Your assignment is to analyze your interview data and present it as a report. You will submit the following:
1) PART 1: Your interview transcript (you must play the role in the role profile you wrote up in your group discussion board and answer the interview questions you created in your interview guide in Assignment 1).
2) PART 2: Your (approximately) two page report
PART 1: ANALYZE the data
First, analyze your interview using the “condensation” approach. You will need to have read the lecture on Qualitative analysis (Qualitative Methods II) to be able to do this. Write directly onto your interview transcript the following:
1) Indicate the “natural meaning units” right on your interview transcript by simply making a line across the page dividing the text into natural meaning units. Do not type up anything new. You don’t need to create natural meaning units. They are already there in the interview transcript. You just need to show where they are by inserting lines on the page.
2) Give each natural meaning unit a title. We call these the “Central themes.”
1) In one paragraph, explain your group’s research problem (1 brief paragraph, drawing on your disciplines, and include in this explanation one or more of your research questions (left column of the interview guide). Do not try to solve your group’s problem here. Then, at the end of this paragraph, in just one sentence, describe the collection of data. You do this by simply explaining the mechanics of how you did the interview (basically: I conducted an interview with __________ via an online synchronous chat room – or over the phone – or in person – in the real world of research this bit of info is very important, but again, we’re just simulating our research for these assignments, so it doesn’t really matter how you say you obtained the data – only that you do say it.)
2) Then, in one paragraph, explain the Condensation Approach. Your cues for this come from the lecture. Don’t forget this one.
3) Then, in one paragraph, offer your “essential response” to one of your research questions. Be sure you call it an essential response. If you like, you’re welcome to answer more than one of your research questions with an essential response.
4) Then, in one paragraph offer implications for your essential response (what else MIGHT you be able to say about your group’s problem from the essential response). This is you thinking out loud about your group’s problem. If you do this here, you’ll have prepared for your work later, when you get back into your group.
5) Finally, in one paragraph offer an additional approach to analysis by interpreting one word, phrase, or statement you will have found (perhaps, but not necessarily, repeated more than once) in your data (see in the lecture the explanation of the interpretation method of analysis). The point of doing is that as an interdisciplinarian you want to emphasize the value of multiple approaches to doing interdisciplinary research.
