Gemma Molyneux is a second year PhD student in Sociology at Newcastle, studying high school girls’ everyday experiences and consumption of STEM subjects at school. In the second post in our Plan B series, Gemma writes about adjusting her research in schools during COVID-19. She reflects on the changes she has made to the project, and the new questions and insights these have brought about. 

Let’s get it out of the way first: COVID-19 came along and I am not going to get to do the research project I had planned.  My planned research project involved exploring girls’ consumption of Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) through a focus on everyday life. The project was intended as an ethnographic study within a high school. The aim was to observe first-hand the day-to-day lives of girls within the school environment, as they interact with their friends and the teachers, within class and break times. From this I would then have been able to develop some rich data that would have shown me the girls’ consumption of STEM within their day to day lives. But now, that’s not going to happen! On the other hand, life would be boring if everything went to plan!

So, what now? Let the roller coaster begin

The first bump began in March, when I started to consider: how long will this lockdown be? What shall I do with my project plan? Being positive, my supervisors and I decided to delay the start of the ethnographic fieldwork from September to January, allowing extra time for additional data to be collected (Plan B).

Second bump at the end of summer: will January be realistic? How long do you wait on the uncontrollable and when do you make a change and take control? Ok, we decided, ethnography (where you need to be around people) in a pandemic is not going to work, just move on. Hence, the decision to use virtual group interviews with students with photograph/vlog elicitation was made.

Let’s not go through the alphabet: Plan Awesome is born

In October the ride starts to change direction again: will/won’t the schools close? Along with the constant adrenaline rush of the possibility of the group of students or the coordinating teacher being isolated,  will the interviews be affected? (still sticking with Plan Awesome!)

Just because it’s different does not make it wrong

Putting the roller coaster imagery aside, the truth is that the challenges brought about by COVID-19 on my research have been present, but not insurmountable. Changing methods changes the type of data you get, so being clear whether this data will answer the research questions has been important. They do say there is more than one way to skin a cat. Ensuring the alternative data collected from group interviews aligns with my research questions establishes that the change of plan still meets my objectives. Being open minded and generating many ideas for every possible method I could think of was helpful. I used a SWOT analysis  to understand what all the different ideas meant to the project and whether they would answer the research questions. In creating the SWOT analysis I wrote down every method I could. Thinking through how these could be used or combined with others made me consider data generation in a more creative way. In addition, evaluating the methods’ negative aspects required creativity in generating possible solutions that could be put in place to mitigate these issues.

Changing the project has reduced the richness that a long-period study of students would have brought. However, now, the research includes a wider range of data sources with the potential opportunity to gain observations from students from more than one school and interviews with a range of teachers. Already some of the additional data sources that have been explored are giving interesting (and unforeseen) insights.

Being able to be flexible has allowed my project not to be derailed

It’s December in year 2 of my PhD and I have completed 5 teacher interviews and have started the school group interviews. Have I made the right decisions and the right changes? I am still prepared to be flexible for the probable additional bumps to come. I have to be positive and confident and remember ♫ Everything is Awesome ♫.