‘It’s important for the students to meet someone like you.’ How perceptions of the researcher can affect gaining access, building rapport and securing cooperation in school-based research

Abstract

Based on research conducted in a secondary school with 13- to 14-year-old students, this article describes and analyses how gatekeepers’ perceptions of the researcher determined access, influenced rapport and cooperation with the students, and defined expectations regarding the researcher’s role within the school. The article also takes into consideration which intersecting social categories gatekeepers, the researcher and the research subjects highlighted and made visible, and which ones were ignored or rendered less visible in the different researcher/gatekeeper and researcher/researched interactions. Social categories were important for understanding how all of the actors in the research process (researcher, researched and gatekeepers) viewed the researcher’s positionality vis-à-vis the young research participants. A type of ‘sliding door’ (‘now you see one, now you see another’) deployment of categories such as race, class, gender and ethnicity framed gatekeepers’ assessment of the possible benefits in enabling researcher access, and impacted on the researcher’s ability to remain reflexive during the research. In addition, the way that gatekeepers perceived the researcher also determined the type of role the researcher was expected to fulfil during the time she spent at the research site. Such expectations affected the researcher’s attempts to build rapport with the students in order to ensure their cooperation during the course of the research.