{"id":426,"date":"2012-11-15T18:24:34","date_gmt":"2012-11-15T23:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/?p=426"},"modified":"2012-11-20T09:46:21","modified_gmt":"2012-11-20T14:46:21","slug":"moving-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/2012\/11\/15\/moving-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving Forward: Interviewing Steppingstone Scholars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Steppingstone Academy Hartford is an initiative led by the Hartford Youth Scholars Foundation (HYSF)<\/p><\/div>\n

This semester, we are working with Steppingstone Academy Hartford<\/a>\u00a0to collect information on the benefits and challenges of the independent school experience for the students in their Steppingstone Scholars program. We are hoping that this information can be helpful for the Steppingstone Academy in developing their future programming, such as a mentoring program for their students. This process has involved several steps, including a research review and open-ended survey of various independent school Deans and Directors, IRB writing and approval, the formulation of interview questions, and interviews with Steppingstone graduates.<\/p>\n

On Friday October 12th<\/sup>, we met with our community partner, Welbith Mota, the Dean of Programs for the Hartford Youth Scholars Foundation. During our meeting, we discussed what might be the best way to get in contact with Steppingstone graduates who currently attend various private schools in the area. Mr. Mota provided us with a list of all graduates who currently attend private school, and he highlighted various individuals who he thought would be open to talking with us. We requested that he provide a range of students, from those who have excelled in private school, to those who might have had an especially difficult time. From this list, we have been able to conduct 10 interviews and hope to conduct 5 more within the next few days.<\/p>\n

We were both very apprehensive about starting the first interview. Perhaps our apprehensions stemmed from the general fear of the unknown; neither of us had ever conducted phone interviews before and we weren\u2019t sure how communicating via phone would influence the direction and ease of conversation. We were unsure of how the students would respond to our questions, whether the students would be honest, nervous, talkative, or shy. These unknown variables and uncertainties were intimidating at the time. After we jumped the hurdle of conducting our first interview, our nervousness faded and we were able to conduct the remainder of the interviews with ease. Frankly, communicating via phone worked in our favor. Both of us have conducted various interviews throughout our time at Trinity, but no face-to-face interview that we have ever conducted occurred with the degree of comfort and ease we felt with the telephone interviews in this collection. Perhaps it was the fact that the interviewee was not able to see us receiving their responses on the other end that was helpful in making the interviewee more comfortable in sharing personal and honest opinions.<\/p>\n

We have started transcribing the interviews and will begin analyzing our data in the next few weeks. We hope to provide a mix of quantitative results, such as frequencies, and qualitative results, such as ethnographic descriptions. We feel that providing a mix of both will be the most holistic way of conveying our results and will be the most beneficial to our community partner, the Steppingstone Academy Hartford.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This semester, we are working with Steppingstone Academy Hartford\u00a0to collect information on the benefits and challenges of the independent school experience for the students in their Steppingstone Scholars program. We are hoping that this information can be helpful for the Steppingstone Academy in developing their future programming, such as a mentoring program for their students. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":476,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/476"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":538,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions\/538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}