their students). This made it possible to support observation of some of the arguments and opinions shared about EAP. Becoming a member of the EAP community enabled the researcher to contribute new ideas and to comment on the topics introduced. Furthermore, to connect with some EAP teachers, the researcher was invited into classrooms to interact with students to tutor some of them. This made the researcher more likely to gain an insider’s perspective of the teachers’ views and the problems they encounter.

Non-participant classroom observation was also used. The data obtained from both the programme setting (such as the way in which the teacher arranges classroom activities and the feedback and instructions given to students) and the human setting (such as students’ genuine reactions to the EAP lesson) (Morrison, 1993).

3.4.2 Ethnographic and Phenomenological Interviews

Discussing the style of ethnographic interviews, Hammond and Wellington (2012, p. 104) stated that, “Ethnographers are long familiar with less formal, more conversational styles of interviewing”. This type of interview requires ethnographers to start short and seemingly casual conversations with research participants and researchers, showing interest in the behaviour of the participants, in order to explore a more contextual understanding (Ogden & Roulon, 2009). This type of interview approach benefits the current study, as it means when the researcher identifies an interesting teaching practice among EAP teachers, further explanation can then be sought from the teachers, and if the researcher notices members’ ideas or activities then a further explanation can be provided by insiders.

However, such interviews are bound up with naturalistic context and ideas can be too quick to develop; therefore, Maggs-Rapport (2000) commented that only focusing on things that happen in a particular space and time can prove inadequate to understand the research participants at the historical and metaphysical level. Thus, the current research also employed decontextualised unstructured interviews, or phenomenological interviews to repeatedly and insightfully enquire about the research participants’ (EAP teachers) experiences during their pedagogical transition, and the factors that influence the participants’ lived experiences (Creswell, 2013).

In unstructured interviews, no interview guides or lists of questions are prepared; and interviews can sometimes originate from a single preliminary question or brief reference to a topic. The flow and quality of the interview are all determined by the closeness of the relationship between the two parties and the social skills of the interviewers (Hammond & Wellington, 2012). Held in a casual environment, unstructured interviews were beneficial for the proposed study, because teachers were more open and relaxed in some informal encounters, such as in cafés or restaurants; the more often the researcher met with individuals in casual settings, the lower they set their mental barriers, and the greater the likelihood that their true feelings were revealed, illustrating a key benefit of prolonged engagement in the field; the research participants were able to quickly voice their opinions. Not all the interviews in this study were face-to-face, and social media apps were used to carry out follow-up interviews with teachers and students when face-to-face interactions were impossible.

3.4.3 Researcher as Tool: Etic and Emic

In ethnography and phenomenology, the researcher should position himself or herself to act as a useful research tool to generate knowledge; because, as Christensen (2011) emphasised, the interpersonal skills and sociability of the researcher to a large extent determine the quality of an ethnography research. In other words, the extent to which the research participants see the ethnographer as one of their “peers” influences their behaviour and determines the quality of the ethnographic data obtained by the researcher (Christensen, 1999). This is why ethnographers negotiate their possible identities/identity from the perspective of their participants (as stated by Christensen, 1999; Liang, 2015).

Conversely, from the participants’ perspective, the ethnographer’s empathy as a participant is vital (Nadia, 2013). In the case of Nadia (2013), who was sometimes also a participant in the online innovative learning space communities under investigation, this involved sharing the feelings and experiences of others. Establishing the author’s empathy or personal feelings and experiences as an involved member also contributed to the cultural interpretation.

Therefore, in the current study, to gain access to and understand the EAP teacher community from the inside, an intimacy with EAP teachers (Scheper-Hughes, 1992) was established based on interpersonal relationships between the author and EAP teachers. The researcher was furthermore directly involved with some of the participant teachers’ EAP activities.

Emic (insiders) and etic (outsiders) perspectives are equally important for the current study. According to Berry (1999), researchers should not aim to be exclusively insiders emic or etic. Employing common sense, when conducting a top-down approach the etic perspective “echoes an outsider’s presentation of reality” and “conforms with the scientific approach to research pertaining to an objective reality… and use logical scientific analysis… to explain social phenomena” (Riazi, 2016, p. 3007). In contrast, emic perspectives are most useful with a bottom-up approach, which attempts to understand social phenomena from the viewpoint of insiders. This fits with an ethnographic directive to researchers to “address the questions that are important to the participants’ lives so that they can relate themselves to the questions and find values in discussing them… (and) to learn the special terms and words (emic terms) they use… (which) may not be used and accessible elsewhere” (Riazi, 2016, p. 2917). Thus, the contradiction between etic and emic characterises the conflicted relationship presents in positivist and interpretivist research, and explains why many scholars claim ethnographic research should only be performed by insiders.

