2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this methods Research Brief, the utility of podcasts as a qualitative data source is explored. The use of publicly available data sources within educational research has grown in recent years. Technologies, including the internet, social media, and cell phones, have led to copious amounts of public interpersonal communication. The number of published chat forums, blogs, articles, and podcasts has also increased. Some public forums, such as Reddit and TikTok, have been utilized as qualitative data sources in educational studies; however, defined processes for utilizing available qualitative data remain scarce. This methods paper describes the process of using publicly available podcast episodes as a data source for an exploratory study in engineering education. The podcast we used (3,2,1…iRelaunch) features interviews with individuals who have taken a career break, and it explores their strategies and experiences as they return to the workforce. The authors were interested in studying the unique experiences of women engineers who relaunched their careers through an analysis of podcast interviews. This paper outlines the data source selection, ethical considerations, data retrieval, analysis, and reporting decisions. The advantages of utilizing podcast data include context-embedded data, eliminating the need for data collection or recruitment, and ensuring public availability. Accompanying disadvantages include ethical ambiguity, a lack of control during interviews, and a lack of follow-ups. Balancing these trade-offs, we believe that podcasts are a valuable, existing data source for engineering education researchers and the larger qualitative research community. This paper introduces a new process to significantly reduce the overhead time and resources required to collect qualitative data when similar podcast data already exists, which has important implications for qualitative researchers.