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Empathy and Inequality: Unpacking America’s DIY Safety Net with Jessica Calarco
811 Plays2 months ago
On this week’s episode, I talk with Jessica Calarco about her book “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net” and the role of qualitative data in research and data visualization. Calarco, a sociologist from UW Madison, discusses her research on family life inequalities and the shift to a “DIY society,” where individuals, particularly women, manage risks without government support, leading to reliance on low-wage caregiving. She critiques the wealthy elite for discouraging collective social support and emphasizes the need for policy changes to ensure basic needs, caregiving opportunities, and work-life balance through measures like paid family leave. We also talk about Jessica’s data collection efforts, which involved more than 400 hours of interviews, surveys, and national studies, to understand human experiences deeply. She addresses critiques of qualitative research’s representativeness, arguing its strength lies in capturing life’s complexities.
Keywords: data, data visualization, flourish, jessica calarco, holding it together, safety net, DIY, data analysis, qualitative data, qualitative data analysis, qualitative data analysis - coding and developing themes, machine learning, nvivo, dedoose, ai, data scientist, qualitative data analysis thematic analysis, qualitative data collection, university of wisconsin, data analyst, data science, machine learning for beginners
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Transcript
Introduction to Qualitative Data and Discussion Setup
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyDiz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. I'm very excited for this week's episode because we spent a lot of time on this show talking about quantitative data, quantitative data collection, analysis, and data visualization.
00:00:28
Speaker
But there's a whole other world of qualitative data, both in how it's collected, how it's analyzed, and how it's communicated or visualized to your reader, your user, your audience member.
Interview with Jessica Calarco on Her Book and Research Methods
00:00:37
Speaker
And so on this week's episode of the show, I'm really fortunate to have ah Jessica Calarco join me on the show. She's the author of the new book, Holding It Together, How Women Became America's Safety Net.
00:00:48
Speaker
And you're going to hear this interview. We're going to spend obviously a bit of time talking about her book. So the content of the book and how women did become America's safety net and what that means. And so we're going to spend the first 10 or so minutes of the interview talking about the actual content of the book.
Deep Dive into Qualitative Data Collection and Analysis
00:01:04
Speaker
But then we turn to where I think many listeners of this podcast are probably interested in, which is how do you go about doing qualitative research, qualitative data work? How do you go about collecting that information? How do you go about analyzing transcripts? I mean, hundreds of transcripts, hundreds of interviews that Jessica and her team have conducted over the last three and a half, four years.
00:01:29
Speaker
How do you go about dissemining that information? How do you go about weaving it together with text in your book or your report or your brief or your blog post? And then we talk a little bit about, yes, qualitative data visualization. And we talk about ways in which she has worked with others, ah with her graduate students, with other colleagues to actually visualize and communicate qualitative data.
00:01:52
Speaker
So if you are thinking about learning more about qualitative data work and analysis, I think this conversation could be one of your starting places because Jessica is going to share a bunch
Book Discussion: Women as America's Safety Net
00:02:03
Speaker
of resources. Of course, I have them linked in the show notes, but she's going to share a bunch of resources and strategies and techniques that she and her team use to collect this qualitative data. And then she's going to talk about her methods of actually going through all of these grand trips to build out these stories and then how she goes about weaving them together, and in this case, weaving them together into her book. So I think you're really going to enjoy this episode if you are thinking about broadening your horizons into more qualitative data. So here's my conversation with University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist and author of the new book, Holding It Together, How Women Became America's Safety Net, Jessica Calarco.
America's Social Safety Nets and DIY Society
00:02:43
Speaker
Hi Jessica, great to meet you. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to meet you too. I mean, I'm very excited to chat with you. um First off, UW Madison. So I'm an alum. So just got that like instant, instant friendship because Badgers. And then your new book, Holding It Together, which I have right here. I also have the ebook version too, which I started reading and then I was like, it's really hard to like,
00:03:09
Speaker
doggier things and like, right, even though the digital thing doesn't work for me. So I like the paper one. So, um, so this was really fun. And then your book on qualitative methods was really great. So I'm, I'm excited to talk with you all things qualitative. Um, so maybe we can start with like introductions, like your background a little bit, and then we can, we can talk about the book. Sure. Sure. So I'm, I'm a sociologist. I'm at the UW, UW Madison. Um, mostly I focus on inequalities and family life and education.
00:03:38
Speaker
um with a particular emphasis on qualitative methods um and you know in terms of ethnographic work with some of my earlier research, mostly on families and schools and more interview-based research with some of my newer projects like with this with this new book. That's great. so okay so I do want to talk about methods, but I also want you to talk about the book itself, so the message of the book. so Why don't you give folks, like what are they going to learn when they read this?
