Bis research paper number 128 The wider benefits of international higher education in the uk

3.3.1 Countering positive bias in the interview sample 
Research which is not representative statistically of the population from which it is drawn, 
and uses a sample of respondents who are self-selecting (i.e. who volunteer to take part), 
has an inherent risk of bias. There was some likelihood that those who were keen to 
participate might generally be those with more positive experiences and stories to tell, 
although arguably those with strongly negative views might also like the platform of the 
research to air their views. In order to counter the possibility of the research only reporting 
those with positive experiences, the sample was designed to include around some 
graduates with known ‘negative’ experiences, as indicated above, but some investigation 
was necessary to judge whether the 10% targeted was an appropriate proportion. 
It was possible to compare results from interviewees’ pre-interview survey responses and 
interview information with results from the wider graduate cohort to comparable (or proxy) 
questions. Results for our interview sample as a whole are reported in in Chapter 5 on 
‘other results’, and can be compared with responses to similar questions in the i-GO study 
(BIS, 2012) and using International Student Barometer (ISB) research.
One question which offers a proxy for a graduate’s overall positivity towards their UK HE 
experience (or not) is whether they would recommend a similar experience to others. The 
ISB contains a question on whether a graduate would recommend study at the graduate’s 
institution to others, and a similar question was included in the i-GO study. These both 
suggest that, typically, only about 5% of international students/graduates would not 
recommend their study experience to others. A broadly similar figure was obtained in the i-
GO study for recommendation of a UK HE experience in general, confirming that the vast 
majority of experiences (perhaps 95%) were positive. In comparison, the responses of our 
interviewees who had also responded to the i-GO survey (to which we had access) 
indicated that 4-5% would not recommend their experience to others.
The combination of these two indicators, bearing in mind that these ‘recommendation’ 
responses are only a proxy for overall positivity, seem to suggest that the interview sample 
was not substantially ‘more’ positive in outlook than the cohort as a whole, and that 
seeking around 10% of interviews with graduates with ‘negative’ experiences was 
appropriate. This suggests that the research results obtained should be reasonably 
reflective of international graduates from UK HE in the period studied. However, it is 
acknowledged that given the nature of the population it is difficult to quantify or eradicate 
bias fully from the findings. 
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The Wider Benefits of International Higher Education in the UK 
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