Abstract
This paper presents a small-scale study aimed at exploring how academic staff articulate professional goals. Methods include semi-structured interviews guided by Whitmore’s (2009) GROW model and analysed via reflexive thematic analysis. Methodological parallels between coaching and qualitative interviewing are discussed. The author describes in nuanced detail the motivation for and attributes of participants' goals through expressed patterns of meaning. Overall, the study highlights the potential efficacy of integrating coaching tools into qualitative research methodologies.
Introduction
This paper describes a small-scale trial in which I collected data via semi-structured interviews conducted with two female academic staff. The interview protocol was guided by Whitmore’s (2009) GROW (
In the process of conducting semi-structured interviews, I found methodological parallels between coaching practices and qualitative interviewing. The combination of coaching tools and semi-structured interviewing served well to answer the research question and yielded complex data. Both participants described goals through the lens of challenges that they sought to overcome in their professional practice. They were motivated by their Christian faith and lived experiences.
In the sections that follow, I will first discuss coaching, goal-setting, and the conceptual framework. Then, I will explore methods pertaining to semi-structured interviewing and describe my own positionality. Finally, I will provide an exposition of the process and results of thematic analysis.
Coaching, Goal Setting, and Conceptual Framework
The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential” (n.d.). Coaches employ a set of tools — mainly active, empathetic listening combined with open-ended questions — to further what many teaching practitioners might recognise as reflection. Lennard (2010) cites Brookfield’s (1986) self-directed learning in adults as part of a theoretical foundation for coaching. Self-directed learning invites the adult to define priorities and be her own locus of control in the pursuit of knowledge and skills, through critical reflection. Self-directed learning is fostered by the external role of the coach or facilitator, paired with the intrinsic motivation of the adult learner. Similarly, assisting individuals in the formulation of learner contracts (Frank & Scharff, 2013; Knowles, 1991) can mirror coaching, prompting them to articulate what, when, and how they will reach their learning goals, externalising and documenting them.
In this manner, coaching dovetails with self-directed learning, particularly for adult learners, targeting a more tailored approach to individual professional development needs. For example, Wolff et al. (2020) found that coaching enhanced the self-directed goal attainment of medical students, who were then more likely to incorporate feedback and follow through with action steps. Coaching and self-directed learning are intensely participant-centred; the agenda is set by the participant and supported by the coach. Costa & Garmston (2015) call this orientation “cognitive coaching”, which is a coaching arrangement aimed at “producing self-directed learners and leaders with the disposition for continuous, lifelong learning” (p. 29). Cognitive coaches “habituate the process of reflection” (p. 199). They describe coaches as intentional, non-judgemental practitioners who pose powerful and pertinent questions to propel the coachee towards their internally-determined ends. In this mode, the coachee’s self-generated focus is explored through the process of reflection.
Academia often dictates the professional trajectory or priorities for academic staff. They navigate the duality of tenure-tethered pre-set tasks with sink-or-swim autonomy. Therefore, supportive and external thought-partners may be helpful in a “publish or perish” context. Challenging constraints and multiple demands on academic staff require excellent executive function (self-directed goal setting, prioritisation, decision making, stress management, and follow-through) and project management (teaching, research, publishing, grant writing) which may be supported through coaching. Costa & Garmston (2015) describe the role of a coach as a mediator of thinking, a guide who allows others to arrive at their own solutions and conclusions. Coaching may have the personalised capacity to support academic staff in setting professional development goals. For these reasons, I choose to use a coaching-based conceptual framework to explore professional goals.
The GROW model is a prevalent approach in coaching directed at goal-setting (David & Clutterbuck, 2013; Grant, 2011). The GROW model can be understood as the articulation of the aim, the limits, the opportunities, and the path of the coachee’s intentions. First, she must ideate what she wants to pursue as well as any obstacles that might prevent her from completing a task. Then, she might consider what “opportunities” or favourable circumstances she might leverage to support this. Finally, a clear articulation of how this will come to fruition is helpful. Whitmore (2009) stresses that the value and results from this model stem from the art of posing questions, not the sequence or model itself. Likewise, the sequence is flexible and iterative. I used Whitmore’s (2009) GROW model to generate open-ended questions for the interview protocol (Appendix 1). My purpose in applying a coaching model to professional goal articulation is a) to investigate what types of goals academic staff identify; and b) to understand how, if at all, applying a coaching lens to researching professional development goals yields richer, more personal, and deeper responses from participants.
