RESEARCHING POLICY ELITES IN EDUCATION

This chapter examines methodological issues associated with interviewing policy elites. There is limited literature in the field of policy sociology in education that engages with the issue of researching policy elites, yet research in this field often involves conducting interviews with officials and senior staff in government and other organisations, including education businesses. These interviews are a socially complex phenomenon in terms of researcher positionality, recruiting and assessing participants, conducting interviews, and analysing and representing interview data. This chapter proffers a comparative analysis of interview research undertaken with policy elites across three cases (government, an international organisation and a multinational edu-business) to highlight common and distinct concerns, challenges and issues. We argue for the necessity to seriously consider interview data, as well as interview processes, as important analytical resources in the development of defensible accounts of education policy development and contexts and the role of policy elites in this work. We advocate for researchers to reject epistemological innocence and to be reflexive in their analyses and representations of interview data.