Synthesizing Interview Data
To synthesize is to combine one or more things down into something more orderly and put-together. Synthesizing the recorded answers from research interviews is an imperative part of breaking down and really understanding the major themes of the conversations. This important process helps researchers realize gaps in their understanding of the problem and may even lead to new avenues of inquiry.
Since our main goal is to investigate how to lessen food insecurity in Fayetteville, my human-centered design team and I have been exploring the concept of community gardening because it seems like a great way to tackle the problem from a more head-on direction. We interviewed three community members over the weekend in order to get a deeper understanding of our how might we question: How might we expand or change the current community garden projects in Fayetteville so more city residents could/would join? We spoke to the Director of a local farming collective called Tri Cycle Farms, a former community garden member, and the Volunteer Coordinator for Fayetteville’s Parks and Recreations. Because all three of these folks were so kind to speak with us about their experiences with local gardening and community involvement, we ended up with a lot of data. Since these conversations were so incredibly detailed and insightful, we ended up with pages and pages of dictations, which unfortunately can be very hard to sift through. This is where synthesizing came in!
Working together, my team and I cleaned up all our interview transcripts and defined five major themes that stood out in their responses. We first gave each theme its own color, then we went back through and color highlighted portions of each interviewee’s communication which aligned itself with one of the motifs. Next, we sorted these phrases into groups by their colors. This way, it was far easier to see what all three community members had to say about a certain subject, such as food production or ownership. This synthesis exercise also helped my team and I to realize new roadblocks to our process, such as how to identify food insecure groups, as well as gaps in our understanding of the problem, like how much knowledge it takes to successfully grow food.
Synthesizing information is a great tool for any researcher, especially human-centered designers, to really understand the specifics of an interaction with one or more participants. Having paragraph after paragraph of word-for-word notes from an interview is good practice and indeed thorough, but not necessarily practical for deeper interpretation. Breaking down and sorting through responses helps to get to the heart of what the interviewees were really saying, which in turn helps designers get a clearer focus on the problem.