Girl-power researcher, Rosie Walters, identifies a lack of academic exploration around the subject of how girls’ education activists represent themselves. With this in mind, she analyses Malala’s autobiography- I Am Malala– in an article which has been published in Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Congratulations to Rosie on an insightful and thought-provoking article which explores the politics of Westernisation and identity.
My research is an exploration into the motivation for learning of pupils who have been excluded from school. I have selected a narrative design to investigate the complex nature of motivation for learning by investigating how a pupil’s motivational journey has resulted in their exclusion and lack of engagement with their education.
Abigail’s project examines environmental and genetic influences on adolescent wellbeing using a genetically informative design. The Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) is world leading in this field, frequently informing policy and often reported in the media. This project expands the impact of TEDS by analysing data collected on 5000 pairs of twins when they were 16 years old using a wide range of variables, including measures of wellbeing, personality characteristics, mental illness and cognitive and academic success. This novel research has great implications for policy, particularly education, and extends current knowledge on subjective wellbeing.
Children from armed forces families have unique needs and face uncommon challenges. Yet their experiences are under-researched and too frequently overlooked in UK educational policy and practice. My research aim is to sharpen our understanding of service children’s needs and inform policy and practice in schools. Using an ethnographic and participant, task-centred approach I seek to explore children’s experiences, identities and agency, and how these intersect with policy and practice in schools and the military. My personal history informs this research, as a former service child and a teacher in a school that serves an RAF community.
Get ready to dive into the SWDTP Annual Student Conference! This dynamic event, exclusively designed for postgraduate Social Science research students, is an absolute must-attend! Act fast, as tickets are in high demand, and seats are limited! This conference is open to all postgraduate researchers, regardless of SWDTP funding, and it’s happening in the vibrant city of Bath. Brace yourself for an exhilarating lineup of keynote speakers and panellists, all centred around this year’s theme: ‘Architects of CHANGE; Impact, Identity & Inclusion.’ Plus, delegates can immerse themselves in interactive workshops covering publishing, podcast and AI in education. We hope to see you there!!!
Beginning from the Inside Out: The Value of Pilot Studies Relational Grounding in Decolonial Research
Kate Matzopoulos, PhD researcher in Education at the University of Bath
This presentation explores the value of conducting a pilot study prior to larger-scale research, particularly when working with Indigenous and decolonial methodologies that are still in experimental phases and not widely documented in education research. My context, with the Ju/’hoansi San community in Namibia, is not widely written about outside of anthropology, which meant that I had to draw from other Indigenous scholarship to piece together meaningful approaches.
My pilot study, carried out during my master’s research, was foundational in forming authentic relationships with the community. Relationality became the hinge on which the work rests: research emerges in and through relationships, shifting with daily life rather than fitting into neat methodological boundaries. The pilot also revealed how to engage respectfully across difference and avoid reproducing colonial knowledge systems that obscure reality.
Ultimately, the study affirmed the importance of beginning research from the “inside out,” allowing Indigenous people to act as co-researchers working from their own onto-epistemologies, rather than being framed by external categories or outsider lenses. This informs my ongoing fieldwork in my PhD studies.
Using a pilot to develop unfamiliar visual methods for research into lived experiences of chronic illness
Dr Louise Toller
My PhD research investigated the experiences of chronically ill young adults using a combination of verbal and visual methods, specifically participant-generated photographs and photo elicitation interviews. In this presentation, I describe how I used a pilot study to develop my visual method, essential due to both my lack of prior experience and the lack of detailed information in published studies. I conducted a pilot with two main objectives: to trial the draft photo diary instructions I would give to participants, and to assess the sort of data the photographs generated. I reflect on what I learned from the pilot, and the modifications I then made to the photo-based phases of the main study, highlighting lessons that I would not have gained without carrying out a pilot.
Apprenticeship by Another Name? Media Discourses and the Vocational Turn in Nigerian Higher Education
Yusuf Olaniyan, SWDTP-funded PhD researcher in Education at the University of Bath
This presentation will discuss the methodological approach and data analysis techniques used in my study of how higher education (HE) is constructed within Nigerian public discourse. The research combines media analysis with a discourse-historical approach (DHA) to explicate how HE is framed in Nigerian national news medias. It focuses specifically on the post-COVID period, and the introduction of the National Universities Commission’s (NUC) Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) polices. The study used 331 media articles from three major Nigerian news media (Punch, Daily Trust, and Daily Post), published between 2021 and 2022, which focused on the intersections of vocational education, entrepreneurship, skills training, and apprenticeship-like pathways in the context of HE reforms. Through a two-phase analytical process, the first phase involved a quantitative scan to map the frequency and thematic emphasis of HE discussions in the media, highlighting the economic framing of HE around employability and market-driven outcomes. The second phase employed DHA to visibilised the ideological functions of these discourses. It also investigates how HE policies were legitimized, how social actors were positioned, and how historical continuities were reproduced in the media. Through this methodology, the presentation will illustrate how media discourses serve both framing and gatekeeping functions to determining which perspectives on HE are amplified or marginalised. It will highlight the challenges of conducting discourse analysis on publicly available media data, as well as the methodological and theoretical benefits of combining quantitative content analysis with a qualitative DHA framework. This session will be useful for doctoral researchers like me and early-career researchers interested in media analysis, discourse studies, and the intersection of policy, education, and public opinion in national contexts.
