Race, education and emancipation: a five-year longitudinal, qualitative study of agency and impasses to success amongst higher education students in a sample of South African universities

This annual report documents the research conducted in the first year of the longitudinal qualitative study entitled Race, Education and Emancipation conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) on behalf of the Centre for Critical Research in Race and Identity (CCRRI) as part of their Education and Emancipation programme of research. In what follows, we briefly describe the five-year project, the conceptual and methodological frameworks, and the methodology used to conduct the research to date. An updated (and on-going) literature review reflects the documented research conducted in the area of higher education, with a specific focus on identities (race, socio-economic status, and gender), and student success within the Higher Education and Training (HET) system. The section on the study design, study sample, recruitment processes, and student sample, provides information on the seven universities which currently constitute our sample, and describes the recruitment processes (see Appendix 1 for the recruitment poster and Appendix 2 for the participant screening form) we used to obtain our final sample of 70 participants. The rapid ethnography guidelines (Appendix 3), in-depth interview schedule (Appendix 4), the formative focus group schedule (Appendix 5), and the Social Network Interviewee (SNI) schedule (Appendix 6), are included as appendices. In the data analysis section, we discuss the coding procedure used as an initial analytical step in analysing the first year's data, and present the preliminary codes that emerged from this process. As appendices, we include rapid ethnographies (Appendix 7), student profiles (Appendix 8), impressions of findings and thoughts for the second round of interviews with students in early 2014 (Appendix 9), and preliminary codes (Appendix 10).