Qualitative Interviewing
To create the interview protocol, I generated questions within each GROW category from my experience coaching in my professional practice and incorporated a couple of additional questions from Whitmore et al. (2013). From these questions, I created a grid meant to provide a menu or guide of possible questions to pose during the interview (see appendix). Additionally, Jacob & Furgerson (2015), describe the interview protocol and a “procedural guide” (p. 2) that should outline the introduction, conclusion, and any other business discussed as a part of the interview beyond the topical priorities. Accordingly, I drafted a “script” for the parts of the interview designed to build rapport and confirm consent. I wrote a conclusion to the interview to thank the participant and leave space for further questions.
To elicit further details, I planned to employ elements of coaching skills, namely using the participant's own language in open-ended questions and reflective statements. These are important aspects of Motivational Interviewing as Rosengren (2017) describes using the acronym OARS or “open-ended questions, affirmations, reflective listening, summaries” (p.16). Within this framework, the coach carefully notices key words and ideas and intentionally uses the participant’s unique phrasing to form questions and/or reflect back summaries. The latter can propel the conversation forward, subtly inviting the participant to continue or elaborate without interrupting her train of thought.
It is recommended to beta-test one’s protocol (Castillo-Montoya, 2016; Galletta, 2013; Jacob & Furgerson, 2015), so I piloted it with two colleagues. This process gave me more confidence in the interviewing process and informed my approach with participants.
Galletta (2013) describe semi-structured interviews as a “repertoire of possibilities” (p. 45). I found my protocol allowed me to stay within my line of inquiry while responding in a manner that matched the participant's last statement, rather than an abrupt transition. The selection of questions in each category enabled me to respond more naturally to the topics at hand. In this vein, Bryman and Teevan (2005, p. 184) describe the semi-structured interview as “a list of topics or fairly specific topics…but the interviewee still has a great deal of leeway in how to reply.”
Neuman (2005) states that the “role of the interviewer is difficult. They obtain cooperation and build rapport, yet they remain neutral and objective” (p. 305). This is distinct from a conversation characterised by equal exchange. In other words, in a semi-structured interview, there are aims, and in my case a loose order, that required participants’ answers, though I may not be sharing myself. It is disproportionate by design or “asymmetrical” (Roulston, 2010c, p. 21). Complete neutrality and objectivity, however, are likely not possible. As Galletta (2013, p.104) state, “no researcher conducts interviews free of interference …”. I bring my unconscious biases to any encounter and as a researcher, I must balance “the tensions between the theoretical and empirical” (Galletta, 2013, p. 76).
Reflexivity
Galletta (2013, p.78) recommend three means towards reciprocity or a balance of the researcher’s interpretive prerogative with verifying the participant’s intended meaning. I believe the use of reflective summaries provided space for “clarification, meaning generation, and critical reflection”. Table 1 shows examples from the interview with Participant A:
In these examples, I prompted for clarification and elaboration; held a meta-conversation about words and concepts with the participant; and provided space to reflect on the big picture.
Reflexivity, or researcher self-awareness, includes a willingness to scrutinise decisions made during the interview process that reflect one’s own positionality and life experience. Reflexivity allows for the acknowledgement of accidental, possibly interfering (Galletta, 2013) moves made in the interview. In this case, my training as a coach and my experience interviewing people professionally inform my interviewing style. This positionality (see below) creates subjectivity: which questions I choose to pose, which lines of inquiry I pursue, and how I interpret themes are all connected to my life experience, who I am and how I show up as a researcher. Subjectivity acknowledges the reality of human error and the inevitability of the researcher’s subjective mind in the process of qualitative research. However, reflexivity can highlight “preconceptions” (Roulston, 2010d) alerting the researcher to blind spots.
