From Interviews to Analysis

It has been a productive week of research. I have now interviewed 10 teens who participated in last year's program! I have also spoken with two other teens who are willing to be interviewed, if I can manage to call at a time when their parents are home. I would still like to talk to a couple more participants because I don't feel that I've really reached saturation and repetition of content. While I wait for the last few interviews, though, I have started looking at my data. Depending on how I calculate my response rate, it's either 53% or 76%, both of which seem pretty good. Of the 33 names and phone numbers I was given by CUCE-NYC, 2 said they did not participate, 10 were disconnected or the wrong number, 2 hung up on me immediately, 2 could not be reached despite repeated calls, 3 chose not to be interviewed, 4 are still on my list to call again, and 10 were interviewed. I have been pleasantly surprised by how friendly people (parents and teens) are when I call.

The content of some of the interviews is quite thoughtful and interesting. I am just starting to code my interviews, so I do not have any preliminary results yet. I think that I will code first for remembered activities (e.g. measuring trees, camping out, learning knots) and for comments on program impact. Then I will go back and code for more conceptual things like transfer to home, interacting with new people, and feeling close or far from NYC. I will also divide the quotes in half by camping/social experiences and educational lessons because eventually I want to compare last year's findings to this year's. I am using Atlas.ti on Athena to do my coding and analysis because I intend to use this program for my dissertation, and I think more practice will be helpful.

In the past week, I have also had a chance to meet with my supervisors here at CUCE-NYC to plan the up-coming one-day Island Explorers programs. I'm looking forward to getting out of the office and to working with youth again! I'm also excited about leading some activities at the end of the day that will serve as a closing and an evaluation. If I can work it out, I would like to do a follow up session with one of the groups that attends, as well, so I can get a little more data to compare a day program to a residential one.

Although I was excited after every interview, perhaps the most useful phone conversation I had this week was with a member of my dissertation committee. We were discussing the possibility of a methods chapter/article to my dissertation, and he suggested that rather than trying to document the validity of retrospective interviews as program evaluation, I could write a "how to" article with a discussion of the method's strengths and weaknesses. That type of paper not only seems more feasible to me, but also more useful and inclusive of my various projects. As I said to him, what I'm doing this summer isn't hard or complicated, it's just something we rarely think we can do. The method is also something that fits with non-formal education programs that lack pre-post tests, extensive contact with youth, and the resources for longitudinal data sets. I'm excited the prospect of drawing on all of my research activities (including this CUSP project) to help others do retrospective research as well.