Mapping Trajectories of Researcher Development with Qualitative Longitudinal Analysis: An Executive Summary

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Abstract Being able to communicate scientific findings is an important skill for STEM researchers. While most researchers will typically communicate findings in professional settings to colleagues within their field, there are also opportunities to disseminate findings to the public. Engaging the community in research can spark interest and further engagement in the researcher's topic. Our team is creating an experience to give researchers from divergent disciplines an opportunity to collaborate and present their research to the local community. This experience brings together researchers from divergent disciplines into a cohort. The cohort collaborates around a convergent theme, such as energy, to improve and expand how they currently communicate their research to the public. First, we trained the participants on how to communicate research in informal public settings. Next, the participating researchers presented their research individually in two informal learning venues. Finally, the researchers from each cohort collaborated to create a convergent presentation that incorporated all of their research while centering it around the convergent theme. The participants were interviewed twice for each presentation in this set to discuss their goals for the various presentations, what they changed after the prior experience, and to reflect on their presentation experience. This executive summary discusses the analysis completed to-date with a focus on the longitudinal coding performed as a secondary coding method. Our analysis is situated in the Longitudinal Model of Motivation and Identity (LMMI) as a theoretical framework. The LMMI centers how motivation to participate in interdisciplinary research and in different outlets to disseminate research, as well as identity as a researcher evolve over the experience. We started with an initial coding approach to see what themes emerged from the transcripts. This led to the development of a codebook to be used for future cohorts. Once all transcripts were coded, our team discussed that we wanted to examine the trajectory of each researcher over the experience. Longitudinal coding was chosen as a secondary coding method to assess changes in how participants talked about their communication experiences within the program and the different themes which emerged in the first round of coding. We also discuss how we developed the process to analyze each researcher's trajectory through extracting meaningful quotes to showcase their growth over time. Our work contributes to the general body of literature related to STEM communication by exploring how identity as a researcher and motivation to participate in interdisciplinary collaborations and communicate to the public grew over the course of the presentations. Because our work is situated in the LMMI, our approach allows us to track participant development throughout the course of the program with regards to their motivation and identity as researchers and how they will modify their research dissemination after the program.