interview protocol

Projects updates & COVID-19 impacts

Hailley Marie Fargo Updates ,

Like many other universities across the United State, Penn State has moved the rest of our semester online. Ally and I have both started teleworking and today is week two of being remote. We wanted to share some project updates and how we’ll move forward without having any more face-to-face time this semester.

We feel lucky that by Spring Break, we had conducted 20 out of our 24 interviews. These interviews have been transcribed and as Ally talked about in her last post, we’ve created detailed maps to help us better understand (and remember) each student engagement journey. In addition, during the first part of this semester, Ally and I created our codebook and began to do some norming with a few interviews. This means that our transition to virtual has been pretty smooth. We’re meeting via Zoom on a regular basis and much of Ally’s work (coding) can be done independently and on a schedule that works best for her.

In addition to coding, we plan on doing some writing, compiling information on the maps for the Student Engagement Network, and creating a protocol for our last four interviews. I feel optimistic that we can get those final four interviews completed, we’ll just need to get creative about the map part. And, there’s a chance we might be interviewing a student whose engagement experience was cut short due to COVID-19. That would definitely give the map something unique and also plays well into “the cloud,” one of our guiding frameworks from Ella Kahu (2013). The one college we haven’t been able to get any interviewees is the College of Nursing and I feel that moving our interviews online might help us get two willing and available students. Stay tuned!

Student Engagement Network Summit Presentation

Hailley Marie Fargo Presentation & Publication , , , , , ,

On Wednesday, Ally and I had the chance to present initial findings at the Student Engagement Network Summit. We had a packed room and lots of excitement around our work. It was exciting to share our work with a wider audience and to feel that those in the room were excited as well.

Below are our slides — feel free to reach out to myself or Ally if you have questions. We’re excited to hear your thoughts and see what’s next for our project.

The matrix interview guide

Hailley Marie Fargo Research Methods , ,

Back in June, when I was attending IRDL, I spent time to develop our interview questions. Initially, I created a standard interview guide. I had a series of questions that I planned to ask in the exact same order. However, as I worked on the guide, and reviewed our textbooks, I realized that this standard format might be too rigid for what I was hoping to do. If I asked the same questions over and over for each experience, an hour long interview would get pretty repetitive with students. When I stumbled across the matrix interview guide, I had a little eureka moment.

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Weekly Update

Hailley Marie Fargo Updates , , ,

Hello all! It has been a minute, but lots of exciting things are happening with our research project:

  • You might have seen our newest post from Ally, our undergraduate student research assistant for this project. I’m so excited that Ally is joining the team. She has a lot of great student engagement experiences to draw from and already has been a great addition to the team.
  • We got our sample! In August, I spoke with Leigh about how to pull a data set for us to sample from. It was more complicated than I naively expected, but also a good lesson on how institutions like Penn State think, track, and record student engagement opportunities. With this sample, we can begin recruiting, once we feel confident about our interview protocol. A blog post is forthcoming, explaining how we decide what students would fall into our sample.
  • A picture of a table with a laptop, snowball microphone, and paper
    Deep in interview mode

    Ally and I were so jazzed on Friday, we decided to pilot the interview protocol. I was able to interview Ally about her student engagement experiences. The interview was about an hour and fifteen minutes long. That means we’re in the ballpark with time, and we both learned a lot from the experience. This upcoming week, we’ll be tweaking the interview questions and then piloting the revised questions with some students we know.

  • We were offered our first presentation opportunity. Ally and I will be speaking on the progress of this project at the upcoming Student Engagement Network Summit, on November 13. More details on the Summit are forthcoming, but it will be a great chance to connect with other university colleagues and share some results of our first interviews.

As you can see, we’re moving and grooving. Stay tuned for more information and updates!