Before submitting this article for publication, I engaged in member-checking, inviting input from both participants, which led to increased anonymization and the clarification of one transcription error.
Reflexivity Statement
As a research team of one, I had only my prior experience and the input of my classmates and instructors to assist me with this process. (Participants’ data was not shared and kept confidential during any discussion of this project.) I found that my experience as a language teacher informed the practice of thematic analysis. The process reminded me of processing assessment (as with teaching writing or gathering formative feedback) as well as of narrative thematic discussion of literature or art. My training in linguistics informed my search for patterns in the text. However, this was my first formal attempt at Braun & Clarke’s (2019) reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews in the context of qualitative research.
Demographically, I share quite a lot with my participants. Since the recruitment pool was from a shared professional network of religious affiliation, both of my participants expressed values related to the Christian faith, a tradition that I share. While I am not a scholar of colour in economics nor a woman in STEM (see Data Collection, below), I sympathise with notions of representation and exclusion expressed by both participants as a non-neurotypical woman in often male-dominated spaces. In addition, the participants and I share a common national, linguistic, and generational background. My positionality vis à vis these women aided as well as likely influenced my understanding and interpretation of topics discussed.
In the above examples of reflective summaries, I adapted Rosengren’s (2017) tools of coaching, however, I was not engaging in coaching itself. In a typical 30-minute coaching session, the coachee identifies a specific focus or objective. This focus progressively narrows to concrete action steps. By contrast, these interviews were characterised by topical exploration of a variety of goals over a 1-hour discussion. The most significant distinction is that I pre-set the agenda and determined the interview possibilities (Galletta, 2013) through my protocol, whereas in a coaching scenario, the coach generates questions spontaneously to follow the agenda set by the client.
Regarding the theoretical continua possible in reflective thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019; Byrne, 2021), I had initially positioned myself as constructivist, experiential, inductive, and semantic. However, in the process of gathering and interpreting data, the spectra between experiential/critical and latent/semantic were blurred. Byrne (2021) observes, “Coding and analysis rarely fall cleanly into one of these approaches and, more often than not, use a combination of both…” (p. 1397). For experiential/critical, I sought to describe participants’ perspectives and processes, yet their responses clearly reflected social structures, so a critical lens was somewhat unavoidable. The process of extrapolating themes was latently interpreted, though the patterns are substantiated from quotes.
Data Collection
I recruited two participants from a non-profit network that provides spiritually-informed professional development and support to graduate students and academic staff in the United States. I was able to send recruitment emails through the sub-groups I have joined in the past, with the permission of their moderators. Two female, millennial, PhD-holding, academic staff agreed to explore their professional goals through my interview. One participant was a professor of economics who identified as a person of colour (POC) and the other was a bivocational white woman in a STEM field. [1] To protect the confidentiality of the participants, I am withholding institutional and geographical information. Each semi-structured interview took between 50-60 minutes in which the participants spoke most of the time. I applied coaching tools such as using the participants’ language in reflective summaries to signal active listening, maintain topical continuity, and also to verify my understanding, in addition to intentional pausing or “spaciousness”. I believe these coaching modalities in the interview process supported participants’ ideation. The examples in Table 2 capture moments of thinking out loud.
The interviews were conducted remotely via Zoom, which produced recordings and transcripts. Files were stored in an encrypted, password-protected location per ethical requirements.
Data Analysis: Description, Analysis, Interpretation
Wolcott (1994), explores description, analysis, and interpretation within the process of analysing qualitative data. He defines each and provides a suite of approaches for the researcher to consider. Wolcott stresses that these three elements are “emphases” (p. 11) that are not necessarily completely independent of each other. I found Wolcott’s (1994) guide helpful as I sought to make sense of the data systematically. After I had entered the
“familiarisation” phase (Braun & Clarke, 2019; Byrne, 2021), I took a step back to describe, “What’s going on here?” (Wolcott, 1994, p. 12).
