Coronavirus (COVID-19): student hardship - case studies: report

Annex 1: Methodological limitations

There are some important limitations to this work. 

In particular, results from this study do not provide any indication of the prevalence of the conditions described in this work in the wider population of students in Scotland. In other words, where we can be confident that instances of hardship described in the case studies are real and valid, that trajectories of disadvantage for different groups can be identified and outlined and comments on institutional shortcomings can be made, it is not possible to quantify the number of students across Scotland who have actually found themselves in hardship as a result of lockdown restrictions. This would have been achieved by undertaking quantitative research, such as a representative survey of students. Qualitative work undertaken as part of this project lends itself well to producing tightly defined research questions and aiding development of quantitative survey questionnaires, which could be used in future research.

A further research design limitation concerns the process for recruiting students to participate in the interviews as well as their online delivery mode. Recruitment mostly relied on students contacting the Scottish Government or SAAS to confirm their interest in taking part. It may have resulted in an overrepresentation of particularly motivated and vocal individuals, with more vulnerable and hard to reach students not being represented. There is also the risk of digital exclusion that some students are facing, which may have prevented those without access to their email accounts from responding to the calls for research participants. Furthermore, self-selection bias may be present in the findings, reflecting the fact that sampling was partially driven by students putting themselves forward to take part in the interviews, rather than being pre-identified as part of a formal sampling frame. The decision to structure the recruitment and interview process in this way was largely driven by the extremely time limited window for fieldwork, informed by urgent policy needs for this evidence and by ethical and data protection constraints.

Finally, within the timescales of the project, it was unfortunately not possible to seek responses from colleges, so the institutional perspective is limited to university specific HE issues (although wider issues, e.g. in relation to specific groups of students such as estranged students, were picked up to a degree in the responses from third sector organisations).  Any further research should seek to engage with colleges (FE and HE) in a more direct manner.