I initially planned to use interviews within my research, in addition to the focus group, workshops, and interactive poster. However, this resulted in an overwhelming amount of data to process. Therefore, part way through the project, at the evaluation stage, I decided to disregard the data.
Of all the data I had collected, these made the most sense to disregard. Although interviews provide rich qualitative data my question, my question focusses on student behaviour, so the data collected from students and their behaviour is more pertinent. It could be that in another round of action research, this data could be presented to staff to reflect on, as co-collaborators rather than participants. The re-design of micro interventions could then also be done collaboratively, and further data collected on student interactions and enagagment.
Of course I cannot avoid the fact that I have already experienced those interviews, and they surely must have in some way, affected my thinking. However, both interviews were with close colleagues, with whom I already regularly discuss the issues at play. None of this information was knew, but it would have provided another dataset to compare the student’s views, interactions and engagement to.