Monday, September 24, 2007

Just Four More...or so

I completed my tenth interview last Friday, and it went really well. I'm getting a good variety of information from these interviews, which is good. Variety is helpful. Sure, some of the comments go entirely against the direction I see this study going, but a grounded theory is grounded in the data themselves and not in my crazy mind.

I'm hoping for only about four more interviews before I start hearing similar answers again. These all need to be women due to the fact that I've had far too many men in the sample. That sort of made me laugh...normally I'd think I'd have the opposite problem of trying to find male participants, but that's not the case here.

Oh yeah, I may have found a more affordable way to get help with transcribing interviews. When I told a friend about the cost of the estimate I received last week, she suggested another mutual friend we both know who would be perfect. I think she'll be interested in the study as well...were she still in college, she could be one of the participants. We shall see. While in theory I want to do the transcriptions myself to get into the data some more, realistically if I want to finish anytime soon, I really should ask for some help.

This weekend I started writing out descriptions of each participant along with my own reactions to the interviews. These descriptions/reactions should be helpful in the long run for the data-collection process. I figure I can share them with the transcription person, too, so she'll have an idea of what to listen for when typing out the interviews.

I'm looking forward to putting on my swim trunks and getting completely saturated in the data, sorta like jumping into a big lake. Let's hope the lake itself has clear water and not too much seaweed obscuring my view.

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