Description
Participant A articulated four overarching professional development areas: 1) encouraging students towards economics, 2) doing good on campus 3) studying economics from a sociological lens, and 4) teaching economics from a capitalist foundation. The underlying values and scope of each of these topics were clarified and often narrowed respectively through the GROW Model questions I posed.
For area 1, when asked why this was an important area of professional development (G), she elaborated on the value of economics as important for society and the need for more diverse representation in the field. Regarding obstacles (R), she cited “limited professional return”, time, and structural factors like the “pipeline” and the “nature of academia”. For strategies (O), she listed “intentionality” in her teaching approach, her own mentorship on campus, and possibly professional organisations. When I asked about feasible next steps (W), she described this as a long-term goal and cited a different priority for the short term. I asked a final question about success indicators (Whitmore et al., 2013), and she responded that she would be successful at meeting this goal when her presence as a woman of colour was “unremarkable…in a professional space”.
She identified her faith as a motivating factor as well as the need for attention towards students’ “mental health” as the focal reasons for development area 2 (G). This was a priority (R) for her because of her “care” for students “who are struggling”. Her strengths (O) for this goal are her empathy, her access to networks, and her position. As far as resources (W), she cited improved access to and delegation of mental health services on campus. When I posed another W question about action steps, she responded that she had a few students in mind but was currently on sabbatical.
For her third focus, which she identified as a priority, she cited methodological approaches informed by cultural biases she wished to complicate and the importance of socially-based decision-making in economics (G). She argued that group membership, culture, belonging, and bias play important roles in the study of economics. Regarding limitations (R), she listed priority management, particularly as a new mother and relatively young researcher. For strategies (O), she explored clearer personal boundaries and improved organisation of her research projects. For next steps (W) regarding boundaries, she identified better communication and going to the office; for organisation, she cited various software, including a research map.
Finally, for her fourth main area of content-based teaching, she identified “horrifying” cultural and political ideas about economics that can ultimately cause vulnerable people harm (G). She wondered aloud about her role as a teacher (“to complicate their thinking”) but settled on developing criticality and understanding students at their “core” (R). (She wove between topics in my interview protocol [e.g. priorities, obstacles, strategies] so this segment of the interview was not linear.) She listed obstacles of the pandemic and students’ attention spans (R). For strategies (O) she discussed creating a “more safe space” and described getting input from more experienced teachers as well as learning to have “uncomfortable conversations”, challenging ideas, and incorporating her own “narrative” as a teaching strategy. She did not identify a (W) or specific action item or path for this last professional development area.
Participant B discussed three main areas for professional development: 1) addressing undercompensation; 2) growing as an instructor; and 3) integrating science and faith. During the course of the interview, she evaluated her priorities and assigned importance (G) to each largely without my prompting. Development area 1 stems from her recognition of being “underpaid” and “underemployed”. Development area 2 is motivated by a desire to “be inclusive and work towards an equitable classroom and have difficult conversations around sensitive topics” in both the classroom and in ministry. Her third focus reflected her bivocationality as a campus minister and lab instructor, synergising her doctoral training and pastoral position.
Regarding addressing undercompensation, she identified changing contexts or starting a union as possible strategies (unprompted). When I asked about obstacles (R) to these approaches, she cited her own time and “lack of knowledge”, but also structural barriers such as “hostility from your employer”, being in a “Right to Work” state (union-unfriendly public policy), and institutional administration. To overcome these limitations (O), she identified “reorganizing [2] where my time commitments are”, prayer, and utilising social capital such as union leaders. While starting a union was a long-term goal, the concrete step (W) she identified was speaking with the union president, with whom she shared an office. Her indicator of success (Whitmore et al., 2013) was making $10k more per year. Further discussion of this goal area led to a brief discussion of work-life balance as a sub-goal or underpinning rationale for addressing compensation.