However, for an ethnographer to be wholly an insider is impossible according to Wolcott (1999, p. 150), who observes, “by definition, the ethnographer was always an outsider for whom virtually everything could be regarded as ‘different’”. This is because, in many settings, ethnographers are frequently attempting to infiltrate an unknown discourse to which they do not originally belong. Moreover, perception of the ethnographer as an outsider is unavoidable for research participants. In the case of this study, as the author is not a colleague of the EAP teachers in Shanghai who comprise the research participants, thus, it is inevitable that the target group’s culture would inevitably blend with my preconceptions and interpretations. Similarly, as “ethnography [is] grounded in the study of differences” (Wolcott, 1999, p. 151), being completely immersed into the insiders’ view with no access to the outsiders’ view, would not be a holistic way in which to understand the target culture. To remedy this, Rogoff (2003) suggests a “derived” etic approach, which welcomes cross-cultural comparison and contextual interpretations; thus, Hammond and Wellington (2012, p. 72) claim that a single account can include both perspectives, as long as “the etic may be, and frequently is, developed from emic accounts, though emic accounts may be valued in their own right”.

Thus, in the current study, potential preconceptions and the experience of entering the field were acknowledged as components of positionality, not only symbolising how the researcher differed from real emic research participants, but also describing how preconceptions inform knowledge production. The researcher’s roles in the different contexts presented by each case further revealed how the researcher’s identity, regardless of whether etic or emic, influences data production. When taking on an emic identity, the researcher sometimes directly participated in the teaching and communication of EAP to students; whereas, his etic identity emerged because, as a researcher from Hong Kong, the investigated teachers and students never mistook him for their peers. Therefore, this research was both etic and emic in character, making it possible to formulate broader holistic findings.

3.4.4 Documentary Analysis

The current study applied documentary analysis to investigate the relevant textbooks, PowerPoint slides, preparation of materials for classroom activities, documents describing teachers’ communication, teachers’ blended EAP teaching materials, personal online blogs on EAP teachers’ experiences, feedback on students’ assignments, and their published materials regarding EFL or EAP, in order to establish the content covered proportional to the themes featuring EAP teachers. By definition, documentary analysis is “concerned with the problems of selection and evaluation of evidence” (Robson, 2011, p. 187), which “has as its central feature an inscribed text” (Scott, 1990, p. 5). Some teachers’ EAP teaching experiences were recorded along with their emotional and metaphysical responses in personal diaries, which can be analysed as exemplifying the participants’ awareness of their own experiences in pedagogical transition. This feature of phenomenological research makes it possible to understand insiders’ interpretations of their contextual experiences (Maggs-Rapport, 2000).

3.5 Positionality and Reflexivity

Interpretivisim is a paradigm that requires acknowledgement of research as value-laden (Hammond & Wellington, 2012) and knowledge as situated (Thomas, 2011). Positionality and reflexivity are employed as approaches to reflect this. Positionality is an explanatory process that involves unpicking the researchers’ background, assumptions, values, and intentions when conducting a study, to justify how identity might influence the research itself (Hammond & Wellington, 2012). In this study, positionality, combined with the author’s impetus when doing the research and accounting for the authors’ field experience is described. In order to avoid what Hammond and Wellington (2012) described as the narcissistic and self-indulgent potential of positionality, the researcher only offers examples of field experience rather than narrating his life history, and frequently referring to the research aims. Thus, positionality confirms the researcher’s “lens”, being bound with his own background assumptions; whereas reflexivity is a specific “snapshot”, as seen through a “lens”.

More specifically, reflexivity is the practice of positionality, or the researchers’ interpretation of how their own values influence concrete research processes and outcomes (Hammond & Wellington, 2012; Riazi, 2016) (see Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2

The relationship between positionality and reflexivity

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Another explanation afforded by Rose (2001, p. 130) is that “reflexivity is an attempt to resist the universalising claims of academic knowledge and to insist that academic knowledge like all other knowledge, is situate and partial”. Harper (2012) compares this to reflexive filmmaking; demonstrating to audiences the processes of making a film and notifying the audience that the film is fiction rather than reality. Ethnography was once marginalised as “not scientific and not objective” and viewed as an over-indulgence in social research (Harper, 2012). However, as Yin (2014) argues, research is never wholly objective. On the creation of the term reflexivity to recognise the researchers’ subjectivity, ethnography is finally revived, but sarcastically. In ethnography, a practice exists in which the researcher admits his/her values relating to the research; formerly this was not termed reflexivity (Harper, 2012).

