How Quaker School Students’ Perspectives Were Explored

Studying Quaker schools involved interviews with over 60 students and teachers and a survey of over 800 students across 5 Quaker schools in England. This chapter will discuss development of a methodology to enable these data to be explored. A major challenge was to evaluate whether students’ learning experiences in different schools included shared qualities related to Quaker faith and practice. Each school in the sample described themselves as Quaker, but each was independent of each other in terms of how the school was managed. Identifying the ways latent values function within the culture of an organisation was important. The methodological goal was to create the means to demonstrate how these values were discovered, labelled and used in subsequent stages of the analysis. Finally, the chapter will conclude with reflections concerning triangulation of data.