Personal Blogs

I made certain decisions about how to sample the people who have volunteered to be involved in my research. I decided to select a group that would be like this:

• 1 mentor and 8 fellows
• 3 at BSc level, 3 at MSc level and 3 at PhD level;
• 3 from the 2008 round, 3 from 2009 and 3 from 2010

Seems so easy. There are 29 volunteers from a variety of countries, rounds, academic levels and academic disciplines.

So i made some criteria:

• ignore academic discipline
• favour enthusiasm over representativeness. Some fellows have responded to my email and started to engage in dialogue, so who better than these women for the first round of semi-structured interviews?
• favour diversity over patterns. With such a small sample, any commonalities between fellows of a certain country or round are circumspect. So, i prefer to actively seek the widest possible views by choosing different countries.

Problems

1. Of the women who have responded, only one is from 2009. So do I stay true to my first set of criteria or the second set?
2. If i select the one mentor (and I will), then which of the levels will have only 2 participants to make a total of 9? Or should I say 10? Will i have time to transcribe 10 interviews?
3. BSc level - i chose the first to respond who then engaged in dialogue. This left me with two women from Kenya. so i changed one to the second person.
4. the one mentor who has volunteered, also the corresponding fellow has volunteered so I should take advantage of that and include them both.
5. in the end I favored the first list over the second.