Exploratory QUAL Phase

In the Exploratory QUAL Phase, I address the research question: “What are the different ways mid-year engineering students are perceiving their future career goals and how those perceptions interact with their actions in their present engineering coursework?” This study is uses a phenomenographic approach, where the phenomenon the students are experiencing is thinking about their future career goals, and the context in which the students are experiencing the phenomenon is their current engineering coursework and the attainment of their engineering degree.

Participant Selection

The participants in this study were 18 mid-year BME and ME at University E. The selection of students from two similar majors at a single institution provided

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variations in experiencing the same phenomenon, thinking about their future career goals in a similar context, engineering coursework and the attainment of their engineering degree (Dringenberg et al., 2015). ME and BME students experienced the phenomenon in a similar context in terms of engineering coursework, as many of the core courses that mid-year students take are similar in the BME and ME programs at this institution based on information in the undergraduate student catalog at that institution. While ME is considered a more traditional engineering major because it is older, larger and more well known, BME is considered more of an interdisciplinary major and is relatively newer. BME undergraduates usually plan on attending graduate or professional school after graduation. ME undergraduates usually plan on working in industry immediately after graduation (Kirn, Faber, & Benson, 2014). The number of participants was influenced by balancing the need for adequate data to identify variations within it, the goal of reaching saturation (a point at which no further insights or perceptions about the phenomenon are revealed), and the practical constraint of working with a manageable amount of data (Yates, Partridge, & Bruce, 2012). A detailed description of the participants in this phase is included in Chapter 3 (pg. 57). A brief description for all interview participants in this doctoral study is included in Appendix C.

Data Collection

Following the phenomenographic tradition, we conducted semi-structured interviews (Dall’Alba & Hasselgren, 1996; Marton, 1986), which were audio recorded

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and transcribed. I was the primary interviewer for half of the interviews; members of the research team were the primary interviewers the other half of the interviews and served as second interviewers for all interviews. In these interviews, the primary interviewer led the interviewee through a series of prompts with clarifying follow-up questions to explicitly reflect on the phenomenon of interest (Åkerlind, 2012), thinking about their future career goals. Data collection occurred over the course of three semesters (Spring and Fall 2014, and Spring of 2015). The interviews started with the question, "What are your goals for the future?" The interviewer then guided the students through different aspects of their future goals (career, ideal, avoided, relevant skills) with a range of follow-up questions, while the second interviewer took notes and asked any questions missed by the first interviewer. In this way, the second interviewer helped maintain consistency across each of the interviews.

The semi-structured interview protocol, detailed in Appendix D, consisted of three parts: long-term goals (perceptions of their future careers), short-term goals (academic behaviors and decisions), and interactions between short- and long- term goals (relevance of their education to their future careers). Interviews ranged from 39 to 95 minutes in length. Our research team piloted the interview protocol in another study with two upper-level engineering students who have experienced the phenomenon of interest in a similar context to the participants of this study; the interview protocol was refined to better capture the phenomenon of thinking about

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future career goals. For more details on the development of the interview protocol, refer to Kirn and Benson (2018).

Data Analysis

The interviews were professionally transcribed; then I and another researcher listened to each audio recording while simultaneously reading the interview transcripts for accuracy, allowing us to be immersed in the data. The researchers used parts of the transcript that have the four primary characteristics of phenomenographic research: relational, experiential, contextual, and qualitative (or descriptive) (Barnard et al., 1999; Marton, 1988). The bounds of the conceptual framework were set by researchers aided by previous work (Kirn & Benson, 2018) and content experts. We developed an initial codebook with broad themes around the conceptual framework created with the analysis of the first nine interviews and used this codebook to code the subsequent nine interviews.

These broad, emergent themes are overarching concepts such as “the student describes how their future goals are influencing what they do in the present.” Over each iteration, the identified themes became more focused on emerging aspects that are significant in distinguishing similarities and differences in the interviews (Åkerlind, 2012). As analysis continued, researchers refined the initial codebook into a more detailed codebook, using a more thematic deductive approach to coding (Saldana, 2013). Some of the qualitative descriptions from the analysis did not fit within these codes or needed more definition to distinguish different codes; we

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marked these qualitative descriptions and re-examined to create new codes and further develop the codebook. The finalized codebook broke the major themes into differentiated codes with definitions of those codes, and example quotes that would be labeled as that code. The codebook is included in Appendix E.

RQDA, a qualitative coding tool, was used to mark text in the transcripts of the participants that fit within a code in the detailed codebook (Huang, 2016). An example of how the qualitative coding software was used is included in Appendix F. We created a summary page for each participant that described the key points of the participant’s experience of the phenomenon based around the structure of the codes in the refined codebook. Research team members met to discuss the similarities and differences in these summaries, and to develop initially hypothesized groups based on these comparisons. Multiple researchers examined these proposed groups and discussed in-depth where participants fit into groups. During these conversations, no new groups emerged from descriptions, but rather only slight variations were clarified within each group.

The final result was a set of groups that are described in a consistent outcome space, focused around the final themes (Barnard et al., 1999). The description and definition of these groups were based on the discussions among the researchers in the research team, and the descriptions were narrowed to abbreviated descriptions based on important concepts for each group, which are presented as results in this paper.

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Quality Considerations

The robustness of the methodological foundations of phenomenography helped us ensure the validity and reliability of the results. For example, commonly accepted research procedures for phenomenographic data collection and analysis helped ensure procedural validation, or incorporating features into the research design to faithfully capture the participants’ reality (Walther & Sochacka, 2014; Walther et al., 2013). In making the data, semi-structured interviews allowed for the interviewer to guide the discussion to the phenomenon being studied while allowing participants the opportunity to express the full range of their experiences. Interviewers were careful to not interrupt or cutoff the participant, and to ask follow-up clarifying questions to ensure that we fully understood the participants’ descriptions.

Also, I memoed throughout the study and interviews to acknowledge any biases I perceived during the analysis to ensure that the outcomes of this study were descriptions of the range of experiences within the sample group and not influenced by the bias of individual researchers (Åkerlind, 2012). Example memos from the qualitative strands of this study are provided in Appendix G.

If there were any questions about the intended meaning of interview transcript data, I contacted via email for follow-up questions to get confirmation, or I did not include the data in question. These methods work towards meeting theoretical validation, or ensuring the fit between the reality of the participant and the theory produced, by ensuring that the final groups resulting from the analysis were descriptions of the

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range of experiences within the sample group and not influenced by the bias of individual researchers (Åkerlind, 2012; Walther & Sochacka, 2014).