This paper speaks to long standing debates in social science research relating to how data are represented and interpreted in educational research. It does this in two ways. Firstly, it is an exploration of the issues faced research teams when attempting to interpret and understand the stories told by interviewees in relation to students’ choice of institution. Secondly, the paper uses the entry to higher education research context to explore the broader methodological dilemmas to provide an account of these students’ choices that goes beyond existing accounts of student choice and navigational capacity (e.g. Gale & Parker 2014).

Student choice of higher education institution has been considered using a variety of research methods and due to the large sets of data available it is as frequent to see quantitative (e.g. Anders 2012) as well as qualitative (Donnelly & Gamsu 2020) work that explores the issues around student choice. However, in qualitative methods there has been a significant reliance on interviews with individuals either pre-entry, during their studies or afterwards, or in some cases all three (e.g. Bathmaker et al. 2016). Investigating intent of interview respondents is a bedevilled activity; however, presenting text without critical analysis is equally problematic. 

During a research project that has been detailed extensively elsewhere (Webb et al., 2020; Sinclair & Webb, 2021; Hodge et al., 2022; Gale, 2022) we generated interview data from enrolled students and recent graduates outlining their decision to choose a college-based higher education. A significant number of students in our research articulated that their choice was preferable to university-based alternatives. The explanation of the students’ choices took multiple forms and were based upon perceived benefits of college-based HE, namely a) the perceived distinctive pedagogy and assessment (Gale, 2022), and b) claims to a connection with industry (Sinclair & Webb, 2021) which meant that students would be taught skills more in line with what is needed for employment compared with their university-based peers. In terms of a), students identified the apparent practicality and non-theoretical aspects, as well as small class sizes. 

aThis paper is derived from several data sources: 1) Reflection on previously published interview and survey data from student studying bachelor degrees in vocational institutions in Australia, generated as part of a broader Australian Research Council project (which involved the authors of this paper); 2) A range of published literature that employs qualitative data and data analysis; 3) Literature that engages with the onto-epistemological issues pertaining to interview data generation, analysis, and interpretation.

The paper reflects the apparent fixation and fetishisation in research outputs of data, the reification of first-person accounts, and a marginalisation of the importance of interpretation (McCulloch, 2004). There has been significant reflection on the techniques, purposes and value of interviewing as a qualitative research form (e.g. Burgess 1984; Fawcett & Hearn 2004; Hammersley 2008); how they might be refined to produce more ‘authentic’ responses (e.g. Gale et al. 2020; Mobley et al. 2019); how data are analysed, interpreted and represented (e.g. St Pierre 2013); as well as the variety of onto-epistemological stances that can inform the use of interview data (from grounded theory with a heavy emphasis on coding procedures (e.g. Deterding & Waters (2021)) to post-structural approaches (e.g. Lather 2004)) While we uphold the importance of interviews for producing first-person accounts and engaging with those with lived experience in research to support educational policy and practice, we note that there are disadvantages such as re-traumatisation to insisting of first-person accounts. Instead, we argue for (re-)recognising interview data as text, with multiple meanings, constituted by and constitutive of discourse (Fairclough, 1995). Further, we argue that interpretation of such texts requires an appreciation of the role and positionality of the researcher in relation to the interview data rather than simplistic presentations of ‘findings’ of ‘themes’ that ‘emerge’.

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