Research Pair-Project – assessing the work experience of “student workers” from Royal Holloway

Research Pair-Project – assessing the work experience of “student workers” from Royal Holloway

Introduction

The course examines work and employment in the shifting world of work, where firms have a global reach, and workers move on an extended scale across national borders. Across all countries, there is evidence of a break-up of specific national or local ways of managing people at work.

Universities are important in local economies, as they annually attract international and domestic students, who both study, but also work in local, national and virtual settings. As workers, students can enter local economies through employment agencies, independently, through university placements and internships. They can also work on-line as ‘gig-workers’. Students may also be involved with start-up businesses, or connected with family businesses and working in these domains while at Holloway. There is also volunteering that adds to local economies through student’s gifting their labour power.

The project is intended to enable course participants to explore the theme of student work through an empirical piece of work. It is open-ended. We do not want project teams to all follow exactly the same interview script. We will say more about interviews in the first Workshop of the course, which is dedicated to the Project.

Covid-19

The pandemic has several potential impacts on opportunities for student work:

Placements and work experience may be harder to get, as companies move online and furlough their regular workforce. Opportunites for work experience and placements may have diminished for students.
Many students work on campus, and because of the move to online teaching university campuses are quieter and have cut back on such work opportunities.
Sectors like hospitality and retail have traditionally been big employers of casual or temporary student workers. These sectors have been impacted by the pandemic and reduced demand means there are fewer opportunities for students to work in these sectors. However, food and supermarkets have experienced an increase in demand which could have increased student’s work opportunities.
As business activity in many sectors moved online, this has also created demand for distribution or delivery or logistics work, which has expanded as retailers were forced to close and consumers switched to on-line shopping. Students may have moved into these warehouse or delivery jobs.
As much of the formal economy went into the deep-freeze with repeated loack-downs, the growth in on-line or platform jobs might be the main work activity students can find.
Causal work in care homes has reduced due to the pandemic, and cut back work opportunities for students.
The move online for secondary and primary teaching may have created the need for online tutoring, a job that many students can do.
With Universities moving teaching online this has eliminated travel to campus time, and freed-up pockets of time that students may wish to convert into work experience or paid employment.
Family businesses in periods of social distancing, may have reached out to family members as core employees, which might mean, if a student comes from such a business background, that they are called upon to work.

There may be other impacts from the pandemic, and conducting this fieldwork, you need to explore this issue with your research samples.

Your task

Your task is a structured problem-based project, focused on student workers. The outcomes for the project consist of a 3,000 word report.

The project team

Students will work in pairs – this is the project team. Self-select a project partner in the first few weeks of the term and email pair names to course organisers. It is important that you do this quickly. Partners can be attached to any of the 4 workshop groups and need not be in the same workshop. All sessions are on Fridays. Teaching starts on 15^th January 2021 and all sessions will start online. Please check your academic timetable and join the online live sessions and workshops assigned to you. We would encourage project teams to set aside Fridays as one of the days to plan your project. However, being working remotely means pairs can get together at any time.

The submission date for the pair-project report is 12pm 27th April 2021 – on-line submission only.

Research method

You will also need to interview your selected student-workers online and we expect project teams to interview at least 5 students. Interviews should last around 30 minutes. Interviews should be recorded, and interviews transcribed (written out) and attached as an Appendix to the final 3000 word report. This is a compulsory element in the assessment. You can do individual interviews or focus groups – several students interviewed together. The focus group is more informal and dynamic and interviewees interact with each other. But focus groups require more coordination, and active managing to ensure that topic areas are covered.

It can take at least 4 hours to transcribe a 30 minute interview, so you will need to set aside at least 20 hours for this purpose. Transcripts should be in English, although interviews may be undertaken in the native language of the student being interviewed. The transcripts will then need to be translated, then transcribed verbatim – that is, word for word. You can add on several more hours per interview if translation is required, so think carefully about interviewing in any language other than English. However, you may decide that you will get richer information if you are able to use the native language of the student worker interviewee.

