Describe challenges you encountered while collecting and analyzing interview data and share lessons learned from the activity
I found this weeks assignment to be particularly challenging in time, energy and overall understanding of data analysis. I interviewed an additional individual because I felt it would round out the data I would analyze. Even though I asked the same baseline questions, two of my interviews were just at ten minutes, one was at 15 and another at 18 minutes. I thought it was interesting that when I counted the number of follow up questions I found that the most junior person took more prompting to get detailed responses and required additional questions for clarity.
The most senior person is a SR VP / GM of the entire program. I ended up only asking three of the four main questions during 15 minutes, and simply forgot to ask the final obstacle question because I was so intrigued with the vision he laid out for my magic wand question. I asked him the least amount of follow up questions and his answers were the most rounded and robust.
The transcriptions took over three hours for three of the interviews and I simply ran out of time to do the fourth so I typed in the notes I took because there is relevant and important data. For my own purposes, and the program, I will go back and transcribe it at a later time.
I got somewhat lost in watching all the videos on the “how to code” and spent a significant amount of time watching additional videos on YouTube. In the long run I don’t believe it helped. I also spent a lot of time pulling out words and phrases and trying to group theme them. This is when it would have been good to have seen some of the actual work that has been previously completed in this class since I learn best by seeing what has been done before and using it to help create my own work.
Because I am so intrigued with the who process of assessing data and believe I have the opportunity to do some great work in my work place, my hope is that I can get better in my coding and analyzing processes. Therefore the biggest challenge is myself and time.
I have to admit that as the interviews moved day to day, I began to wonder if I would actually be able to complete them before the week ended. I hadn’t intended, and ended up doing all four on Friday.
I am also encouraged that each of the interviewees are curious and now appear to be more interested and helpful in the work I am doing. Especially when I shared the question on communication and some of the feedback I was able to share from the focus group. The interviews made it personal and real.
I am looking forward to continue to move forward with this project!