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1. Accessing Complex Constructs: Refining an Interview Protocol

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE44824.2020.9274260  

   Braaten, Bailey; Kramer, Amy; Henderson, Eric; Kajfez, Rachel; Dringenberg, Emily (December 2020, 2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   null (Ed.)

   A well-developed interview protocol is an essential data collection tool in qualitative research. An established process to refine interview protocols can help build quality and consistency into data collection. However, despite the importance placed on interview protocols by academic texts, there is little guidance regarding how to systematically develop and refine interview protocols, particularly when exploring complex constructs, such as beliefs and identity. In this special session, attendees will learn and practice an approach for refining interview protocols for investigating complex constructs in engineering education. We share this interview refinement approach as it enabled us to determine if our interview questions prompted participants to provide data essential to answering our research questions for a pilot study investigating students' beliefs and identities. This special session will also include conversations around best practices related to data collection to access complex constructs and how these practices can impact and shape future research. We welcome attendees of all experience levels (novice to expert) with regard to designing interview protocols. The session will be facilitated by Dr. Emily Dringenberg, Dr. Rachel Kajfez, and their graduate students. Dr. Dringenberg is a qualitative researcher well versed in beliefs. Dr. Kajfez is a mixed methods researcher well versed in identity. Both have multiple NSF grants exploring these complex constructs. 

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2. Evaluating the quality of interviews with a process-based, self-reflective tool

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43453  

   Brooks, Amy; Huff, James (June 2023, ASEE Conferences)

   This methods paper presents the interview quality reflection tool (IQRT) to evaluate the quality of qualitative research interviews. Qualitative researchers commonly use semi-structured interviews that rely on the interviewers’ ability to improvise in real time based on the needs of the study. Given that interviewing involves numerous tacit skills that cannot be delineated by a simple written protocol, it is necessary that researchers develop interview competencies through practice and reflection. While prior literature on interviewing has often focused on developing interview protocols, we know little about how interviewers themselves may be trained to gather high-quality data. In this paper, we focus on how the IQRT may be used to guide the self-assessment of research interviews. We discuss how interviews are used in engineering education, how we developed and applied the IQRT, and how lessons learned through using this tool might lead to improved interviewing skills through careful examination of interview structure, content, and context within the mentoring process. 

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3. The Interview Quality Reflection Tool (IQRT): Honing the Craft of Experiential Interviews

   https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069241300989  

   Huff, James L; Brooks, Amy L (January 2024, International Journal of Qualitative Methods)

   Prior methodological literature on conducting interviews emphasizes the importance of skill development in conducting interviews. However, in contrast to qualitative data analysis, there are few systematic processes in place to guide the interviewer into reflexivity about their role in the interview situation. Here, we present the interview quality reflection tool (IQRT) as a process that we developed from conducting and mentoring semi-structured and unstructured interviews focused on personal lived experiences. The IQRT prompts the interviewer to transcribe each interview question and reflect on how the spoken question served to advance experiential quality in the interview. We illustrate the IQRT itself before demonstrating how we authors used the process to examine experiential quality in three cases conducted in our prior research. Finally, we consider how the IQRT enables researchers to examine the interview situation as a whole, by increasing the self-awareness of the interviewer, and the parts, by commenting on the mechanics of constructing useful questions. 

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4. Workshop: Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to Study Psychological Experience within Engineering Education

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962480  

   Huff, James L.; Brooks, Amy (October 2022, Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conferences)

   In this workshop, we introduced participants to the tacit and often hidden skills of doing interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to understand lived experience in engineering education. With the growth of IPA research in engineering education, this workshop was designed to sharpen the skills of participants who come with experience in qualitative research and provide practical guidance to participants who may be novices to qualitative research. The workshop was characterized by an interactive style, in which participants collectively analyze a transcript excerpt from an interview with an engineering student regarding their experience of shame. To strengthen the translation of the workshop, the session was intentionally facilitated by both an expert in conducting IPA research and a highly trained engineer who is at the beginning stages of doing IPA. 

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5. WIP: Developing an Interview Protocol to Unveil the Stories of Neurodivergent Engineering Students

   Brown, L; Spence, C; Cuellar, A; Thakkar, K; Karimi, H; Tsugawa, M (June 2025, American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   This Work in Progress (WIP) paper will present an interview protocol development that leverages social media analysis for capturing narratives of neurodivergent (e.g., ADHD, autistic, dyslexic) engineering students. The work presented in this WIP is part of a larger mixed-methods sequential research project which aims to capture neurodivergent engineering student narratives that describe their engineering experiences in terms of strengths and challenges. Through social media analysis, we identified key language used by the neurodivergent community (e.g., neurodivergent, spoon, forget). We developed a few initial themes such as multiple pathways to recognizing one’s identity of being neurodivergent, multiple ways in which neurodivergence symptoms are experienced, and the ways in which an individual internally and outwardly interacts with their own symptoms. To capture neurodivergent narratives, we plan on conducting semi-structured interviews with neurodivergent engineering students three times over the semester (beginning, middle, end). Initial interview protocols for each interview will be developed and adjusted throughout the interview data collection process. An initial compilation of relevant interview questions was compiled from previous research and from the objectives of the research study. This initial pool of questions will then be refined based on our thematic findings and using the nuanced language identified on the social media platforms TikTok, Reddit, and Twitter. Results of this work will be presented in this paper as an interview protocol that will continue to be adapted as part of this larger research study, but can also be used as a starting point for researchers exploring similar topics in capturing the experience of neurodivergent engineering students. 

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