3. Method and Material
3.2 Research material
In this section, I first describe how I narrowed down the subject of my study and decided on the material that would be examined, and introduce the gathered material. Initially, it was my intention to study the language policy of the local service providers in Joensuu. At this stage,
38
my purpose was to first interview some of the international students and thus specify the objects of my study. I reached out to new exchange students, degree-students and post-graduate students, who would ideally form a group of interviewees with as varied a background as possible (regarding for example age, gender, country of origin and major subject). I ended up interviewing five international students during January 2015. The students were between the ages of 22–35, they studied either forestry, sociology, social sciences or computer science at master’s level or doctoral level, or they were enrolled in a non-degree programme. The interviewees had lived in Joensuu for different periods of time, from 5 months to 2.5 years and they were from Germany, Japan, Poland and Spain.
I held these initial discussions in order to determine which service providers in Joensuu would be worthwhile to study. Among the discussed places were accommodation companies, the UEF and the student union, some local shops, local health services, banks and insurance companies, as well as local offices. The student union ISYY received the most praise from the interviewees, and they were also mostly pleased with the student housing company Joensuun Elli. The UEF received both positive and negative feedback: the interviewees were thankful for all the information the university had sent them prior to their arrival in Joensuu, and agreed that most of the matters concerning their studies proceed smoothly. However, they were disappointed in the study curriculums found in WebOodi, as, in some cases, they contain outdated information.
One of the interviewees would also have liked to have more communication with the university staff before moving to Joensuu, since he had visa application and enrolment issues to consider.
Since these discussions did not reveal any sort of consensus on which service providers in Joensuu would need to be researched, I found it necessary to switch the focus of my research to the organization that actually generated most discussion: the UEF. However, this “first stage”
proved to be a very good learning experience, because I was able to experience how difficult it can be to keep the focus of the discussion on the matter at hand. I also realized that I should have given the interviewees more information on the research I was conducting. Admittedly, since I carried out several different interviews, I gained more confidence and learnt about the practicalities of this research method after each interview.
I decided to first become familiar with the language policy of the UEF by examining their English-language website and later interview international students again. In Section 3.2.1 I
39
present the gathered information from the UEF website, and in Section 3.3.2 I introduce the international students and researchers who are a part of this research.
3.2.1 The UEF Website
As a starting point of my research, I examine parts of the UEF’s international website. During the years of 2014–2015, the entire brand of the UEF was updated and redesigned in order to
“enhance the university's attractiveness, competitiveness and people's awareness of it”
(University of Eastern Finland 2015c). The renewal of the UEF brand is a part of the new UEF strategy, published in the year of 2015. According to the UEF website, the renewal of the website was carried out in cooperation between various actors at the university, Communications and Media Relations, and a marketing agency called Nitro ID (University of Eastern Finland 2015d). The content of the website is produced by various authors, such as people from faculties. In addition, there are different authors behind the translations of the Finnish website into English. According to Liikanen (personal communication, January 19 2016), the instructions at the university level are translated by various translators, the website content is translated by the coordinator of international communications, and the brochure of the post-graduate studies is translated by a translation agency. Remnants of the old webpages are still visible behind some of the links, and, surprisingly, on the pages of some of the doctoral degree programmes. I will analyse the content of the webpages relevant to my study further in Section 4.1.
Initially it was my plan to follow in the footsteps of Jenkins and her research partner who had spent approximately two hours on the webpages of each university as they gathered material to analyse. However, since my research focuses more on the website of one university instead of gaining a bigger picture and drawing generalizations within a certain timeframe, I had to find another way to restrict the scope of my material. I decided to analyse pages that would include information on the admissions and descriptions of the doctoral programmes (e.g. what kind of courses are arranged; in which languages; whether the courses are arranged for specific subjects, different doctoral degree programmes, different faculties or whether they cover the entire university; and methods of arranging the courses). The analysed pages include the home page, introduction of the UEF, information on admissions, brochure on international studies as
40
well as descriptions of the different doctoral programmes arranged at the Joensuu campus.
These sites are chosen, because I presume that language would be discussed in these sites. A more thorough list of the examined pages is provided in Appendix 3.
3.2.2 International doctoral degree students
In this section, I present the international students and researchers that participated in the initial discussion of my thesis project as well as in the final focus group discussion. As I promised all the participants before conducting any of the interviews, in order to respect their anonymity, I do not name them or provide such a description that would reveal their identity.
After the initial discussion I had had with a few international students, the research question was specified into the language policy of UEF alone, and then further on to language issues present in the doctoral degree programmes at the Joensuu campus. Thus, I searched for new volunteers for a focus group discussion. Eventually, I had a discussion with seven doctoral degree students, four of whom were able to participate in the actual focus group discussion on Wednesday the 9th of December 2015 at the Joensuu campus of the UEF. Three other students were interviewed separately via Skype, on Thursday the 10th of December, Friday the 11th of December, and lastly, on Monday the 28th of December 2015.
The volunteers of the focus group discussion and the one-on-one discussions included three female and four male students between the ages of 28–45. They study in doctoral degree programmes of Language studies, Social and Cultural Encounters, Postcolonial studies as well as Educational Sciences and Teacher Education. The volunteers had studied at the UEF for various number of years: the earliest enrolment to the doctoral degree programme had been in the year of 2009 and the latest in the year of 2015. The ensemble included people from Germany, India, Iran, Morocco, Poland, Pakistan, and the UK.
The interviews lasted 186 minutes altogether (with an average time of 46.5 minutes), which resulted in 20 204 words (or approximately 33 pages) of transcribed material. The figures related to the interview data are presented in Table 3. The focus group interview was recorded and later transcribed with the help of a video camera. As for the interviews that were held via Skype, I utilized an audio and video recording software called Pamela for Skype in order to
41
record the interviews. I transcribed all the interviews myself, because it helped to proceed with the analysis part of my study in advance. Also, it was important to keep my promise of treating all the gathered material with confidentiality. This is also the reason why I do not characterize the interviewees in a way that would reveal their identities.
Table 3. Numerical data on the interviews with doctoral degree students
Interview Participants Duration (min) Number of transcribed words
Focus group interview 4 63 7 009
Skype interview 1 1 49 3 966
Skype interview 2 1 33 5 267
Skype interview 3 1 41 3 962
42