Chapter 5 Research Design
5.1 Case Selection and Sampling
The field research for the study took place in Bremen. As the second largest port city of Germany, Bremen has been an industrial and trade center and its population presently is around 650.000 (Statistisches Landesamt Bremen 2010). However, the city has been undergoing a deep de-industrialization process, which hits mostly the low qualified immigrant workers. The impacts of the re-structuring of the industry has impoverished usually the regions of the city such as Kobbel and Kolding28. These parts are largely populated by Turkish immigrants and most of the interviewees in this study are from one of the two. Particularly, the closing of the shipyard firm AG ARGA had a great negative impact on the migrant population in this region as it was the major migrant employer. In 1984 the firm was closed down and two thousand people were fired. The second wave came with the closing down of another shipyard firm VULBRAN in 1997, and again a couple of thousand workers became unemployed.
In these two shipyards, mostly immigrants were working. The German workers who were fired had better chances to find new jobs in different sectors with professional retraining (Umschulung), whereas the immigrants mostly could not take professional training due mainly to their language problems and thus they could not find a new job in different sectors.
In the 1990s the temporary employment companies mushroomed and the same unemployed immigrants started doing low paid temporary work and they became unemployed regularly.
Those who did not work were directed to temporary compulsory works by Unemployment Office or they were retired early.
28 All student, teacher, school, Bremen's regions, and firm names in the study are anonymous
This has a very negative impact for immigrant families living in these parts of the city.
They became dependent on welfare and they presumably pessimistic about their futures. The dense and rapid unemployment made the younger immigrants less hopeful for their future . They grew up in poor family conditions in which the fathers are unemployed and the mothers often look to unskilled, low-wage jobs such as house-cleaning. Today it is not so difficult to see the reflection of this impoverishing in the rundown buildings, schools, and rough streets of the two regions in which most of the interviewees live. The students interviewed attended the disadvantaged schools in these neighborhoods. They are disadvantaged in terms of both the students' profiles and the learning environments so that some parents want their children go to intermediary schools in better parts of the city than go to college track schools in these areas.
As noted earlier, leavers from the School of General Education are sent to vocational schools. Therefore, I planned to find my interviewees in one of these schools in Bremen. After my many visits to the Ministry of Education in Bremen (Senatör für Bildung), I gained access to a social worker working in Lindenhof School. He helped me get the necessary permissions from the school administration for working there and in establishing trust-based relations with my interviewees. The social workers are closer to the children and know more about their private lives than do school teachers. They are often seen as friends by the students. My relations with the social workers, therefore, eased my acceptance tremendously in interviewees' eyes as someone to talk with and take part in their daily school life.
Lindenhof school offers vocational training in some fields such as nutrition, clerical-work, woodwork, metalwork. It usually has more male students than female and when the study was conducted, it had 115 male, 85 female students. Lindenhof school is situated in a part of the city, which is heavily populated by immigrants. Among inhabitants living there, there is a commonly held belief that Lindenhof School is one of Bremen’s most problematic vocational schools. Many people think that most of the children in this school are drug users or dealers, asocial, aggressive, problematic and/or hopeless. The students attending Lindenhof are aware of the negative image of the school:
(…) OK this school is too shitty, I'd not like to come to this school, but I have to, because I could not in other schools (…) (Aykut, 108629)
Although it is possible to reach a Hauptschule certificate via this school, it actually
29 The number next to the name refers to the line of the expression in transcribed text of the interview
functions as a last resort for those who could not 'succeed' in the School of General Education30. So, although they attend Lindenhof school, the children are official leavers from the School of General Education.
The present study examines the disengagement processes and meanings of schooling by placing the school leavers themselves in the center of the research. It takes the Turkish school leavers at this school in Bremen and elicits in-depth accounts of their lives with room for them to select which aspects they wish to emphasize (Barbour 2008:115). It is criticized that the case studies provide little basis for scientific generalizations (Kohlbacher 2005). Indeed;
...case studies […] are generalizable to theoretical propositions and not to populations or universes. In this sense, the case study […] does not represent a 'sample', and in doing a case study, your goal will be to generalize theories (analytical generalization) and not to enumerate frequencies (statistical generalization) (Kohlbacher 2005) quotes from (Yin 2010).
Thus, the aim in this study is to contribute to theory of school disengagement processes via immersing depth into narrations of the interviews. In order to reach the interviewees I spent an intensive four months in Lindenhof School. The average school time lasted from eight o’clock in the morning to three o'clock in the afternoon. I was at the school almost every day until it closed. I joined occasionally into the classes, spent time with the children in and out of the schoolyard, and I was with them in events such as year-end parties, and celebrations and festivities that the school organized. This was very helpful for taking notes about challenges from students to teachers` authority, such as resisting leaving the classroom when they were told to do so, and, the ways they behave and are approached in the Trainingsraum31,and students` relations with each other in different situations. Participant observation was extremely helpful for establishing trust-based relations with teachers, school staff and interview partners.
In this context, the qualitative character of the study should be emphasized; this study does not aim at measuring the impact of a set of predictors on leaving leaving school or staying in school. This would require a different research design and sampling, such as including a control group. Instead, the study is designed to explore the dimensions and
30See at (Kelly 1993) for a discussion of the role of such vocational schools in General school system in the context of Canada.
31Trainingsraum (Training-room) is a room in the school to which the students who, the teacher thinks are misbehaving, are sent It works like a rehabilitation room. The students are usually given advice by the social workers of the same national and language background on why they should get a certificate from Lindenhof and how important this certificate is. Actually the social workers are expected to keep the students under control and handle the situation with the least harm to the school. They mobilize their language and 'cultural tool box' to get closer to students as an “in group” person.
processes of leaving school based on the in-depth narratives of school leavers.
In sampling the interviewees, a snowball technique was used. The interviewees were asked whether they have friends interested in giving an interview. After gaining more knowledge of the environment and people via participant observation, I myself contacted the interviewees directly by purposefully not choosing them from the same friendship circles and the same ethnic32 backgrounds.
Concerning sampling, despite wishing to have female leavers included in the sample, there was no female social worker working there, who could help the male researcher to establish trust-based relations with potential female interviewees. Therefore, it was impossible within the short time frame of the doctoral study to include them. The possible findings of the study are related to male leavers, not females. The criteria for choosing interviewees were as follows; male, Turkish school leavers from the School of General Education who had been in German educational system for at least five years.