In this activity, you will practice qualitative analysis by reading and analyzing excerpts from interviews with staff working at reentry programs for women who have recently left prison. The goal is to learn more about the relationship between staff and formerly incarcerated women by identifying common themes in their responses to several concepts identified by the questions below. This is similar to the measurement activity relating to protests about police violence; however, we have no multiple choice questions and instead will be reading the interview excerpts for not just what they said but also meaning that can be inferred.
There are two parts:
Read the interviews linked below and consider the questions listed. Then, make notes about each respondent.
Answer the summary questions below based on your notes. Part 1:
Questions to Consider as you read the interview excerpts:
How does this respondent characterize the relationship?
What words do they use? Are they positive/negative/etc?
Can you identify any attitudes or emotions?
Any strategies or techniques they use in this relationship?
Does the answer make sense? Does it conflict or contradict itself?
Does gender play a role in how the staff develops and maintains relationships with the women?
Part 2:
Review your analyses of respondents 1-4 and answer the following questions.
Can you identify any patterns or themes between respondents? If so, what are they? (you can bullet point these)
Are there any outliers (i.e. any respondents who don’t “fit in” with what others said)
Can you quantify any commonalities (such as ¾ of the respondents were positive about the relationship, ¼ were negative, etc?)
Any other important findings/examples you believe to be important?
Please submit the notes you made for each interview except in Part 1) and the answers to the questions in Part 2. You can download the Google Doc version of the table/instructions as a word doc by going to “File” then “download as” in the Google Doc)
