The Role Of Interpersonal Relationships And Care In Personal Tutoring Within UK HEIS

Lead researcher: Dr. Liz Gloyn, liz.gloyn@rhul.ac.uk; MA student at St. Augustine’s Theological College.

You are being invited to take part in a research project. Before you decide to consent to take part it is important for you to understand why the research is taking place and what your participation will involve. Please take time to read the following information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. Ask us if there is anything that is not clear or if you would like more information. Please consider carefully whether you wish to consent to take part.

This project is exploring aspects of the personal tutoring (PT) relationship within UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). It seeks to identify which caring elements are employed within PT, with the goal of better understanding the PT relationship and the contribution it can make to a student’s university experience. It will draw on the experiences of personal tutors to generate insights and understanding about how the role functions at its best, and the barriers that get in the way.

A number of titles are used as equivalents to personal tutor, including academic tutor, college advisor, academic advisor, academic support tutor, personal supervisor, personal academic tutor and academic mentor. By personal tutoring, this questionnaire means a system in which a student is allocated to a member of academic staff who then has pastoral responsibility for them.

Participants are being recruited through invitations on social media and academic e-mail lists. Participants will have held personal tutoring responsibilities at a UK university within the last five years.

You are free to decide whether or not to take part. You can choose not to participate in this study, or not to complete the questionnaire after you have begun it, without any consequences and without needing to give a reason. The structure of the questionnaire means that it may not be possible to identify your responses once you have submitted them; for this reason, once you have pressed 'done' at the end of the survey, it will not be possible to move your questionnaire response from the dataset.

Your participation will involve completing an online questionnaire, which will take approximately ten minutes to complete.

There will be no payment for taking part in this study.

The questionnaire may bring to mind potentially difficult experiences that participants have had within the PT space. The questionnaire has been designed to gather information as anonymously as possible, but there is always a possibility that participants could be identified from their optional free text answers. Similarly, while protocols are in place to safeguard participant data, there is always a risk that these may be circumvented.

This study asks participants to indicate their level of agreement with a number of statements, and to answer three optional free-text questions about the personal tutoring role. It will collect generalised demographic information including age and gender. Data will be gathered via the Surveymonkey platform and then held on a password-protected server. The research data will be stored for 3 years after publication or public release of the work of the research. The researcher will have access to the research data. This research will be used to produce an MA thesis for submission to St. Augustine’s Theological College. The findings of the research may also be written up in academic publications and conference presentations.

The researcher would like your permission to use direct quotations but without identifying you in any research outputs.

To safeguard your rights, the researcher will use the minimum personally-identifiable information possible. The researcher will keep information about you and data gathered from the study, the duration of which will depend on the study. Certain individuals from St. Augustine’s Theological College may look at your anonymised research records to check the accuracy of the research study. If the study is published in a relevant peer-reviewed journal, the anonymised data may be may be made available to third parties.

If you have any concerns about any aspect of this study, please contact either the researcher, Dr. Liz Gloyn, at liz.gloyn@rhul.ac.uk, or the MA supervisor, Revd. Jenny Morgans, at jenny.morgans@kcl.ac.uk.

This study has received ethics approval from St. Augustine’s College of Theology. You can view the College’s Research Ethics Policy here.

Thank you for considering taking part in this study. Please click 'next' below to enter the questionnaire.