Reflexivity as currently understood has two subdivisions, objectivist and epistemological reflexivity; the former attempts to objectively bracket the researchers’ influence on participants. It is frequently used in transcendental phenomenology; while the latter confirms the researchers’ epistemology when co-constructing research outcomes that are suitable for hermeneutic phenomenology (Creswell, 2013; Riazi, 2016).

In practice, reflexivity means accepting a stakeholder’s interaction is a component of the research (Finlay, 1998). For example, Mazzoli Smith and Campbell (2012), who studied gifted children in working-class families in northern England, found that during each interview, the couples being interviewed would look at each other, intending to obtain the other’s support before or while speaking. They sometimes also complemented the other if they did not want to lose the researcher’s esteem, which indicated that their answers were partially constructed under the influence of the presence of the researchers and the other stakeholders. When Liang (2015) researched Cantonese speaking among pupils and their associated identity, some of the pupils with parents from places other than Canton chose not to speak their mind when interviewed, to save face with the other (Cantonese) participants and Liang herself (who is Cantonese).

Considering the above, careful attention was paid throughout this research to the effects of context, and other influential non-verbal symbols on the participants (e.g. how you felt; how others told you they felt; background murmurs; and, misunderstandings that were later clarified). These potential influences will be examined from a narrative viewpoint, which also works to report the researchers’ personal contribution to the findings (O’Reilly, 2008, p. 195). Meanwhile, as advised by Liang (2015) and Harper (2016), the researchers’ role is also negotiated in respect of the participants’ points of view. As Pink (2003, p. 187) argues, “reflexivity should be integrated fully into processes of fieldwork and visual or written representation in ways that do not simply explain the researcher’s approach but reveal the very processes by which the positioning of researcher and informant were constituted and through which knowledge was produced during the fieldwork”.

3.6 Plan for Data Analysis and Organisation

In this study, the data is analysed and organised into three stages, as shown in the illustration below (Fig. 3.3). In the first stage of the data analysis, the researcher describes the context of the field, and uses a first person angle to describe how he gained access to EAP teacher communities in Shanghai, as well as his encounters and experiences of meeting people when conducting fieldwork. This contributes to a thick description of the setting, to establish the background to the story and the researcher’s positionality.

Fig. 3.3

The data analysis process

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At the second stage, the researcher carefully examines data from multiple sources for each teacher; for example, interviews, observations, and documents from both the etic and emic view. The researcher concludes by elaborating key concepts featuring different aspects of the teachers’ experiences of EAP. At the third stage, all the concepts derived from each EAP teacher, in conjunction with some excerpts from thick descriptions of the researchers’ other experiences and feelings are integrated and categorised relative to the research questions, in order to produce an anthropological interpretation of the EAP teachers’ culture in transition in Shanghai.

3.6.1 Thick Description: The First Layer of Data

A so-called thick description, is one in which, as described by Hammond and Wellington (2012, p. 61) “a detailed account of an aspect of human behaviour through reference to the context in take place”. Narrative, as shown by its literal meaning, is a form of storytelling, demonstrating “the way participants make meaning of the events that shape the way, in which they have lived their lives” (Hammond & Wellington, 2012, p. 120), or how the hero/heroine in the story understands their own life. In the ethnographic tradition, there is a tradition of analysis that is enriched by thick description and narrative. O’Reilly (2008) states that this allows the data to have its own voice.

Scott (1985) emphasises the purpose of such links between thick descriptions and data analysis in ethnography as intended to inform readers. However, O’Reilly’s (2008) interpretation is somewhat easier to follow. He references two of his former students’ ethnographic research. Firstly, Frederick, who investigated the experiences of two males who gave up their jobs to look after their children full-time and narrated two stories about them. Frederick carried out a thematic analysis based on hands-on fieldwork and later found the life details informing the narratives could (one was a single parent and the other had a wife who worked full-time) mirror the thematic findings well (that men felt guilty staying at home doing nothing when women were working hard outside the home). Secondly, Claire carried out ethnographic fieldwork with fishermen in a village for over a year; when she started to write her thesis, she was unsure of whether she was being too descriptive when introducing the research field and the people involved within it. In contrast, O’Reilly (2008) reassured her that a thick description of the context and people is a prerequisite to delivering a convincing argument overall. As O’Reilly (2008, p. 203) argues, “What appears to be merely descriptive is actually part of the analysis”. In other words, if readers are not aware of the details relating to the field and other people, they might be less able to comprehend lives and cultural implications that are outside their experience.