In discussing the importance of being an inclusive instructor (G), she described the lack of racial representation in her advanced sections as “not proportional” to the institution and stated, “as a Christian, I feel really responsible to serve people who are at the margins”. She expanded on the idea of inclusion and representation, sharing her own experience of exclusion and marginalisation as a female graduate student in a white-male-dominated field. When I asked about limitations (R), she cited “my own blind spots and … time” with the caveat that both the university and ministry organisation provide and encourage applicable training. She also considered the “level of irony to being at an elite institution trying to promote equity”. Regarding strengths (O), she again mentioned training opportunities as well as social capital in the form of colleagues and other faculty. This led to a discussion of a collegial relationship, initially formed through her ministry job, that enabled a more “sensitive” discussion of race and genetics in her department. Following this anecdote, she described a “scientist spotlight” (W) as “highlighting scientists from all different backgrounds” as an action she could take as well as something that could “resource other lab instructors”.
For her final area of integrating faith and science, she described her own “personal journey” from fundamentalism and not knowing “any scientists who were Christians, not even in undergrad.” She described a “conflict narrative”, which is being addressed by mostly “older white men” and in a way that is “abstract”. She connected this to a previous mention of marginality and inclusion (G and R). Possible approaches (O) to this professional goal include leading a “faith and science reading group”, teaching a class at the divinity school, creating a podcast, and starting an “American Scientific Affiliation” chapter. She chose the latter as an action step (W).
In providing this thick description (Geertz, 2017) of the participants, data collection, and researcher positionality, I hope readers might be able to ascertain the data’s “transferability” (Curtin & Fossey, 2007, p. 92) via à vis their own contexts. Given the specificity of this project, this may be of use to practitioners who work with Christian faculty or to those seeking to examine goal-setting with coaching frameworks.
Analysis
Familiarisation. I initiated the familiarisation stage by re-listening to the interview recordings while correcting and re-reading the Zoom-generated transcripts. I made comments in the margins as I corrected the transcripts. Like Byrne (2021), within the familiarisation stage, I “took note of casual observations of initial trends in the data” (p. 1398-1399). It was at this stage that I evaluated the interview process itself utilising prompts from Roulston (2010b) and Roulston et al. (2003).
Generating initial codes. The previous stage of familiarisation and transcription overlapped with this next step of generating codes. Byrne (2021) used the comment function in a Word document (as did I) and used an Excel sheet to track the evolution of his codes and mind mapping to visualise them. Roulston (2010a) describes the reflective process of “memo writing” (p. 7) as a practice of recording observations and iterative changes. In my case, I created a spreadsheet to track, define, and exemplify codes largely based on Galletta’s (2013) suggested system of record keeping (p. 121), which includes the code, its meaning, examples, and relation to other codes.
Based on my notes, re-listening to the interviews, correcting the transcripts, and reviewing the transcripts again to draft a description, I initially generated 10 codes (Table 3). As I coded the transcripts, I added “external system” to refer to systemic cultural forces such as “academia”. Then, I proceeded to code the transcripts in NVivo.
Generating themes. I made a mind map on a dry-erase board to visualise connections between codes and to think about possible themes. I also created “top level nodes” in NVivo to play with “clusters” (Galletta, 2013, p. 127) and “categories” (Galletta, 2013, p. 127; Roulston, 2010a, p. 5). Byrne (2021) describes this process as “collapsing multiple codes that share a similar underlying concept or feature of the data into one single code” (p. 1403). Galletta, Byrne, and Roulston all give examples of codes that can be combined into themes and that are connected to and supported by the data collected.
Reviewing potential themes. I reviewed the codes I had clustered in NVivo again and created a draft hierarchy between codes “faith” and “care” which reflected the participants’ stated motivation for pursuing “inclusion” in their classrooms and in their respective “fields”. I went back and systematically reviewed my initial codes, entering examples into my spreadsheet. There, I also tracked the relative frequency of codes per participant. From there, I created another mind map with my research question in mind. I created a few additional iterations of the mind map to demonstrate “how academic staff articulate goals” while highlighting the relationships between themes and codes in order to reflect the content of the interviews. This was in keeping with Byrne’s (2021) “level one” and “level two review” (p. 1404).
