Excercise 1: First group meeting and preparing field studies!

This was the first time all 6 of us had the chance to meet!

During the exercise, we discussed how we wanted to do our field study and what transportation route we wanted to focus on. We chose option 2, Centralen-Karlberg with the commuter train. We decided to do our first round of field studies this week with very open, unstructured interviews to give us a view of the context and what kind of problems may appear at this route. After analysing this data we want to go back and do more structured interviews, if we have time.  

Triangulation

The goal here is to get a good feel of the context. We use triangulation of data (we interview different people) and investigator triangulation - we will all do interviews, and we all give our own touch on the interviews, which affects the data. We also use methodological triangulation for the data gathering to reach this goal, since we are doing state of the art research as well.

The interviews

Axel, Sofie and Yrin will meet on Monday, and Alexander and Hanna will meet on Tuesday to do interviews at the stations and on the trains. Unfortunately I (Elisabet) will be travelling myself so I can't participate, but I will be back to participate in the structured interviews.

Data recording

We will try to do sound recordings if the interviewees agree to, otherwise we will take notes. Note taking is very flexible and non-obtrusive, but it can be hard to record everything, especially if you aren’t used to taking notes during an interview. If the notes aren’t good, the reliability of the data isn’t very good. Audio recordings are also flexible and non-obtrusive, especially if we use our phones to record. If the interview is longer, the sound quality is important, but since our interviews are short it isn’t as important for us. The shortness of the interviews is also key, since the transcription won’t take very long.

We will do the interviews in pairs/groups of three so one person leads the interview and the other/s record and take notes.

After the interview sessions, we will do a quick analysis of the interviews and what kind of information we gathered, and then we will meet up for breakfast before the exercise on Thursday to finish the analysis.

 

Interview

First we thought that we would make a semistructured interview, which combines questions that have limited amounts of answers with questions that are open ended. But when we wrote the questions we realized that due to how early in the stages of the project we are we want very open answers to inspire and guide us in some direction. Also, because we aren’t going to have time to do a lot of interviews, there is little point to aim for quantitative data, which you would get with a structured interview. Instead, we are aiming for qualitative data, which is obtained by open ended questions. We wrote questions with some optional follow up questions, and decided that sometimes we would ask “Why?” if the interviewee seemed to have a lot to say about a specific question. We also made sure that the questions were in an order where there are positive ones in the beginning and more negative and/or specific questions come later, to make the interviewee start out feeling safe to answer more complex questions later on.

For a number of reasons it was better to do interviews rather than questionnaires. A questionnaire would take longer time to do with open ended questions. It would perhaps not be answered by many people, meanwhile most people asked to be interviewed would probably say yes, increasing the degree of participation. 

The interview structure we decided upon is as follows:

Introduction

Hi, we are from KTH and we're doing a field study to get ideas on ways to improve the travel experience in this area, we would like to ask a few short questions. Is it okay if we record this conversation? (if not, tell them that is perfectly fine and we will just take notes)

 

Questions

• What is the best and what is the worst about this route?
• Follow up: why? do you think others agree with you? How could the worst thing about the route be turned into the best?
• What would you want to add to your travel experience? It can be anything!
• Follow up: elaborate, what would you use this for? Do you think others want this as well?
• What do you feel when you travel from Centralen to Karlberg?
• Follow up: is it always this feeling or is that just today?

We are going to do the interviews on the platform and during the congestion time to reach the interviewees we are interested in and in an environment that is relevant. Making a short interview on the platform is very convenient since everyone is waiting on their train for a few minutes and would probably have time to do the interview.