Mapping the Questions: Supporting Qualitative Interview Analysis Through Emergent Structure

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Talk the Talk: Centering Dialogue in Methodology

Abstract

Interviews are rich tools valued for their flexibility, responsiveness, and capacity to surface participant meaning. Yet this openness also leads to analytic difficulty: having different questions asked in different ways makes it difficult to navigate large collections of transcripts. Fortunately, recognizing that interviewer questions often recur across interviews that explore a shared topic allows us to treat them as landmarks in a shared topical landscape. By clustering recurring questions, we can uncover an emergent structure that reflects the underlying interview protocol. We propose an open-source software package that constructs this map given a collection of interviews, allowing for quick retrieval of relevant responses, visualizations of common pathways, and further exploratory analyses.

Author

• Zachary Lim, Harvard University