HW10

PLEASE PAY ATTENTION ON STEPS AND YELLOW SECTIONS

2 PARTICIPANTS ONLY

MAKE IT SIMPLE

NO INTRODUCTION AND REFERENCES NEEDED.

ANY QUESTIONS PLEASE LET ME KNOW

GROUNDED-THEORY QUALITATIVE RESEARCH –

DATA COLLECTION

Your assignment is to gather interview data from 2 of your participants in a manner consistent with Corbin & Strauss’ Grounded Theory approach to qualitative research.

The guiding research question for your data collection will be:

What have community and societal relations been like for those who are living through the pandemic?

Step 1: Write down some notes concerning your own reactions to being a member of this society right now, your history of relations with others who don’t share your political beliefs, and your attitudes about elected officials and the government. In addition, jot down any general assumptions or theoretical understandings you have about how power, race, gender, etc. influence community engagement and/or political understandings. This self-reflection exercise will help to develop your sensitivity toward this topic. Try to be aware of your own biases while conducting the interviews.

Step 2: Given the general research question given above, write a list of 5-10 questions you could see yourself asking your participants to elicit their thoughts about various aspects of this topic. For example, you could ask about how their feelings, attitudes, beliefs, encounters with others, conflicts, etc. Keep in mind that the guiding research question above is phrased in abstract, technical language, but your interview questions should be phrased in concrete, everyday language that your participants can easily understand and relate to. Your questions should be open-ended and invite your participants to describe their ideas and/or experiences in detail. Do NOT write closed-ended questions (i.e. questions that can be answered with Yes, No, or a few words).

Step 3: Select 2 participants with most interesting differences in their perspectives on the pandemic, their fellow Americans, and the government? and ask them if they would be willing to be interviewed (and recorded). The recorder is to do the next step

Step 4: Interview each of your participants for about 15-20 minutes about their perspective on the above issues having lived through the pandemic. Be conversational and spontaneous in your interview and don’t be afraid to probe into an aspect of your participant’s experience that interests you. Use the questions you developed in Step 2 as a guide ONLY—do not feel the need to ask all of the questions you came up with, but have them in mind for when an appropriate occasion comes up in the interviews. Remember, these interviews are NOT a forum for you to interject your own personal opinions or beliefs—the focus is on understanding each of your participants’ perspective. You will need to audio-record the interviews (with your participants’ permission, of course).

Step 5: Transcribe a 5-minute section of EACH of your interviews; for each, try to select a section you believe to be particularly illuminative of that person’s views. Instead of using your participant’s name, use P1 or P2 (for participant #1 or participant #2) and I (for the interviewer—yourself). After transcribing, go through each transcript and REPLACE every instance of a proper name (i.e. name of a participant’s friend, the neighborhood or street where the participant grew up, their favorite musical artist, etc.) with either a placeholder (like “[best friend]”) or a fake name (like substituting “Morristown”). Whatever you do, be consistent, so if you are using placeholders, use them in every instance of a proper name; if you are using fake names, use them throughout. When you are finished with your transcripts, they should contain NO personally identifiable information that could give away the identity of your participants. Add the interview date and a brief demographic profile of your participant (see example below).

Step 6: Create a qualitative report document (Word, RTF, or PDF file) containing a header, title, your self-reflection, your list of interview questions, and the two transcripts. Upload your document to the corresponding assignment folder. In addition, please come to class next week with a file containing at least one of your transcripts so that we might use it for our in-class analysis lab.

(REFLECTION 1- 2 PARAGRAPH ONLY) no need of references and introduction paragraphs

Example Transcription Excerpt

[The following interview excerpt is on a different topic than your assignment, and should be used as an example of formatting only]

Interview Date: November 1st, 2021

Participant: #2

Brief demographic profile of participant (gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.):

Female, mid-30s, White, Straight, currently living with her fiancée of 3 years

I: So, I wanted to ask you about your relationship with [partner].

P2: OK. Yeah, there’s a lot there, so I’m sure I’ll be able to say something …

I: I first wanted to find out how you would describe your and [partner]’s role in the relationship.

P2: What do you mean, role?

I: Well, like are there differences between how you act and [partner] acts, or between what each of you takes responsibility for?

P2: Oh, sure. Yeah, he’s really forceful with things. Like when he wants to go somewhere, he’s got his mind made up, and I’m usually like, “OK, fine. I’m game.” And, really he does have some pretty good ideas most of the time. But, you know, it’s not give-and-take with him. I don’t usually have a lot of suggestions or demands, but sometimes when I do, he kind of dismisses it out of hand. [pause]

I: Could you give me an example of when he dismissed your idea like that?

P2: Well, just last week, I wanted to go see my sister in [city]. She’s just had a new baby, and I haven’t had a chance to see him yet. And when I suggested this to [partner], he immediately had three reasons why it wasn’t going to work. And I was like, “This is my sister. This is really important to me.” And he kinda shined me on, saying that maybe we could do it next weekend, after his work stuff dies down a bit …