ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on experiences from my own doctoral research project, conducted from 1998 to 2001, to explore problems I encountered with data analysis, and to describe a variety of techniques that (eventually) helped me transform the data successfully. In short, it is a story about how data analysis was the problem; how (in this case) data synthesis proved a more suitable method for transforming data; and how I learned through this that there is no ‘golden key’, no ‘proper’ method that will unlock our data for us. It is our research enquiry that must drive the methods we adopt, otherwise the risk is that the methods will drive our enquiry – possibly entirely off course. My PhD project focused on the experiences of two sets of learners involved in men-
toring – young ‘disaffected’ people, and university undergraduates who acted as mentors for them – and the meanings they brought to and developed through mentoring. Therefore, I begin by explaining the type of mentoring involved, and the research concerns that this practice posed for me. This includes the identification of particular gaps in existing knowledge about mentoring that I wished to address. After briefly indicating the nature of the research project and the critical interpretive
approach I took, I go on to explore the particular difficulties of making sense of the interview data I had generated with mentors and mentees, giving illustrative examples of different techniques of analysis I applied, and their results. I evaluate the texts I produced at different stages of the research from the perspective of how I presented issues of cultural capital (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) through them. A case study of one particular mentoring relationship is discussed to show how I finally developed a theoretical framework for understanding mentoring as a process of emotional labour to produce specific and gendered forms of cultural capital in both mentor and mentee. However, the struggle to make sense of my data also revealed how I, as the researcher,
needed to be aware of my own power to construct the cultural resources of respondents as cultural capital or as culturally redundant within the educational research field, and the tendency of inappropriate use of research methods both to reinforce and to obscure that power. By the end of this journey, I realised that research questions, researcher values, theoretical understandings, research methods, and a need for sociological reflexivity in
research are all far more inextricably inter-related than I had anticipated at its start. I conclude here by considering the place of methods in qualitative research in this light, especially in the current context of debate about the future of educational research and the dangers of imposed consensus in the field. I turn first to an explanation of the context of my research, starting with a definition of the practice of engagement mentoring that I studied.
Engagement mentoring is a term I have used to designate a particular form of mentoring for socially excluded youth that emerged in the USA in the early 1990s, and in Britain in the latter half of that decade. I have given a fuller account elsewhere of this model of mentoring and the socio-economic context for its development (see Colley 2001a; 2003a; 2003b). Examples include a range of projects funded by the European Youthstart Initiative (Employment Support Unit 2000; Ford 1999) and of local projects funded through the voluntary sector (e.g. Benioff 1997; see also Skinner and Fleming 1999 for a review of over 40 similar projects). Since the election of the Labour government in Britain in 1997, engagement mentoring has also become a central feature of initiatives addressing youth offending and health education, and of school-to-work transition systems such as the Learning Gateway, New Deal for Young People, and the Connexions service. In brief, engagement mentoring has a number of defining characteristics. First, its
nature is planned and formalised within institutional contexts and agendas. This contrasts with the informal mentoring relationships that many young people seek out for themselves, in which agendas are negotiated without external third-party intrusion. Second, it is targeted at socially excluded young people, and its aim is to re-engage those young people with the labour market and structured routes thereto. The underpinning assumption is that paid employment is the prime condition for social integration, and legal or financial compulsion to participate is sometimes a factor. Third, the role of mentors in this process is to transform young people’s attitudes, values, behaviours and beliefs so that they acquire ‘employability’. Employability itself is frequently defined as a requirement for young people to engage their personal commitment to the needs of employers and the economy (e.g. Industry in Education 1996), although this requirement has been criticised as having ‘more to do with shaping subjectivity, deference and demeanour, than with skill development and citizenship’ (Gleeson 1996: 97). There is, of course, nothing strikingly new in this concept of employability shaping various education and training frameworks as instrumental (cf. Bathmaker 2001), but its influence on the practice of mentoring has barely been questioned or investigated until now. A fourth characteristic concerns the subjectivity and disposition of mentors themselves.
A particular construct can be identified in the discourse of mentoring that includes the specific context of engagement mentoring, but also extends into other fields of professional development. Mentors are expected to go ‘beyond the call of duty’ on behalf of their mentees, and they are often portrayed as saintly or god-like characters (Ford 1999: 13; see also Megginson and Clutterbuck 1995; Shea 1992; Standing 1999). In engagement mentoring, their role has been compared to that of a parent, exhibiting selfless devotion to the needs of the mentee. They must embody the ideal of both rational control and self-sacrificing care, in order to rectify the deficits or deviancies of their mentee and render them employable. Compounded by the fact that the vast majority of mentors for socially excluded young people are women, this is redolent of the gender stereotype
of female nurture that is a central aspect of women’s oppression (for a fuller critique of this construction of mentors’ role, see Colley 2001b; 2003a; 2003b). Furthermore, this is connected with a view that mentoring will also enhance the employability of those who act as mentors, whether they are already in employment (Skinner and Fleming 1999), or whether they are students preparing to enter the graduate labour market themselves (Goodlad 1995).
