Interview and Data Extraction Assignment Handout

Interview and Data Extraction Assignment Handout

The two main requirements for this assignment are to conduct two (or more) sessions of interview and observation with your interview participants and to extract data from the interviews in the form of affinity notes. For reasons of privacy and practicality, you will not need to submit anything from the interviews other than an attestation that you have completed them. The submitted portion of this assignment will focus on the extracted affinity notes.

You will be asked to submit the text from 20 affinity notes (selected for review out of your entire affinity note set), five at a time by category: (1) quotations by interview participants; (2) observations and interpretations; (3) factual statements that are not quotations; and (4) any five other notes (they can include the categories above). Good notes will do the following:

Be relevant to the overall problem being investigated in your mini-project.

Include an appropriate participant code for the affinity note. Don’t forget this!

In order to preserve the privacy of your participants, you should use participants codes instead of names or other personally identifiable information. Codes can be very simple: P01 for Participant 1, etc.

Contain one of the following types of content:

A quotation from an interview participant. These should be in quotation marks.

Statements of fact that you learned from the interview or observation. These should be understandable as full sentences.

Questions that arise, or which you might ask in future interviews. (These should end with a question mark.)

Other observations or interpretations. Again, these should be understandable as full sentences.

Be self-contained and understandable on their own, in the context of your mini-project.

Be specific. Affinity notes represent the raw data for later analysis. Many, though probably not all, of the notes should be very specific and contain concrete information derived from the interview sessions.

Be concise. Most affinity notes will be a sentence or two long. Some may go to three or more sentences, especially if they involve quotations from participants. However, the goal is to have each affinity note represent a single idea in a concise way.