JCPSLP Vol 16 no 3 2014_FINAL_WEB

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 Interview questions were developed from unpublished survey data, collected previously from undergraduate allied health students at the two institutions.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

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 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”; three stages of the honours journey. Results and discussion

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

118

JCPSLP Volume 16, Number 3 2014

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology