Facilitating research Mindedness ● 165interviews, and others were not. For those who were fearful, observing
someone else conducting an interview gave them the confidence that they
could also conduct one.
The availability of the lecturer was a large factor in easing students’ fears.
Students said that their greatest resource was their ability to email or see
the lecturer when needed (Tolich, Paris, and Shephard 2014). He was often
able to suggest solutions or find a different way of approaching people. For
example, when students were unable to gain sufficient interview participants,
the lecturer wrote a “professorial” email that brought a much better response
rate than had the students’ email. He sat in on interviews when requested by a
group whose 20-minute interviews were lasting only 4 minutes. He was able
to help the students learn to allow silence in the interviews and thus elicit
further responses—a learning experience that could not have been gained in
the classroom.
Some students were overconfident and evinced no fear. This occasionally
led to problems developing rapport with either the client or the research
participants. In year one, a student entered the research site on the first day,
went straight to the site manager, who was serving customers at the time, and
asked about the site’s mission statement. This incident came close to ending
that project. In subsequent years, students were taught to slow down and
respectfully create rapport with clients before beginning data collection. At
the outset of projects in year three, some groups of students were going to
research sites to promote their questionnaires. It was suggested that they fol-
low a process that began with developing rapport. Students were advised to
first introduce themselves to potential research participants and to talk about
their interest in this particular community group. In other words, they were
to present their intentions so that potential participants could make fully
informed decisions about whether to participate.
Research mindedness requires students to think about themselves as
researchers in a variety of ways. As an integral aspect of conducting them-
selves as professional researchers, students were required to develop a safety
plan (Sieber and Tolich 2013). This could be as simple as making a phone
call to another person, both before and after meeting a participant for an
interview. Safety also entailed students thinking about what clothing they
wore and how they comported themselves in public.
The role of the lecturer and the nature of the student-lecturer relationship
in this course were unusual. The students spoke about their relationship with
the lecturer as more like one with a mentor than like one with a lecturer. The
lecturer allowed students to drop by his office without an appointment to talk
about their project and any roadblocks encountered. Emails received a quick
reply. Although in three years no student used this, the lecturer gave them