Mind Maps
The blue bubbles in Figure 1 are an attempt to answer the research question. “Representation” and “Structural Factors” are main themes or “patterns of shared meaning underpinned or united by a core concept” (Braun & Clarke, 2019, p. 593) with their associated codes. “Practical Parameters” reflect the remaining codes that describe common aspects and descriptors of goals. At first glance, one might conflate “structural factors” with “race” or “gender” or lack of “external heterogeneity among themes at the level two review” (Byrne, 2021, p. 1405). However, this is not how the participants framed Representation. While this may be the subtext, neither mentioned race or gender as “systemic” but rather as part of their personal lived experience, an issue to be addressed within their fields, and closely linked to “inclusion”-based goals, motivated by “faith” and “care”. “Structural Factors” included policies, institutional realities, and cultural forces that informed their goal articulation. Finally, both participants considered time (e.g. management), time frame (e.g. post-tenure) and work-life balance (e.g. not working on weekends) as “Practical Parameters” in their goal-setting.
Representation
Both participants explicitly named representation in their discussion of professional goals.
In a discussion of her field, Participant A stated, “I think representation matters”. Participant B said, “a lot of them are older white men and so kind of wanting there to be more representation in that space too” with reference to the voices in scholarly conversations of faith and science. The “dominance” of this demographic in their respective academic disciplines was something they both discussed.
Participant A’s goal of encouraging more students into the field of economics was motivated by her minority experience and assertion that the field should not be left “to a small subset of people to sort of have as their fiefdom”. Participant A conceptualised goal completion as a future ideal state, saying that it would be achieved, “when it's unremarkable what I look like in a professional space.” She also described cultural dominance of individualism in methodological approaches in economics as a priority for her to address professionally.
Participant B reflected on a difficult period as a female graduate student in STEM as well as her belief that “as a Christian, I feel really responsible to serve people who are at the margins.” Her two goals of “growing as a teacher” and integrating faith and science involved diversity and inclusion in their execution by highlighting and inviting diverse stories and perspectives into spaces she facilitates.
Structural Factors
Here, I define “structural factors” as a combination of institutional inputs and cultural or external systems that influence the articulation of their professional goals. Elements of faith and care also motivate their responses.
Participant A’s goal of “doing good on campus” was fuelled in part by external realities:
Academia and institutions of higher education can be places where students have mental health problems, students feel that they don't belong, students feel isolated.
She also described the dynamic in which “faculty do everything” at her institution, which influences her bandwidth. With regards to the discipline of economics, she cited the “pipeline,” meaning the (often inequitable) educational structures that feed into who and who does not choose it as their major. In the same segment, she stated,
The nature of academia is not necessarily something that is the optimal environment for diversification because there's such a really rich and strictly enforced set of codes and behaviors. [3]
Her goal of encouraging undergraduates toward her field is largely a reaction to these structural factors which she seeks to address.
Participant B also acknowledged the ‘eliteness’ of her institution with regard to equitable teaching. She described the multi-layered structures in place preventing her from achieving “sustainable…commensurate” compensation. On an institutional level, she described “hostility from your employer” and a “university administration” that is “anti-union”. On a policy level, the US state she finds herself is considered “Right to Work” which means “their laws are…written in a way to undermine unions and to weaken them”. Her main goal was financial and in direct reaction to these structures that she herself seeks to influence.
Both women mentioned oppositional structures that demote teaching and hence present challenges to parts of their goals:
The first is there is, I guess, very limited, if any, professional return on these activities. (A)
I think that it's a really important, especially the teaching part, that's a really important and economically undervalued role. (B)
Practical Parameters
Finally, the “practical parameters” are the nuts and bolts, mostly of the how and when a goal will be pursued, often after asking the final “Way” question. Both participants cited time (the need for it), different time-frames (goal target), and work-life balance as important factors in the concretising of their goals.
Participant A described balancing research, teaching, and “personal time”. This was most apparent in her pursuit of “sets of others” in her research by establishing clear boundaries and communication around her work versus home time as well as employing a project management tool. Her sabbatical state prevented her from identifying time-frames for immediate action items but planned on enacting this research-based balance goal imminently.