In the current study, the researcher employs a thick description, concretely depicting his experiences of entering the research field to explain how he encountered the research participants. Furthermore, the author describes the transformation of his metaphysical movement throughout the entire research process: ranging from his original perception of the EAP reform in Shanghai and his initial impressions of what EAP teachers were like, to how these perceptions transformed as he became immersed in the field. The author particularly describes his identity as a scholar from Hong Kong in contrast to the EAP teachers in the field. All these descriptions expose to the reader the subjectivity and bias the author used when interpreting the EAP teachers’ words and actions.

3.6.2 Multiple Case Studies: The Second Layer of Data

Multiple case studies explore the uniqueness and complexity of several issues that are related to each other and normally conducted in naturalised environments; a thick description of reflexivity from the researcher’s and participants’ identity, relationships and their produced influence on data is often discussed (Bassey, 2012; Cohen et al., 2011; Pring, 2015; Robson, 2011; Stake, 1994; Thomas, 2011). This is similar to the four case studies in the current research, which all begin with a phase, introducing the life history of the teachers, followed by a report of reflexivity, describing how the author interacted with them and how the relationship grew and influenced the knowledge produced, and finally how to outline the perceptions of each character at the end of each case by using thematic analysis, discourse analysis and multimodal discourse analysis.

3.6.2.1 Life Histories

Life histories as a qualitative data analysis method (Cohen et al., 2011) were used to introduce the research participant teachers, and their general experience of EAP. A primary reason for introducing these teachers was to contextualise the readers with as many thick descriptions as possible, as required by ethnographer experts like O’Reilly (2008). Apart from this, the life history of the participants enriched the research with a more longitudinal eye witness perspective on their experience of the EAP pedagogy transition themselves: life histories could expose “the inner experience of individuals, how they interpret, understand, and define the world around them” (Faraday & Plummer, 1979, p. 776). In other words, the heroes of a saga know most about their experience and themselves. This quality is absent from most social research methods, not only because they have a limited view (Payne and Payne, 2004), but also because most methods tend to ignore the phenomenological emotions and metaphysics of research participants (Pring, 2015). Thus, the researcher collected clues from interviews with the research participants, examining some materials provided by them, and the hearsay of others while conducting fieldwork to compile a life history of each participant teacher’s experience with EAP. Each piece of the history was returned to the teachers for member checking and trustworthiness (Creswell, 2013).

3.6.2.2 Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis was used to link verbal interview data with the aspects about each EAP teacher participant. Discourse analysis as a qualitative data analysis technique “of ‘reading’ texts, conversations, and documents…explores the connections between language…and social practices” (Muncie, 2006, p. 2). After the manual transcription of the interviews and ethnographic field notes was completed by the researcher, the transcription was read carefully to extract commonalities to describe the characteristics of each teacher during the pedagogic transition.

Multimodal discourse analysis was also used to analyse the non-verbal data collected from the research participants, such as pictures, screenshots from the internet, and teaching materials related to research in current research. It is an approach that “focuses on how meaning is made through the use of multiple modes of communication as opposed to just language” (Jones, 2013, p. 1). Multilmodal data is particularly abundant in this ethnography, because much of the data were obtained through the researcher observing the participants online, and screenshotting some critical moments. Furthermore, the teachers also offered samples of their teaching material, some of which was in the form of pictures.

3.6.2.3 Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis was another important data analysis method used to describe each teacher case. It is based on themes, and each theme can describe some features of data. The common stages of a thematic analysis include, e.g., transcribing and inputting materials, developing thematic categories derived either from literature reviews or taking the form of emergent inspiration from the data, and coding of relevant content under each possible category and theme (Sage Research Methods, 2016). In each case, many themes were extracted to describe the characteristics of the teachers, and there are some predefined themes like the teachers’ definition of EAP, but the majority of the themes drew on inspiration when interacting with the participant teachers. Thus, the themes in each case were combined to describe the respective teachers transitioning to EAP.

3.6.2.4 Producing Theories: The Third Layers of Data

This portion of the data analysis was intended to formulate a discussion chapter to answer the three research questions. In other words, all the previous data was deconstructed, compared and organized by research question. According to Cohen et al. (2011, p. 552), organizing data underneath each research question can provide “relevant data for the exact issue of concern”; it affords a systematic comparison among data from different sources and increases the coherence of the materials (Becker & Geer, 1960) (for example, the researcher used several rounds of interview results, observation, and relevant documents to explore each particular teacher’s circumstance and he also used his ethnographers’ etic-emic-combined vision to compare the phenomenological perspective of the teachers’ as insiders). It also supports cross case comparisons, meaning “examination of …a collection of cases in order to learn something about a concept, theory, social process, and so on” (Schwandt, 2011, p. 2), in order to summarize the commonalities and difference among the four EAP teachers.