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah, so essentially the the core argument here is that that other countries have invested in social safety nets to protect people from falling into poverty, you know to give them a leg up in reaching opportunities and and to make sure that people have the time and energy to contribute to a shared project of care. Whereas in the US, you know billionaires and big corporations and their friends have decided that they don't want to pay for those kinds of social safety net programs. And so they've turned us into what I call a DIY society instead. And the idea here is that people should be able to manage their own risks and responsibilities, you know take care of themselves essentially without support from the government. um And the idea is that they just make the right choices if they just, you know,
00:04:41
Speaker
take the right steps, follow the right plan. They shouldn't need that kind of government support. But the reality is that we we actually can't DIY society. Certainly I think this breaks down most readily around caregiving in the sense that some people, children, elderly people, people who are sick or disabled often can't take care of themselves, at least fully. And also some jobs don't pay enough to actually allow people to support themselves on their own. And so acknowledging those kinds of policy failures would destroy this illusion of a DIY society But the US is able to maintain that illusion by essentially relying on women to be this invisible glue that fills in the gaps in our economy and the gaps in our social safety net. So for example, women do
00:05:23
Speaker
almost 70% of the lowest wage jobs in the US economy, and those are disproportionately jobs in the caregiving sector, things like home health care and childcare. And on top of that unpaid labor, women in the US s are also doing almost twice as much underpaid labor, women are also doing almost twice as much unpaid labor as men are. And that work is really crushing women, you know particularly women from systematically and multiply marginalized groups who often have know where to turn for support in managing the kinds of challenges that they've been handed and know where to hide when others you know see them finding ways to make it work and then asking them to do even more. And yet I argue in this the second half of the book that you know we know what the problems are. We know this is crushing us and then leaving us oftentimes worse off than our counterparts in other high-income countries.
00:06:11
Speaker
But we haven't fixed these problems in part because the same billionaires and big corporations who brought us this DIY society have also sold us a set of myths that are aimed at deluding us into believing that we don't need a social safety net and also at dividing us by race and class and gender and politics in ways that keep us from coming together across those differences to really demand the net that that we all really desperately need.
00:06:36
Speaker
What are your policy, I don't want to say recommendations, but what are your like policy prescriptions to building out, and I'm not going to say building out the middle class because it's really not the middle class that you're focused on. It's really kind of like, like probably like at this point, like 92% of the income distribution, but like, what are some of your policy prescriptions that you think would resolve some of the challenges you just mentioned?
Policy Prescriptions for Societal Inequalities
00:06:59
Speaker
And I tend to think about it in sort of three big buckets in the sense that we need policies first that allow all people to live with dignity. And I think this will get us to kind of somewhere, some of where we're going later on in the conversation around empathy. But I think we have this safety net right now that is built on the notion that you have to prove that you are deserving of support, either by being so destitute that you just can't possibly take care of yourself. And if you are in that boat, there's a lot of stigma and shame that comes with needing support, or by, you know,
00:07:26
Speaker
showing that you have worked really hard and so you deserve things like tax credits on your you know on your home mortgages, you know things like that. um And so that notion of deservingness, if we flip the script and say, no, there are things that we all just basically need as human beings have to have a life with dignity, things like affordable housing, things like sufficient you know healthy food, things like clean water, ah things like access to education that really should just be basic access for everyone ah to be able to live a life with dignity. So I think that's one big bucket. Another key piece here is about making sure that people have access to opportunities.
00:07:59
Speaker
um And this can mean things like support with caregiving, you know so child care for families so that they do have the opportunity to engage in paid work. Things like free college to make sure that people have access to those kinds of opportunities that can give them access to different types of jobs in our society.
00:08:15
Speaker
things along those lines. And then the third bucket is really about making sure that people have the time and energy and incentive to contribute to this shared project of care. And this is where things like you know not only paid family leave, having time to you know take off to care for your families, your loved ones,
00:08:30
Speaker
but also things like limits on paid work hours, things like the four-day work week or 35-hour work week limits um that we've seen in other countries, be very effective in kind of limiting the extent to which our paid jobs can take over our lives and meaning that there's less pressure to invest more time in paid work simply to be able to have the money that you need to have that level of security because you know that you have your basis taken care of instead.
