With Insight Education is an organisation that supports Black-heritage students to attend elite universities through mentoring schemes. The organisation commissioned me to research these students' experiences when applying for and attending elite universities. The aim was to influence diversity policy at the associated universities to represent the students' experiences.
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I led the research end-to-end for this project while collaborating with the key stakeholders to establish their research goals.
Collaboration Lit review Research goals
01
Research plan
During this stage, I collaborated with key stakeholders on the project, the CEO and Programme Officer, to establish their research goals and background. I began to plan the research method based on their goals. I chose in-depth interviews to explore the participants' feelings and attitudes fully. I also decided to undertake surveys for those who could not attend the interviews. Before the research began, I did a small literature review for background information.
02
Participant recruitment
The participants were recruited from a cross-sectional user base from the companies' existing clientele. I recruited them via email and delivered the consent and information forms.
I recruited six participants for the interviews, three for the surveys and outlined their data protection rights. I created the interview scripts and collaborated with the stakeholders to fit the research goals.
Consent forms Interview script Data protection
Semi-structured Open-ended In-depth Survey
03
Conducting the interviews
I conducted semi-structured interviews with the participants using a mixture of open and closed questions. I also emailed the surveys to the participants that featured open-ended questions.
04
Findings and insights
I coded the findings to analyse the responses and create insights from the results. The insights included various diversity policy recommendations for universities moving forwards. E.g. I found that the students did not feel that they could fully immerse themselves into their culture while attending the university due to a lack of diversity awareness exhibited by the universities.
Policy recommendations Coding Analysis
Conference Presentation Report
05
Dissemination and impact
I created a report to produce the findings in an accessible way. I delivered my recommendations and methodology at a roundtable conference held for the research.
Moreover, the research impacted the organisation because they understood the benefits of their mentoring scheme. Additionally, the research influenced the University of Manchester to sponsor a hotspot map that considers their Black students' culture.
