To guide my analysis of the interview data, I relied on several articles written explicitly to guide doctoral students and novice researchers through the phases of qualitative research (Brice, 2005; Doheny-Farina & Odell, 1985; Grant-Davie, 1992;
Lauer & Asher, 1988; Ritchie & Spencer, 1994). Doheny-Farina and Odell (1985) pointed out that the goal of an interview is to find out what the participant thinks;
therefore, while researchers may need to guide their informants’ attention to the topic,
they shouldn’t guide too much—not even by recasting what the participant has said because that adds our own interpretation into the interview.
Concerned that I might “guide too much,” I listened to my first interview the evening after I had conducted it. This decision turned out to be serendipitous; not only was I able to improve my interviewing technique, I was also able to add notations to the notes I had already taken in order to clarify the participant’s utterances and indicate sequences I found particularly interesting or unexpected. In fact, Doheny-Farina and Odell suggest that this method is the best way to begin the challenging process of developing the categories that will later be the basis of the codes. Besides making notes on the interview guide, I created a computer file for the interview and typed in a journal paragraph of “impressions” about the participant and the interview. Realizing how helpful this exercise had been for me, I continued the practice for all subsequent interviews. These two steps—listening to the interview to add notes and creating a journal entry for the experience—were essential because the interviews were conducted in the midst of a semester filled with teaching, administrative duties, and meetings. I knew I would not be able to transcribe the interviews until the end of the semester; by then I might forget characteristics of the interviewees and/or the thread of a conversation that was partially obscured by ambient noises.
I wanted to begin working with the interview data as soon as possible while it was at least somewhat fresh in my memory. Ritchie and Spencer cautioned, however, that preliminary to working with the data is a familiarization stage, which involves immersion in the data: listening to tapes, reading transcripts, studying observational notes, etc. (p.
177). In order to do become familiar with the data, Ritchie and Spencer suggest that when
researchers have conducted more than “a few interviews” (p. 178) they should select representative transcripts to immerse themselves in. I chose my first five interviews to transcribe in their entirety for the following reasons: the interviewees came from three different L1 backgrounds, they represented both US- and foreign-born bilingual learners, they came from three different age groups (19-20, 24, and 36), and they were at three different points in their Alverno College career (two freshmen, one sophomore, and two seniors).
I chose to transcribe the interviews in a format that Bucholtz identifies as
“characteristic of the transcription of spoken discourse in non-linguistic research in the human and social sciences, which is carried out for the purpose not of analyzing discourse structure but of examining discourse content” (2007, p. 787). I am working within the field of applied linguistics; yet, the purpose of the interview data is for thick description and triangulation. For this study, a more detailed linguistic presentation would distract from the content of the speakers’ messages. Bucholtz cautions that even a simplified transcript should indicate “any talk that was omitted,” and I have done so with the use of ellipses. There are some distinct disadvantages to representing speech in this way. First, as careful as I try to be with my use of punctuation marks, they still add a layer of my interpretation to what the speakers were saying. In fact, by not rendering the transcripts in a linguistically detailed manner, I make it difficult for other scholars to challenge my interpretations of the speakers’ intended meanings. I also make it harder for other researchers to “discover new things in the data” (p. 794). Still, given the focus of this study, simplified transcription is the best choice.
After transcribing the five interviews and reading the transcripts, I began “the process of identifying units of analysis and classifying each unit according to the categories in a coding system” (Grant-Davie, 1992, p. 272). Grant-Davie explains that syntactic units (like T-units or sentences) are problematic for oral speech because they’re often broken up and/or never finished. He prefers “episodic units,” which last as long as a speaker “continues to make the same kind of comment” (p. 276). The vagueness of Grant-Davie’s explanation suited me, giving me permission not to be overly fastidious about the end of one unit and the beginning of the next. I decided to use episodic units with the understanding that “single passages often contain a number of different themes each of which needs to be referenced” (Ritchie and Spencer, 1994, p. 182).
I read through the transcripts repeatedly, marking units and glossing them for the topic(s) the speaker was discussing. This process helped me notice recurring phrases and ideas. After several more readings, I was able to develop a list of themes or significant topics based on the frequency with which they recurred throughout the transcripts, or their cogency to my research questions, or their striking, unusual quality. Moreover, because of the triangulation purpose for the interviews, I also identified segments when participants answered the clarification questions and when they mentioned in passing a fact about their schooling and/or background that was pertinent to the survey data. These responses were immediately entered as footnotes into the charts of the survey data. In addition, a chart of interviewees’ reconstructions of writing the CPA composition was created and appended below the writing analysis data chart to assure that qualitative information about the CPA compositions would be readily available when I was ready to interpret the writing analysis results.
My list of significant topics and ideas formed the preliminary index for coding the interview data. I coded two of the transcripts and then gave the index and uncoded copies of the same transcripts to an Alverno College communication instructor so that she could do the same thing. After our discussion, I modified the index and we re-coded the two transcripts together. This exercise led to more revisions of the index. We used the revised index to separately code the next three transcripts. Our subsequent discussion led to fewer instances of disagreement, making me feel more confident about the index. As Ritchie and Spencer observe, “applying an index is not a routine exercise as it involves making numerous judgements as to the meaning and significance of the data” (1994, p. 182).
At this point, Brice’s description of her struggles with coding the transcripts of her interviews was very helpful. Brice found that some of the disagreements between her and her colleague occurred because her colleague, like mine, was not an experienced ESL teacher. The vocabulary and syntax errors of Brice’s participants sometimes made it hard for her colleague to understand them. Brice, on the other hand, was accustomed to the way ESL students express themselves. Also, as their teacher, she knew more about the participants than her colleague did. These sources of knowledge “informed all of the interpretations I made” (2005, p. 167). Brice’s discussion allowed me to maintain a more fluid notion of the index. I realized that I would have to make judgments. I also kept my index list open-ended, in case of a need to modify or add codes as other themes emerged from subsequent interviews. For example, several of the later participants spoke at some length about the support they received from English-speaking family and friends as they were trying to learn the language. After adding “ELL Support” to my index, I went back through the earlier transcripts, coding segments where such support was mentioned.
After transcribing and coding the remaining interviews, I reviewed all of the topics in the final index, searching “for patterns and connections and [seeking]
explanations for these internally within the data” (Ritchie & Spencer, 1994, p. 186). As a sense of these connections emerged, I developed a wall chart with three major sections:
“L1” “English Learning” and—the section that linked them—“L1-L2 Relationships.” I organized the themes and topics from the index in the appropriate section of the wall chart. Finally, I added references to the coded interviews under the appropriate headings on the wall chart, identifying each by participant number and transcript page number.