Interview reflections

In conducting the interview for the recent assignment, I was pleased at how open and frank the student was in answering the questions and providing depth to his answers. It was somewhat surprising because I have conducted student interviews in the past that were like pulling teeth to get meaningful answers. One of the strategies I used with this student that I had not used in past student interviews was to conduct the interview in a neutral setting. In the past, I had conducted interviews in my office with myself on one side of my desk and the student on the other. In class it was mentioned that conducting interviews in a neutral setting was helpful in obtaining better data. Thus, I chose to conduct the interview at an outdoor patio sitting at a picnic table. This was a great setting in regards to neutrality. However, there were a few too many distractions such as people walking bye while talking on their phones and a low-flying airplane that was very loud. If I were to conduct the same interview again, I would have probably either conducted the interview indoors or in an area more secluded from foot traffic.

An important factor mentioned by Creswell (2007) was the importance of choosing interviewees that are not shy or hesitant. My question with this is whether I as the researcher should attempt to decipher which students/individuals are going to be hesitant or shy in an interview type situation, or do I conduct the interviews without filtering and simply discard the ones in which the subject is apprehensive? It seems that the second option is the most appropriate. In a past interview I chose a participant that I thought would be energetic and articulate on the subject. However, during the interview she had very little to say and was very general in her responses. I could not have known that beforehand, so I ended up just disregarding her interview. With the student in this interview, I had no idea that he would provide as much detail on his experiences as he did, so I was just lucky, I guess.

Another change I would have made would be to refine the interview questions through use of a pilot-test. I believe this would have been helpful in collecting better data. There were a few instances where the student had to ask a clarifying question as to what information I was looking for with the question. While I was able to explain what I meant by the question and while he was able to provide an appropriate answer, I think the interview would have been better served had a pilot-test been conducted. The questions made total sense when I asked them to myself, but my biases and assumptions play a large role in how I hear and answer questions. Having someone lend a critical ear to the protocol before I actually use it would have greatly improved the quality of the questions.

The final observation that I noticed in my interviewing skills was that I was often eager to get to the next question. In transcribing the interviews and listening to the playback, I realized that I should have probably gone in to more depth with particular questions or allowed for a few more moments of silence in anticipation that the student would have added more to his answers. While I was pleased with the majority of the information that he provided during the interview, I think that if I had been more patient and less focused on the next question that the data would have been much more meaningful and rich.

Creswell Chapter 8

Chapter eight was helpful in developing a visual model of the qualitative process. The “spiral” helped provide a structural framework for each step in the process. I also appreciated his “enter & exit” analogy in relation to the spiral. It simplifies the research process in my mind when it is thought of as entering the process with data such as text or images and exiting with a descriptive narrative or account.

The spiral, and other aspects of the chapter, provided a clearer picture of where the different approaches are similar and where they differ. While describing the development of coding and categorizing the information, Creswell used the term “winnowing” to describe how the data is organized and often even discarded. I was struck for the first time while reading this section of the chapter at how much influence the researcher has on the data in qualitative research. I think it really calls the researcher to an extremely high standard in accurately representing the data that was gathered.

Another aspect of the chapter that I appreciated was the guidelines or parameters that he mentioned for establishing the number of categories in a qualitative study. With hundreds of pages of data, it must tempting to identify hundreds of categories that can be coded. However, Creswell’s standard of not developing “more than 25-30 categories of information” helped me realize that the point of qualitative research is to identify the categories and data that speaks the loudest and carries the most depth. Although there are probably hundreds of findings that could be reported on in a qualitative study, he stresses that it is important for researchers to limit themselves to the most meaningful.

The table on pages 156-157 was helpful in further understanding the "spiral" for each of the five approaches. By reading through the processes for each approach, I better understood the differences in the approaches that were introduced in chapter five. This was particularly true when examining the process of moving into the describing, classifying, and interpreting phases. Although theoretically similar, these phases of the process look quite different.

New beginnings

This has been an interesting few weeks in regards to my research direction. I feel that I'm finally starting to gain clarity on the direction God is taking my studies and maybe my post-doc career. Over the past two years of my course work, I've struggled with what I was going to focus my research on. While I was interested in many of the topics from class and the research areas of my professors, I never was able to fully engage in them to a point where I knew that I wanted to focus my energies there. My goal was to have a specified dissertation topic by January '09... the half-way point of my coursework. My thought was that if I knew my topic by this point in the program, then I could be strategic (yes, it's my top strength, for those of you who know strengthsquest) in approaching the remainder of my assignments with the topic in mind.

Well, it turns out that I did not have a dissertation topic by this past January. I had brainstormed a number of possibilities, but had yet to feel a peace about any of them. The possible topics I had considered included things like student leadership development, administrative leadership, strengths, positive psychology, spirituality, and international higher ed/study abroad. In looking back at my "choice assignments" over the past 3 semesters, an interesting pattern that emerged was that most of them centered around some facet of international higher ed or study abroad. My interest in this area has been long-standing and actually traces back to my summers spent in China as a college student. These summers were by far the most formative summers of my life and I have been fascinated on Asian/foreign cultures ever sense.

So what does all this have to do with my research interests and dissertation direction? Well, just a few weeks ago I shared my heart surrounding all this with one of my professors in an e-mail saying...

"I want to chat more about your international h.e. research ideas and maybe brainstorm any ways I could help in that. I have been soul searching a lot about why god has given me the privilege of graduate studies and how he wants to use me. I keep going back to the biblical example you mentioned in class of “the least of these.” There’s so much freedom right now in the direction I can take my research that I want to make it matter. It’s not that I don’t think things like student leadership development are important; it’s just that I don’t really get inspired/excited when thinking about doing serious research in those kinds of areas. Anyway, we can chat more about it when we get together. Let me know when you’ll be around. Take care. -Jake"

Starting with this e-mail and then over the course of about 10 days God began to further develop my interests towards international higher ed and the research opportunities that exist. During this time He was also revealing in me an interest passion for what APU will be doing in Cambodia in the coming years. In various ways over the past two weeks (I'll get to these in future posts), God has started to reveal to me that this is where I am called to focus my research. It is amazing the peace and energy I get when thinking about this. Having the opportunity to invest the privileges and blessings I have been given as a graduate student into a developing country like Cambodia would be humbling and amazing.

So with that, (sorry for the long post) I just wanted to share with you my excitement about what the next few years are going to look like in regards to my research with what looks like will most likely be Cambodian higher education and and other areas of international higher ed. I would love to talk further with anyone who is interested in hearing more. I'd appreciate your prayers as I (and Em & Abby Jane... and even many of you!) begin this journey.

-Jake