4.3 Selecting Setting and Participants
Selecting a case is an important factor to rationalise the uniqueness of a qualitative case study, whereas the selected case is a qualitative researcher’s unit of analysis of a single entity or phenomenon in a bounded system of context (Miles & Huberman, 1994).The process of selection unavoidably contains not only the subjective orientation but also manageable effort.A good way to avoid prolonged or aimless research design is to bind a case by time, definition, context and activity (Creswell, 2009; Miles & Huberman, 1994; Stake, 1995; Yin, 2014).The case, not surprisingly, may reflect the characteristics of other similar case(s) within these same domains.However, it is possible to attribute potential applicability to the similar case(s) due to its own parameters.
As to selecting the discipline of International Communications, my original intention was to compare Chinese Humanities students’ and Science students’ disciplinary identities construction in different years.After I received approval from the Heads of the School of Engineering and the School of International Communications (hereinafter IC), I emailed all non-Chinese teachers (in order to maximise the contrast of cultures) in the schools, explaining my research and requesting their participation.Some engineering lecturers refused their seminars to be filmed, though they agreed to be interviewed.Some of them explained that I would not be able to collect as much classroom interaction as I wanted because they only provided the experimental seminars, that is, rather than engaging in discursive classroom interaction, the students were requested to practice experiments in the seminars.
Considering the exploratory nature of my research, I still wanted to collect the data from the engineering lecturers and then decide whether they would be useful or not.I then interviewed four lecturers from Mechanical Engineering and video recorded three of their experimental seminars.When I was trying to transcribe the video recordings, I discovered that there was indeed limited teacher-student discursive interaction involved.I then had to reconsider my research focus.In the meantime, I maintained contact with the lecturers from the School of IC, which consists of the largest number of non-Chinese lecturers and Chinese students in the university.Eventually, three non-Chinese IC lecturers who were conducting four modules for each level of students accepted all of my research requests.
The list of the student participants is summarised in Table 4.2.All names in the table are pseudonymous.Two male and four female IC Chinese students from each of the four years were first approached at the beginning of the filmed seminars.After I explained the project and sought potential participants, by accident rather than design, all of them expressed their willingness to participate.Therefore, these Chinese student participants were chosen on a voluntary basis without considering the variables of gender, learning ability or place of living.Actually, almost all the Chinese students in the school experienced similar Chinese primary and secondary education systems, entered the university with high College Entry Examination scores, and paid the same high tuition fees, due to the institutional entrance restraints.
Table 4.2 Six Chinese student participants
Notes:All pseudonyms.