Please choose a category of student workers for the project, whether these are students on:

Internships – mini, one-year, on-going placements. Students here might be working for ‘experience’ ‘future career’ planning, sampling work, or preparation for entering the labour market. Is this internship paid work? How does pay reflect work effort? How do students feel about the level of pay relative to the work work-effort?
Independent paid work – working during college time (evenings/weekends/days when no College classes); or working only during holidays – Christmas, Easter, summer. Or working online at different times. Reason for working – an economic necessity, additional income, family business and family pressure, starting own business, related to their degree or independent of degree.
Or as a Volunteer – unpaid work purely for the experience, building connections for future career or being a good citizen.
Family business – working to help the family
Entrepreneurship – owner-capitalist, start-up, trying to set up a business, pre-profit business or already profitable business
Other

It would be good to go for focus rather than spread – interviewing students who are working in family businesses or on mini internships, o rworking online, rather than trying to cover too many types of student work. This means trying to get a ‘sample’ of interviews, rather than just accepting any interviewee. This requires more planning and preparation. Depth can come from interviewing students who may have worked at the same workplace or for the same company.

Types of questions – some issues to think about

How did they get the job – open-application, on-line, advert, connections (friend, lecturer, career service, family member, or a contact in the workplace) or other source?

How much did they know about the job before starting?

Are you directly employed by the organisation you work for or indirectly through a third-party, such as an employment agency?

Where are you working?

In local economy
Through the internet on virtual or digital work
In university
Close to my home
Other

Are there other students working in your workplace? Does the organisation depend on student workers?

If not a year out or a summer vacation mini-internship, but working during term-time, how many hours a week are you working?

Are you getting trained in anyway – what type of training – on-the-job, off-the-job, working with more experienced workers who are not a student-worker.

Are you expected to work alongside regular non-student workers and be part of the team?

The above are suggestions. There will be other issues to explore.

Something about interviewing

Interviews are an excellent way of getting first-hand information. But do not assume that it is only facts that you want from interviewees and that’s the job done. You are not doing market research, asking about preferences of flavours of ice cream. Teams are exploring work experience, so ask about key events that highlight what it is like to be a student worker. Seek out interviewee’s interpretations and attitudes and feelings about being a student worker, alongside facts like pay, hours of work, types of contract etc. The interview is a dialogue. Have a conversation. Remember that you can use interviewees’ words in quotes as data sources in your project.

It would be useful if teams could keep samples to a disciplinary subject, such as business and management, music, arts, computing etc., and then seek out students in that subject area to be the interviewees or respondents of your research topic. If this is not possible, try and group your sample by ‘type of student work’. Or you might group the sample by their workplace – all the sample work for a College shop, or in hospitality, for example. Grouping increases the depth of information and experience that student-workers can provide.

Finding your sample

You may know students who have worked while studying at Holloway. You may have worked yourself with other students. These might form the sample for your project. Teams need to self-organise to get their sample. We have contacted all the departments in the College and there is an awareness of the project at this level.

We suggest that interviews (one to one, or through a focus group) are all done on-line and should be the preferred means of collecting information. All interviewees need to be informed that they are taking part in a coursework project and their names should be anonymised. You should aim to record all interviews. There is a consent form that interviewees need to sign to show willingness to participate in the project.

Departments in the University

All departments have been contacted about this project, but you and your research partner will need to collect data on student work directly yourself from students at Holloway.

School of Biological Sciences

Business and Management

Classics

Criminology

Computer Science – several year in business courses

Drama, Theatre and Dance

Earth Sciences

Economics

Electronic Engineering

English

Geography

History

Information Security

Languages, Literature and Culture

Law

Liberal Arts

Mathematics

Media Arts

Music

Philosophy

Physics

Politics and International Relations

Psychology

Social Work