For our first pass through, I was assigned to analyze the data from a junior at the Croft School. I began by reading each interview transcript through and jotting down any points that seemed particularly significant or useful to construct some overall themes. Our group broke down our note taking process on each student/alumni into six categories: background information, indicators of student wealth, student personal attributes, student social life, school factors, and notable emerging themes. These were formulated from a quick skim of each participant’s data.
As I sifted through the three interview transcripts, I copied down important quotes that seemed to represent certain themes as well as my own notes on what the student was describing. One of the most interesting parts of this process was how smoothly certain themes started to emerge out of the data. For example I jotted down “seems to be knowledgeable about the wealth and privilege around him but not motivated to use in any majorly positive or influential ways” as a summary of the student’s understanding of the systems of privilege at the Croft School but his reluctance to find a job after college. After reviewing the transcripts, I went back to the school’s website to get a more in depth understanding of some of the systems my student was talking about which was a very helpful step.
The next hurdle our group faced was combining all of our findings into cohesive and largely representative themes for each group of data so we could formulate our research question. Whether it was by chance or not, a majority of the interviews we read had surfaced similar ideas about how the Croft School functions within the larger Chilean society. For example, one of my groupmates wrote down “economic awareness/class awareness, or a lack thereof” which parallels what I noted earlier. Some students that were interviewed focussed more heavily on their intent to stay in Chile after graduation, while some emphasized how much of a “bubble” the school is. The broad range of perspectives gave us some interesting ideas to work with.
For me, one of the most important parts of doing research is really being able to talk through what I’m seeing in the data with other people. My group’s in person conversations really allowed us to bounce ideas off each other and notice things we hadn’t on our own or compare between students/alumni. By doing this, we were able to come up with a research question for our paper on how the Croft School reinforces and challenges class structures in Chile. Through our next process of creating a proposal, each of us got to dive into some important themes: historical background of Chile and the Croft School, Chilean society and socioeconomic status, diversity, the Croft School’s physical location, and class reproduction. After each individually researching a theme, we brought our findings back together into a cohesive proposal.
All together, our beginnings of this project have helped us derive about eight categories of themes that have shaped the codes we have produced in order to analyze the student interviews more carefully. Going forward, I think it will be very important to continue in person discussions and hear what others are finding so we each have a comprehensive idea of all of the data for this project. Despite the intimidating size of this project and the difficulties that sometimes arise when working in a large group, our systematic organization and collaboration has proved essential thus far and will continue to be as we dig further into the ins and outs of the Croft School and its students.
