The first two focus groups have been successfully transcribed! This process was a little more time consuming than expected due to a couple of different reasons. First, because the two focus groups that we recorded doubled as a roundtable at NCEAS where people are used to discussing topics more generally and inserting their opinion throughout the session, the focus groups had a lot of extraneous information that I had to listen and sort through. In the future, we need to be more specific in the information that we wish people to share and help direct the conversation accordingly. Also, because of the fact that we held two focus groups in the same room, I sometimes found it difficult to clearly hear a speaker as I was transcribing if someone was talking in the other group. For future focus groups where we have two groups at once, we can either have the focus groups in different rooms, or just make sure that we sit far enough away and have the participants talk at a lower volume so that the two groups don’t interfere with each other. Despite these two issues, the focus groups have been successfully transcribed and we learned many things to apply to the next focus group or interview to make it an even smoother process.
We are now working on compiling stories from these focus groups to post on the blog. We have already gone through the transcriptions and outlined possible story lines. We will use the common conflicts we have identified as the base of our organization for the stories. The first story that we are working on is about the problems that arise when researchers try to merge their file organization systems. We are in the process of finalizing this story and should have it up by the end of this week!