Checking In: 'Who Are We?' Project
Happy January! Our lab team has just finished the first phase of our ‘Who Are We?’ research project; here’s a quick update on what we accomplished in the past semester:
Conceptualised and defined our key terms: belonging, community & identity 💬
This activity was more challenging than expected, given that we often use these terms interchangeably in our day-to-day speech. As a team, we were able to gain conceptual clarity and come up with some working definitions.
Developed our interview guide 📝
After conceptualisation, we had to think of questions that tapped into each of the three key constructs. This process taught us about the importance of word choice when formulating questions. We often put our assumptions into a question, so this process of iterating on our interview guide allowed us to identify when we were asking leading questions. Some interview questions included: ‘What do you think makes a person a HKU-er?’ ‘Do you feel like you belong at HKU?’ ‘Is there anywhere you feel like you strongly belong?’
We also learned about the importance of structuring an interview flow. We considered which questions would be more palatable and easy to answer, then placed the trickier/complex questions towards the end.
Practiced qualitative interviewing skills 🗣
This meant learning to establish rapport in a short window of time, being attentive to interviewee's responses and mannerisms, guiding the interview so that research questions could be answered.
Recruited and conducted pilot interviews with 10 interviewees 🚀
We’re very fortunate to have multilingual students on our research team, which allowed us to collect data in English, Cantonese and Mandarin. This allows us to garner a range of perspectives, especially in a linguistically diverse environment like HKU.
Looking ahead to the new semester, we have many things to accomplish but we’re excited to get into the nitty-gritty of transcribing, coding and analysing our interview data. We will also be reflecting on our research skills – how can we improve as we go into the second round of interviews? Lastly, we will be creating a storyline about what it means to be a ‘HKU-er’. Our team has already expressed that the interview results were surprising, and we look forward to unpacking what that means this semester.