2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this methods paper, we describe the use of participant-generated I-poems as a tool to represent data from qualitative interviews. I-poems are poems composed of I-statements a participant made during an interview. This form of qualitative analysis highlights a participant’s voice and self-focused statements within a text. For our study, we adapted the I-poem method so that participants created an I-poem themselves from their interview transcripts to represent their researcher identities. It was important to us to use a participatory method of analysis because it gave participants agency in how their identities were interpreted and expressed. We believe participant-generated I-poems will be useful for researchers who want to learn about participants’ beliefs in their own terms or those who want to use participants’ knowledge as a lens to analyze the qualitative data they help produce. To that end, we discuss the methods and results of our study using I-poems to represent researcher identity as a case study to show how the participant-generated I-poem method can be used to analyze interview data in a new way. We recommend applying I-poems to other engineering education research agendas.

After the interview, participants were provided with their interview transcript to review and modify as needed. In a second meeting, participants created the poems themselves from their interview transcripts: each participant selected which of their statements to include to create a poem that represented who they are as a researcher on their team. The first author was present during the poem session to answer questions. After participants finished creating their poem, the first author asked them to share it and then asked reflection questions related to the content and construction of the poem (ex. “what does your poem say about who you are as a researcher?” and “how did you go about creating your poem?”).

In this paper, we describe how we operationalized the I-poem method to address our research question and discuss how participants’ poems related to our theory of researcher identity. We compare I-statements that were included in I-poems to those that were left out. We also make recommendations for applying I-poems to other engineering education research agendas.