Interviews, rubrics, and stories (Oh My!): My journey through a three-manuscript dissertation

Faculty must expand the culture of andragogy and assessment in teaching qualitative research methods (QRM). How students experience assessments and how faculty perceive and implement assessments in their qualitative research methods courses needs more inquiry. To that end, as a part of a three-paper dissertation, I investigated: 1) qualitative faculty motivations behind their assessment practices for interview assignments; 2) student experiences in a QRM course with a student-created rubric for an interview assignment; and 3) my experiences transitioning from an evaluator to a scholar through completing my dissertation and the parallel transition from cohabitation to marriage. In this dissertation, I utilized multiple QRMs to investigate faculty motivations, student experiences, and my experiences. First, I interviewed qualitative faculty in a descriptive general qualitative research study. The findings show that the faculty view interview assignments as the best and most comprehensive assignment their students can complete to give them experience as qualitative researchers. While instructors had differing opinions on whether rubrics were an appropriate tool to use in their assessment practices, all the instructors believed that giving students feedback was an essential assessment practice. To build upon my findings, I tested an innovative student-centered assessment in a QRM course for my second study. I collected student reflections from the assignment and used ethnographic and enumerative document analysis techniques to write an ethnodrama. The ethnodrama is a dialogue between three students about their experiences conducting their first interviews. The findings for the second study show that students grew in their confidence in conducting interviews, experienced a transformation in their paradigm, and were conflicted about using the student-designed rubric in that some students found it useful, and some did not. Finally, as a capstone to my dissertation studies, I wrote an autoethnography of alternating and interwoven narrative vignettes of parallel stories of my transition from an evaluator to a scholar and the transition of my personal identity from cohabitation to marriage. I aimed to add to the literature about evaluator-researcher identities, contribute to the limited qualitative research within cohabitation literature, and also to inspire others to embrace being uncomfortable—both personally and professionally.