As with other qualitative research, ethnography, although claimed to be a spiral process of data analysis (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007), also needs to extract common themes or concepts from the collected data to reveal the hidden meaning associated with the culture under investigation. The formulation of thematic concepts is often written once the author concludes thick description and narratives, and by the matising data, the researcher interprets meaning with “startling facts, themes and patterns (derived from the data), or (and) for inconsistencies which need explaining” (O’Reilly, 2008, p. 205). However, either the researcher or the participants can identify key concepts. In the case of concepts derived from the data, ethnographers base their theories upon them. Theories are composed and integrated by extracting principles from concepts, in order to explain and interpret cultural behaviour and to fulfil the aim of the research questions (O’Reilly, 2008).

3.7 Trustworthiness

In interpretivist research, Hartas (2010) suggests using trustworthiness to replace the positivist measures, validity and reliability (Hammond & Wellington, 2012) to ensure the research is rigorous. Creswell (2013, pp. 243–245) recommends a set of approaches to guarantee the trustworthiness of qualitative research, the majority of which are considered in the current ethnography (see Fig. 3.4): “prolonged engagement and persistent observation”, “triangulation”, “clarifying researchers’ bias”, “member checking”, “thick description”, and “external audits”. Prolonged engagement and persistent observation are core requirements when completing an ethnography, as is the clarification of researcher bias, positionality and reflexivity, and a thick description of research field. Member checking is also carried out by sharing the narrative accounts with the research participants and inviting them to check them. External audits, in which supervisors are invited to perform quality controls, are also performed. Triangulation is realised through both methodological and data triangulation, after the philosophical and methodological blending of phenomenological ethnography, as discussed in the preceding chapters.

Fig. 3.4

Approaches to maintaining trustworthiness

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3.8 Generalisability

Generalisability or representativeness is a consideration that frequently arises in criticisms of ethnography (O’Reilly, 2008). As a case study form (Hammond & Wellington, 2012), ethnography faces the same challenges as case study research in terms of its limitations as regards representing a sufficiently representative population (Yin, 2014). As a highly contextualised research methodology, subject to the researchers’ interpretation, and aiming to enrich people’s awareness of a certain culture, criticism of statistical generalisation is inappropriate (Yin, 2014). However, in contributing to the theories posed, it is indeed generalisable; and is termed analytical generalisation (Yin, 2014). In other words, theories generalised in the current case might allow people to learn lessons and reflect on other contexts. Ethnography is a research method that avoids brining preconceptions into the research arena, including into the research design (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Representativeness is essential, beginning with the sampling method. However, regardless of what kind of sampling is performed (i.e. predefining sample size, age group, genders, work experiences, etc.), it is likely to reflect somewhat the assumptions or theories associated with the research forms. Such idea is inconsistent with the naturalness of ethnography (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Similarly, before entering into the field, it is also impossible to predict whom the researcher might meet, as ethnography by nature is a sequential or spiral approach (O’Reilly, 2008).

3.9 Ethical Concerns

The necessary written confirmation was attained from the Shanghai EAP teachers themselves. This followed distribution of letters seeking informed consent (following gatekeepers to institutes recognising HKIED, now EdUHK) from the relevant departments and research participants (disseminating information concerning the research aims and processes), expressing the participants’ rights to participate voluntarily and withdraw at any time, and any benefits and potential dangers (none are foreseen) of the research. The names of the participants and institutions were coded for anonymity, and their answers secured on a password-protected personal computer, in order to ensure their confidentiality.

3.10 Summary

Influenced by interpretivisim, the current research adopted a phenomenological ethnographic methodology. When completing the fieldwork, ethnographic and phenomenological interviews, participant and non-participant observations were used to provide the etic and the emic perspectives of the teacher cohort. Additionally, a documentary analysis of teachers’ teaching materials, lesson preparation materials, and some of the teachers’ diaries were carefully integrated into the rest of the data. The researchers’ reports regarding reflexivity and positionality were mentioned in order to corroborate the ethnographic data. The collected data was also analysed in a three-layered process, a thick description, case studies teachers, and thematic analysis. Trustworthiness was guaranteed via a “prolonged engagement and persistent observation”, “triangulation”, “clarifying researchers’ bias”, “member checking”, “thick description”, and “external audits”. Generalisability was then maintained analytically.

Which qualitative approach is focused on describing interpreting or understanding a culture

Which type of qualitative research focuses on the study of culture?

Which qualitative research explores the characteristics of culture

What are the 5 qualitative approaches?