Legitimising veganism online: Computationally-interpretative approach to video analysis Adrianna Jerzierska, PhD researcher in Business Studies at the University of Bristol
In this presentation, I will outline the methodological framework used in my PhD project, which aims to understand how social media influencers have legitimised veganism over time, by analysing approximately 8,000 YouTube videos posted between 2014 and 2024. During this workshop, I will discuss the computational theory construction and the qualitative techniques used to study the discursive legitimation strategies by which influencers mainstream veganism. The first phase of the analysis involves generating the Dynamic BERT topic model (DTM). BERT is a large language model (LLM) that performs language tasks, such as distilling clusters of documents with similar semantic topics. By incorporating temporal analysis of topics, researchers can effectively track lexical changes across topics, leading to a deeper understanding of discursive legitimacy over time. The second stage involves the qualitative interpretation of the machine output by adopting a qualitative content analysis of the videos to contextualise the discursive strategies used by online actors. Given that BERT performs best with short texts compared to long and noisy YouTube video transcripts, this was a significant challenge to overcome. In this webinar, I will discuss the decisions made to work within these limitations, as well as provide a brief overview of the analytical framework, from querying and downloading videos using the YouTube API to discussing AI tools for converting large audio files into transcripts.
The Messy Realities of Anticolonial Research: Reimagining Language Practices in Secondary Education in Nigeria Mercy Martins, PhD researcher in Education at the University of Bath
My research explores how language practices in Nigerian secondary schools can be reimagined using anticolonial concepts of agency and resistance. The research design was indigenous, weaving qualitative, creative, and participatory methods that were flexible and aligned with the daily experiences of my collaborators. Structured in two phases, the first focused on the voices of marginalised students, while the second included teachers, parents, school management, and leadership. After securing ethics approval, I conducted a small online pilot with local collaborators which informed my choice of a school with linguistic, ethnic, and religious parity. I prioritised depth in one all-male secondary school rather than breadth across two schools due to time constraints. Almost five months of fieldwork produced extensive data. To preserve Nigerian Pidgin and avoid rough translations, I transcribed and cleaned the data manually. Journalling and a participatory analysis session, where students directly engaged with the research questions, guided the analysis. While I set aside some methods (such as Theatre of the Oppressed and parent interviews) for future work, I sought to include multiple perspectives, centre participant voices, and clearly distinguish between their ideas and mine. Ethical tensions included deciding what to share, avoiding reductive categorisation, and ensuring authenticity.
Storytelling, Embodiment, and the Ethics of Analysing Bedouin Ethnography Wesam Wekhyan, PhD researcher in Social Policy at the University of Bath
My PhD research explores Bedouin identity, knowledge, and community praxis in central Jordan through a decolonial, feminist ethnographic approach. The dataset is multi-modal: focus groups, one-to-one interviews, oral histories, WhatsApp notes, photos, videos, fieldnotes, memos, and observations of ceremonies and everyday life (weddings, funerals, dinners, walkabouts). Much of this material was produced in a Bedouin dialect and a culture where history is preserved orally rather than textually, requiring translation across dialect, Arabic, and English, as well as from embodied, performative expression into written form. Virtual data (voice notes, chats, images) extended this storytelling into digital space. Writing was not separate from analysis, but a continuation of storytelling: through memos, vignettes, and embodied descriptions I traced how narratives lived, moved, and transformed across settings and generation. Analysing such material meant making decisions about segmentation and representation without erasing relational meaning. Ethical and personal challenges were constant: anonymity in small communities, safeguarding oral/visual data sovereignty, and navigating my insider–outsider position and the embodied emotional labour of researching from within.
