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onsidering the choice of the appropriate research method fitting my research question, I have taken into account several aspects, starting with my ontological view. I envisage the world as social interactions. Interviews are not only capable of capturing social interactions but also uncovering angles of reality that ethnography hardly is because interviewers can reveal facts about or responses on social interactions (Lamont & Swidler, 2014). Besides that, I wanted to uncover similarities and differences in the family contacting habits, for which interviews are more suitable. Lamont and Swidler (2014) argue that interviews permit comparison across people and certain contexts. Moreover, unveiling the emotional dimensions lying behind contacts was also my aim. Therefore, interviewing the students proved to be more suitable to my research because interviewing has the ability to highlight ‘emotional dimensions’ of social experience, which would normally be very hard to infer from behaviour (Lamont and Swidler, 2014).
Although I argue that the interviews are best suited to my research, I acknowledged that ethnography could also be an appropriate method to use. According to Jerolmack and Khan (2014), ethnography has the ability to best explain social actions, as they are observed in their everyday contexts, which is their natural setting. However, a practical issue, namely language barrier, vastly influenced the method choice. Observing family communications without understanding them would not make sense and excluding non-English speaking families would massively limit the scope of my research.
Regarding the sampling procedure, I applied the sampling for range technique because it guarantees the involvement of a certain number of people from identified subcategories of the studied group (Small, 2009). It was really important to have students from different countries of origin in the sample because I believed that different cultural backgrounds might account for some patterns in family communicating habits. Gender also played an important role in sampling because gender differences could also be the root of dissimilarities in contacting habits. Therefore, I wanted to have both male and female participants. Although sampling for the range was the most efficient for the goals of the research, my sample suffered from problems of representativeness and bias (Small, 2009). Moreover, all the students I interviewed were postgraduates, which potentially leads to sample bias, creating a limitation of the research.
My position as an insider in the researched topic enabled me to easily access participants.
