Hence in my project, research design, finding a class who could and would participate in the research, and building trust between myself and these participants were simultaneous, overlapping, and ongoing processes rather than individual events. I negotiated “site entry” (Erikson, 1986) with a proposed format in mind for both the diary and other elements of the broader ethnographic methodology (see above), but also hoped participants would actively help shape the research design, subsequently fine-tuning my approach in line with the circumstances (both physical and social) and recommendations of the teacher and learners (adjusting, for instance, the diary guidelines offered to participants [see below], the time demands placed on them, and so forth).
Ethical considerations were also, of course, central to these processes. Given the project’s focus on “the social classroom” and possible differences between participants’ perspectives of classroom life and events, I had initially speculated that a class with social “difficulties,” where the smooth flow of classroom interaction might break down for whatever reason, might provide more “interesting” data; the “gap” noted in Block’s (1996) diary study, for example, was between a teacher and a rather critical student, Block’s data suggesting that (some) learners like to know the rationale for classroom activities in addition to how to complete them. And yet, to actively search for a class in which social difficulties were prevalent seemed problematic, and explicitly asking participants to focus on tensions and problems seemed to pose unacceptable social and psychological risks to them (see also, Erikson, 1986). I felt that verbalizing, through a diary, previously unspoken thoughts may reify any negative attitudes the diarists might have, causing a degree of emotional harm, and potentially eroding further classroom relationships, with myself as researcher unable to intervene for reasons which included my lack of training in counselling, insufficient class knowledge, and the potential impact of any intervention on classroom life and the project’s data in contravention of the project’s ethnographic principles.
It therefore seemed important to work with a class whose members liked or interacted positively with each other. Clearly, however, these concepts are difficult to pin down precisely and play out in ways that are changeable and at times difficult to ascertain. Consequently, I relied on the professional expertise of a former colleague (and friend) who suggested that his class in a UK-based private language school might provide an appropriate focus for the research. Yet as the discussion above suggests, the benefits to participants of taking part in a research project are often not clear or straightforward, and participation may not even be in their best interests (Erikson, 1986), particularly, for example, in my diary study, given its likely time demands and its possible inherent social and psychological risks. Thus, for both ethical and practical purposes, my research needed the participants’ informed consent, not only that given at the outset of the project, but as an on-going process throughout the study built on trust and negotiation between myself as researcher and the teacher and learners.
In order to start the project on a sound ethical footing, therefore, once my own institution had assessed the project proposal and given its ethical approval for the study (reviewing an overview of its aims, methodology, consent processes, and documentation, and provision for the safe storage and appropriate use of data), the language school principal, teacher, and learners were approached through letters explaining the study’s rationale and its voluntary nature. Drawing on the conception of the classroom as a social environment, for the learners, the project’s goals were broadly summarized as “how working with others affects the way you learn in class,” while for the language school principal and teacher, this became the slightly more terminological “investigation of the social constraints, which exist on language learners in the language classroom.”
In the interests of both honesty and site entry, I highlighted to learners my friendship with their teacher, anticipating that if they liked him, this might assist in the practical development of the project. Yet is seems possible that the way in which I introduced the project to learners will have affected the data; ties between myself and the teacher may have hindered diarists’ honesty and openness. Meanwhile, although emphasizing that the project was voluntary, power imbalances between myself and the teacher on the one hand, and the learners on the other, meant that my request to participate in the diary study was unlikely to be rejected wholesale.
Consequently, the participants of the diary study were a British teacher and 12 upper-intermediate (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages [CEFR] B2 level) learners from a mainly German or Swiss-German L1 background. Most were female (the teacher was male) and aged between 20 and 30 years old, and data collection took place over a 4-week period. We shall return to participants, the differing ways in which individual diarists contributed to the study’s overall body of data, and what this means for the subsequent analysis, later in the chapter.
Designing the Diaries: Questions and Possibilities
We have already noted that there is no “optimal” or fixed format for ethnographic diaries, and thus, as Blommaert and Jie (2010, p. 10) note, “the process of gathering and molding knowledge is part of that knowledge; knowledge construction is knowledge; the process is the product” (original emphasis). I was thus very aware that the way in which the diaries in my study were designed, as data collection tools, would affect the resultant data and subsequent analysis. Unlike personal diaries that many people keep in order to keep a “life-record” of their experiences, thoughts, and feelings, the diaries that my project’s participants would keep were “solicited,” that is, they were kept at my request and in the knowledge that I would read and analyze what was recorded. At the outset, therefore, I needed to consider, for example, how the diarists would deal with moments of embarrassment and difficulty in their accounts, how would they be truly open and honest, and how would they avoid simply pleasing the reader? Like most researchers engaged in diary studies, I needed to provide participants with guidelines in order to minimize the difficulties around these kinds of issues. Clearly, however, the provision of any guidelines, in addition to the diarists’ own knowledge that their accounts would be read, meant that their diaries had to be regarded as co-constructions by myself as the researcher and the participants as diarists (see also, Mackrill, 2008). A fundamental question when reflecting on the project, therefore, is “how did my research design affect the data?” (Hall, 2008, p. 119), and it is to this that the chapter now turns.
Structured or Unstructured Diaries?
A first key decision, therefore, was the extent to which the diaries should be structured or unstructured. Although ethnographic approaches aim to minimize the effects, disruptions, and distortions of the research process on participants’ experiences and understandings (Alaszewski, 2006, p. 78), the act of keeping a diary was, all the participants reported, a change in their behavior; none otherwise maintained a daily journal or record. Hence, a central tension was how to give the diarists control over what they recorded while recognizing my study’s own focus and goals; in other words, how to attain “relevant data without restricting [their] flow unnecessarily” (Mackrill, 2008, p. 8). Consequently, to what extent should diary entries be the participants’ own “free text” or be structured around a set of guidelines I might provide outlining what the diarists should record?
Thus, in an example of what Casanave (2017, p. 236) identifies as the “struggles, twists and turns” inherent in almost all research projects (but which are often smoothed over or overlooked in final publications), the guidelines to diarists in my study progressed from the former to the latter approach, developing and becoming slightly more structured during the early stages of data collection. Initially asking participants simply to record “anything you think was interesting,” this guidance became more focused at the request of the participants themselves, many of whom had felt slightly lost in the array of possible topics they might document (an example of the diarists themselves shaping the research; see above, “Finding Participants”). Consequently, I asked the