Participant B frequently cited “time” as an obstacle and contrasted her current role with other campus roles that require “a lot more hours” and the desire to remain in her current role for this reason. Her action items were framed for the coming Fall semester.
Interpretation
Producing the report. The previous steps blended into the report writing as I journaled and provided substantiated descriptions of the data. Byrne (2021) acknowledges, “The separation between phases five and six can often be blurry” (p. 1409). As I’ve structured this section into description, analysis, and interpretation, I will now move on to my interpretations of these data. Based on this analysis, how do academic staff articulate goals?
Both women expressed care for others and goals that navigated around institutional and structural barriers in their respective academic disciplines. The goals they expressed were intrinsically tied to their values and lived experiences. In relation to goal-setting within coaching, Kegan et al. (2013) describe:
a less obvious source of goals that has to do with how one experiences those challenges and possibilities. This involves the more general ways in which people make meaning; the deeper underlying assumptions that guide the way they generate a sense of themselves, the world, and their relationship to that world. (2013, pp. 230–231)
Their goals were not “not professional tick boxes” (A) or “lofty career goals” (B) but deeply contextualised, meaningful sets of pursuits often in relation to challenges.
Hardin (2011) describes “doxological fascination” as the posture a Christian scholar takes in relation to her discipline as she engages in examining “God’s inexhaustibly rich world” (9:41-9:43). This is a manner in which faith is manifested in scholarship, Hardin argues. He describes “attentiveness” (9:54) and the art of seeing as a key aspect of “doxological fascination”. What I observe in these interviews is what I would call “doxological praxis”. Each participant's goals and professional practice are informed by a faith-based imperative. Their “attentiveness” to the needs of those around them, and ability to see ways of rectifying something they perceive as amiss (often structural) is a component of this “doxological praxis”. Both participants identify normative problems (lack of equity, lack of mental health care, unsustainable wages, cultural bias in research) and formulate professional goals that actively address these through their professional practice.
Conclusion
To evaluate a chosen methodology, Roulston asks, “are research interviews the best possible means of generating data to inform one's research questions?” (Roulston, 2010b, p. 16). It is likely impossible to determine “the best possible means” but I believe this study demonstrates that the semi-structured interview is a suitable modality for the exploration of professional goals. The added conceptual coaching framework further elicited ideas and aided the participants in the expression of their own goals.
Further evaluative prompts from Roulston (2010b) guided the following reflection. Coaching has prepared me well for qualitative, semi-structured interviews through the use of open-ended questions, long pauses, and reflective summaries. The use of a conceptual framework designed semi-structured interview schedule gave me a fairly straightforward and reliable guide to conducting the interview and to exploring a topic in a systematic way that still yields considerable space for participant story-telling and vulnerability.
In this preliminary study, I found that both participants framed their goals through the lens of marginalisation: in spite of, and in reaction to, external factors that limited their agency. Their faith motivated discipline-based and instructional-based professional development aspirations. This resulted in a much deeper and more meaningful interpretation than a technical framing or according to institutional expectations. The data yielded likely reflects a much more nuanced discovery than perhaps surface-level goals collected in a survey. I posit that the semi-structured interview in tandem with a coaching framework and skill set afforded this depth of meaning. Future research into practitioners’ personal and professional development goals may benefit from this methodological approach.
Footnotes
The precise field is not specified for participant confidentiality.
I am choosing to retain the American spelling in direct quotes to reflect the participant’s voice.
I am choosing to retain the American spelling in direct quotes to reflect the participant’s voice.
Appendix 1: Interview Protocol (sans pre & post scripts)
GROW
Whitmore, J. (2009). Coaching For Performance: GROWing human potential and purpose (4th ed.). Brealey.
Whitmore, J., Kauffman, C., & David, S. A. (2013). GROW Grows Up: From Winning the Game to Pursuing Transpersonal Goals. In S. David, D. Clutterbuck, & D. Megginson (Eds.), Beyond Goals: Effective Strategies for Coaching and Mentoring (pp. 245–260). Taylor & Francis Group.