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JCPSLP
Volume 16, Number 3 2014
Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology
interview, data analysis and subsequent interview was
critical to ensure that the interview questions were authentic
to the students’ experience through their honours journey.
Depending on the duration of the embedded honours
programs (1–2 years), the three interviews for each student
spanned a period of between 9 and 18 months. The
staging of interviews at the early, mid and late stages of
honours enabled insight into the students’ experience over
time and captured their changing perspectives. This
research strategy permitted both prospective and
retrospective reflection on the experience of honours. This
is important because experience is dynamic, dependent on
context and shaped by previous events.
Analysis
A total of 61 individual items were derived from analysis of
the interview data (Figure 1). This extensive list was
collapsed to 28 items, to prioritise the items which were of
importance to the majority of the ten students. This detailed
process entailed a listing of the items derived from each of
the three interviews and a ranking of individual items,
according to the number of students each item was relevant
to. Each item included in the list of 28 was relevant to at
least eight of the ten students. The development of a smaller
number of key themes was essential to achieve clarity
about the students’ experience of honours and to facilitate
a framework for illustrating the phenomenon of honours.
Immersion in the data from the early to late stage interviews
enabled a deep understanding of issues which were most
relevant to the students, at different points in time. This
prolonged immersion, re-reading and questioning of the
data is a vital element of hermeneutic phenomenological
analysis. Themes “emerge” from the data because the data
becomes very familiar to the researcher. The 28 items were
distilled to nine key themes which mapped broadly to the
three stages of the honours journey.
Results and discussion
The nine themes that emerged from this research are
presented in Figure 2. They are a representation of the
complex phenomenon of honours:
•
Early stage – “challenging self”, “a different way of being”
and “coping”;
•
Mid stage – “communities of practice”, “self-
actualisation” and “becoming a practitioner-researcher”;
highly applicable for researching practice (Grace, Higgs, &
Ajjawi, 2009, p. 115). “Hermeneutics”, derived from the
Greek word meaning “to interpret”, is the theory of
interpretation. Hermeneutics is a distinct research paradigm
concerned not solely with the interpretation of texts, but
more with broadly the interpretation of “human being”.
Hermeneutic phenomenology focuses on the meaning of
being for an individual and how meaning influences
decisions and life choices (Liamputtong, 2010, p. 126). A
hermeneutic phenomenological approach enabled a deeper
understanding of honours as experienced by the allied
health students and a clearer insight into what it means to
be an honours student. The emphasis in this philosophical
approach is finding common ground, shared meaning and
consensus (Loftus & Trede, 2009, p. 62). In this study, the
aim was to develop an interpretation of the students’
experience which is “coherent and useful” (Trede & Loftus,
2010, p. 187).
Participants
Ten honours students were recruited from two Australian
universities – one metropolitan and one regional institution
– by a process of convenience sampling. These
undergraduate allied health students represented speech
and language pathology; podiatry; physiotherapy; and
occupational therapy (Table 1). Students were invited to
participate in the study just prior to commencing their
honours program.
Procedure
A series of three interviews was planned for each of the ten
students, in order to capture their experience at the early,
mid and late stages of the honours journey. The interviews
were conducted individually, face-to-face, at the student’s
place of study. Each interview lasted between 35 and 50
minutes. The format of the interviews was semi-structured
and guided by an interview schedule. The purpose of the
initial interview was to explore the students’ reasons for
enrolling in honours and their early experience of the
program. Interview questions were developed from
unpublished survey data, collected previously from
undergraduate allied health students at the two institutions.
Data from the initial series of interviews informed the
development of the mid-stage interviews; the final-stage
interviews were informed similarly. This iterative process of
Table 1. Demographic data for honours student participants
Age Allied health profession Regional / metropolitan university Qualification on entry to current course
Pseudonym
20
Occupational Therapist
Regional
High school
Cassie
21
Physiotherapist
Regional
High school
Emma
20
Physiotherapist
Regional
High school
Jess
21
Podiatrist
Regional
High school
Sarah
32
Speech pathologist
Regional
BSc(Honours)
Maria
21
Physiotherapist
Metropolitan
High school
Lauren
21
Physiotherapist
Metropolitan
High school
Holly
20
Podiatrist
Metropolitan
High school
Ellie
21
Podiatrist
Metropolitan
High school
Nicola
22
Podiatrist
Metropolitan
1 year BSc
Rachel