Sam Hooker, SWDTP-funded PhD researcher in Social Policy at the University of Bath
My PhD project used a narrative methodology to capture people’s experiences caring for the dead at home. Two interviews were conducted with participants. The first consisted of asking them to tell me their experience, while the second was used to ask questions to fill in gaps in the narratives. Then, in the participant’s own words, a chronological narrative of the event (core story) was formed, which reads like a short story of their experience. This process was an emotionally taxing experience for me as a researcher, due to the depth of immersion in the data. The core stories are included in the thesis, allowing the data to remain situated, capturing the complexity of a very personal and challenging experience for participants. While additional analysis is included, the core stories allow the reader to draw conclusions from the data itself. They also provide a valuable resource for people who wish to take care of their own dead to learn from.
Putting a light in the window: using creative writing to focus analysis in relationally engaged research
Luci Gorell Barnes, PhD researcher in Education at UWE Bristol
My PhD investigates how relationally engaged arts-based research methods can support minoritised children to express, reflect on, and amplify their lived experiences and perceptions. I understand meaning-making as happening through the process of engagement, and gathered data to consider the ‘double hermeneutic’ (Smith and Eatough, 2021) of not only what the children expressed, but how they did this through their conversations, interactions, and demeanours.
This study focuses on the children’s unique experiences and I wanted to examine what I had learned from each child, foregrounding how they had ‘got under my skin’. Having familiarised myself with the data I then drew on less conscious or orthodox ways of knowing (Hammond and Fuller, 2024) to write what I think of as ‘fictional portraits’ of my encounters with individual children. These were informed by the issues that child explored, the metaphors and images they used, and how they had interacted with me and each other. Using this process helped me get close to each child’s ‘internal narrative’ Mannay (2010, p.10) and I came to understand each ‘portrait’ as being like a light in the window guiding me through the dark woods of data, focusing my analysis and supporting me to write interpretive accounts that kept the relational nature of the study at their heart. McNiff (2019) suggests that fact and fiction can work together to deepen our understandings, and by engaging with my data in this highly subjective and ‘interruptive’ way (Clark, 2024, p. 3) I brought a level of relational accuracy to my analysis that I might not have otherwise found.
References Clark, T. (2025) From Interpretation to Interruption: Embracing disruptive analysis. Qualitative Research, 25(1), pp.299-310. Hammond , K. and Fuller, N. (2024) ‘Between two worlds: a shared (shamanic) journey of creative qualitative data analysis and researcher identity’ in Kara, H., Mannay, D. and Roy, A. (eds) The Handbook of Creative Data Analysis. Policy Press, pp. 437-453. Mannay, D. (2010) Making the familiar strange: can visual research methods render the familiar setting more perceptible? Qualitative Research. 10(1), pp. 91–111. McNiff, S. (2019) Philosophical and Practical Foundations in Leavy, P. (ed) Handbook of Arts-Based Research: New York: Guildford Publications. Smith, J. A. and Eatough, V. (2021) ‘Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis’ in Lyons, E. and Coyle, A. (eds.) Analysing qualitative data in psychology. Third edition. Sage, pp. 162-179.
Luci has chosen not to make her slides available for download.
Reflexive Thematic Analysis on researcher’s position as an “in-betweener”
Claire Hadfield, Senior Lecturer and PhD researcher in Education at Plymouth Marjon University
Reflecting on my journey using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) in a qualitative longitudinal study of early career secondary teachers’ professional identities, I draw on my position as an “in-betweener”—moving from school teaching into initial teacher education. This role placed me close enough to share aspects of participants’ experiences while also able to view them from a different perspective. Working with interviews, viva reflections, and journals, I returned to the data repeatedly in an iterative process of theme development. RTA supported deep engagement through analytic journaling and participant discussion. I will discuss how insider knowledge both enriched and complicated the analysis, how slowing the process helped avoid premature conclusions, and how reflexivity was essential in managing bias. The session will share practical strategies and honest reflections on the challenges and insights that came from applying RTA in a long-term, identity-focused study.
How to prioritise participant voice in data analysis when a third voice is present – the use of advocates in research
Kim Collett, Lecturer in Education at The Open University
For my PhD I conducted interpretivist research, using research driven photo elicitation interviews and thematic analysis, comparing experiences of inclusion in the classroom. For some of the participants adjustments were needed to ensure the research was accessible. This included having advocates present during data collection. One of the under explored, issues with advocacy in research is how to deal with advocate voices in the data. The words of advocates will appear in verbatim transcripts and removing them can change meaning/context. However, keeping them means they become part of the analysis and introduce a third voice.
I kept the voices of advocates and analysed these along with the words of the participants. However, careful consideration was needed to determine if the data was really reflecting the experiences/thoughts of the participant when the advocate was speaking. Sometimes it was clear as the participant would verbally or non-verbally agree/disagree, or the content would reflect other parts of the conversation. However, sometimes there was no confirmation. Reflexivity was key to assessing this and the findings chapter had to carefully cover the use of advocates when a finding was based on or informed by the advocate.
