Stories to Live by: Narrative Understandings of the Self-Concept of Students at Self-Financing Higher Education Institutions in Hong Kong
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors of the article have found an interesting problem setting.At the same time, the theory part of the article does not reveal why learners who pay for their studies are so-called losers. It would be important to explain it better and justify it with the support of research literature. It would also require more convincing that the education received in state higher education institutions is of higher quality.
Since the data collection was multi-level, the reader needs better clarity on how the data was analyzed. For this, a diagram could be helpful, e.g. in a section of one topic.
The results are interesting, but it is difficult to understand why, for example, playing sports does not provide an opportunity for successful academic studies - maybe I don't understand because the context of education and educational system in different countries is very different. Therefore, the particularity of the context could be highlighted more clearly. Reference has been made to how popular public higher education is compared to paid higher education, but there are certainly substantive nuances to be pointed out here as well.
Discussion of the article raised questions. As usual, no new sources are brought into the discussion, but there are both new sources and references to the peculiarities of the Chinese education system that have not been discussed in the article before. This made the text difficult to understand and thus could be more reader-friendly.
If the authors of the article rewrite the text and make the necessary additions, the article is suitable for publication.Author Response
Reviewer 1
Comment 1: The authors of the article have found an interesting problem setting.
Response: Thanks very much for your appreciation!
Comment 2: At the same time, the theory part of the article does not reveal why learners who pay for their studies are so-called losers. It would be important to explain it better and justify it with the support of research literature. It would also require more convincing that the education received in state higher education institutions is of higher quality.
Response: Thanks very much for this suggestion. Actually, there is a lack of research regarding the loser identity of students. Therefore, it is hard for us to provide an extensive review on it. As we mentioned in the manuscript, we attempt to make contributions to the literature by studying this phenomenon by applying the narrative perspective, which is one of the theoretical frameworks to investigate the construction of self-concept and self-identity. Therefore, we choose to introduce the perspective in general and highlight how the key proposition and idea regarding self-concept inform the present study. In this sense, we aim to explore the upholding and evolving process and mechanism of self-concept development of the students at SfHEIs rather than testing theories or hypotheses that are used to explain the causality of self-concept. To achieve the aim, the theory part should review and introduce what Glaser and Strauss (1967) call sensitizing concept because it provides a theoretical lens and sensitivity to make sense of data. According to them, if qualitative researchers adopt middle-range theories or review the causality between factors in details, it is easy for them to bias the data by imposing pre-existing thoughts on the phenomenon. To avoid this methodological problem, we just introduce the narrative perspective underlying the study in order to keep and remind our theoretical sensitivity with an open mind.
However, we agree with you that we should add literature related to the loser identity of students in Hong Kong, even though the relevant literature is scarce. Thus, we revise the Introduction a little bit in order to show the possible reasons why the students view themselves as losers (lines 27-65). Moreover, we also add a section called “Context of Hong Kong Education System” in which we provide a more detailed information about the Hong Kong education system in order to help international audience like you to better make sense of the reasons why the students may have the loser identity in Hong Kong (lines 83-120).
Reference:
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine De Gruyter.
Comment 3: Since the data collection was multi-level, the reader needs better clarity on how the data was analyzed. For this, a diagram could be helpful, e.g. in a section of one topic.
Response: Thanks very much for this comment. As a narrative study, we would like to keep the finding section be like a story-telling. Therefore, we did not divide the finding section into sub-sections. However, we agree that a long finding section may not fit many academic audience’s reading style. Thus, we adopt your advice and divide the section into four sub-sections with sub-titles, namely Childhood experience (lines 219-233), School experience (lines 234-299), Experience of academic failure (lines 300-321), and Anticipated future (lines 322-351).
Comment 4: The results are interesting, but it is difficult to understand why, for example, playing sports does not provide an opportunity for successful academic studies - maybe I don't understand because the context of education and educational system in different countries is very different. Therefore, the particularity of the context could be highlighted more clearly. Reference has been made to how popular public higher education is compared to paid higher education, but there are certainly substantive nuances to be pointed out here as well.
Response: We add the section called “Context of Hong Kong Education System” in which we provide a more detailed information about the Hong Kong education system in order to help international audience like you to better make sense of the reasons why the students may have the loser identity in Hong Kong (lines 83-120).
Comment 5: Discussion of the article raised questions. As usual, no new sources are brought into the discussion, but there are both new sources and references to the peculiarities of the Chinese education system that have not been discussed in the article before. This made the text difficult to understand and thus could be more reader-friendly.
Response: Actually, we do not agree with your point of view that is “no new sources are brought into the discussion”. As we know, it is often that we find unexpected findings. It is important for us to explain and discuss why the expectation happens. To do it, sometimes additional literature is required. However, we think the problem of our manuscript is that we point out the cultural issue in the Discussion section without any hints or highlights in the previous section. Thus, it may be hard for international audiences who are unfamiliar with the research context to understand and follow the discussion. Therefore, we move those paragraphs to the new section called “Context of Hong Kong Education System” in which we provide information about the research context and then communicate our findings with the literature about the cultural issue in the Discussion section briefly. We hope this revision helps resolve the problem you raise.
Comment 6: If the authors of the article rewrite the text and make the necessary additions, the article is suitable for publication.
Response: We hope our responses successfully address all of your concerns. Thanks so much for your contributive comments.
Reviewer 2 Report
Very convincing framing of the case, and although the sample is small, the narrative materials carry strong similarities and the case can be strengthened by affirming this and reinforcing the case by showing clearly that there is no repetitious use of any one narrator, or by announcing the findings of less self-worth of the participants.
Mention of studies of similar cases of stress over passing an examination threshold have been made, e.g., for Japanese upper school students and pressure over the UK A-Levels at school
Author Response
Comment 1: Very convincing framing of the case, and although the sample is small, the narrative materials carry strong similarities and the case can be strengthened by affirming this and reinforcing the case by showing clearly that there is no repetitious use of any one narrator, or by announcing the findings of less self-worth of the participants.
Response: Thanks very much for this comment. Actually, we are not sure of the exact meaning of this comment. We guess you appreciate the study so much because of the well theoretical framework and the convenience of the data collected from diverse participants. However, we are not sure what you require me to make improvement on the manuscript. For example, we are not sure about the meaning of this sentence, “the case can be strengthened by affirming this and reinforcing the case” and “by announcing the findings of less self-worth of the participants. Do you expect me to highlight that the participants share similar backgrounds and they tend to be less self-worth? If yes, we do think we already make it in the Materials and Methods section when we describe the sampling procedure. Moreover, we are not sure the reason why you make this comment “by showing clearly that there is no repetitious use of any one narrator” since we did not frequently make use of few participants’ narratives as the evidence to support our argument. If you read the finding section, you can find we cite different participants’ narratives throughout the data analysis. For example, we cited Participants A, B, C, E, G, H, K, J, L, and M (10 out of 15 participants’ narratives were cited in different parts of the finding section). In this short article, it is impossible to unconditionally cite all participants. We think we have already done what you want. As a result, we do not make any revisions according to this comment because the comment is unclear to us.
Comment 2: Mention of studies of similar cases of stress over passing an examination threshold have been made, e.g., for Japanese upper school students and pressure over the UK A-Levels at school
Response: Since the article is not focused on academic stress, it may not be appropriate to cite or review the mentioned literature extensively. However, we think it is reasonable to mention or imply that the Hong Kong situation is not unique and is similar to many Asian societies. Thus, we add few sentences about this at the beginning of Introduction. We also cite relevant literature to support this point of view. Please check lines 27-31.
