‘My Ideal First Day’: Implications for induction from a three (London) university project

This study sets out the initial findings from a mixed methodology approach which aims to research the experiences of first year, first semester students in three UK inner city Universities. Goodenow’s (1993) Psychological Sense of School Membership instrument was utilised to collect quantitative data (n=1300), and Wengraf’s (2001) Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) was employed as a guide to gather the qualitative interview data. Below we report on one strand of the data collected, that of how the students would construct their own ‘ideal first day’.