00:08:54
Speaker
Do you think the policy challenges are primarily at the federal level or are a lot of these or at least some of these at the local or the state level? i mean Certainly, I think we've seen some states make inroads in terms of putting in place policies like you know affordable childcare, things like universal pre-K, things like even guaranteed paid family leave. and so I think if anything, what we've seen is that this is possible to do at the state level, but it also drives larger inequalities in the sense that the states that are putting in place these protections are often also the states where ah other protections exist around, say, reproductive freedom. And I talk in the book about how um a attacks on reproductive freedom, whether through policy or through culture, um operate to trap women in these kinds of systems of exploitation, make it easier for them to ah be pushed into precarious situations, which can lead them to getting pulled into low wage jobs, oftentimes low wage caregiving jobs. And so I think
00:09:48
Speaker
What we've seen is that the the lack of response at the federal level has left it to the states in ways that drive huge inequalities between women in different states in terms of both the the precarity that they face in terms of reproductive freedom and also the kinds of the lack of support that they get on the policy side
Societal Constructs and Women's Burden
00:10:05
Speaker
as well.
00:10:05
Speaker
right I wonder if you get pushback on the focus on women in this book and and whether people are like, well, what about men? You've mentioned a lot of different factors that disproportionately affect women. and And you talk about in the book, but particularly women of color, but like, what is your response to that when someone says, well, what about men?
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, certainly. So I think there's a couple things going on here. and And first, it's about recognizing who is kind of disproportionately carrying the burden. And this has to do with the fact that in this DIY society model, everyone who has a little bit of privilege has an interest in helping themself get further ahead by pushing any sort of risk and responsibility they face further downstream. And so often that means men pushing risk and responsibility onto the women around them, you know, their wives, their mothers, their girlfriends, you know, their daughters, even in some cases,
00:10:54
Speaker
um And then for those women, the the choice is then between do I carry that responsibility myself or do I have enough privilege to then push some of that risk and responsibility, some of that caregiving responsibility, for example, onto other women who are in more vulnerable positions than my own. And that's part of how we get to a situation where for, you know, relatively affluent white women, that the choice is between, you know, do I, it's sort of a moral dilemma in the sense of, do I do this responsibility? Do I do this work myself? Or do I push this onto another woman, oftentimes ah a woman of color, a low income woman who is struggling to make ends meet, but who's underpaid work allows me to, you know, keep my job and compete with that in the workforce. And so it's sort of this trickle down effect of of the way that we pass the buck care wise and risk wise in our, in the in this kind of a DIY model. And so that's why
00:11:42
Speaker
I think the focus is on women in part because it allows us to see these dynamics in terms of both what privilege can buy you in terms of outsourcing care and also what happens when you are in those multiply marginalized positions where you often have no choice um but to to do the the unpaid caregiving work for your family.
00:11:59
Speaker
and the underpaid work ah that makes you know paid work possible for others in your community as well. Right. So we've been talking about 10 minutes on the content of the book, and probably most people who listen to this podcast are like, this isn't about data. what am i what
Role of Empathy in Qualitative Research
00:12:13
Speaker
Why am I listening to this? So let's let's talk about the data part. A lot of the folks that I talked to on this show are doing quantitative data work.
00:12:21
Speaker
But qualitative data is its own skill set, its own challenges, both visually and also just going through the data. And I want to start with what you mentioned earlier on this concept of empathy. There are two quotes, I'm going to read them because there are two quotes in the book that really like I underline, double underline. There's one where you say,
00:12:39
Speaker
If you believe that some people are simply lazy, that they will mooch off others without giving back what they can, then it's easy to oppose a more universal safety net, which you've you've already mentioned today. And the and the other one, um an absence of empathy also pushes us toward a more punitive social safety net, one that disciplines people for needing government support. And you've already talked about the lack of empathy in this DIY society and our policies. But can you talk a little bit about, I guess it's sort of a two-part question.
00:13:06
Speaker
the data you use for the book and how empathy comes into play when you're doing your interviews, when you're doing your focus groups? Yeah, so the data for the book come primarily from about 400 hours of interviews um that my team and I conducted with um families that we've been following, families with young children that we started following back in 2018 when they were, one one of when um the the woman and the partner, they were all women who identified um for the study um when when when the woman partner was pregnant um and so we started following them asking them up a whole extensive survey about their kind of parenting decisions that they planned to make and then followed those same women over time checking in with them at six months and 12 months and 18 months postpartum and then we also did three waves of pandemic focused data collection with the moms and with their partners because we were still in the field when the pandemic hit and it just became
00:13:54
Speaker
so apparent so quickly through um the follow-up interviews that we did, you know how much of an impact this was having um on families with young kids. And so we ah we started by recruiting these moms in prenatal clinics, mostly in Indiana, and then followed them over time, though some of them spread out over the course of the project with 250 families that we started with.
00:14:13
Speaker
And then during the pandemic, in part because we wanted to see how is this you know very particular qualitative sample mapping onto larger patterns, I also fielded two national surveys, each with about 2,000 parents from across the US, one through Ipsos and one through Qualtrics, to kind of just get a sense of how um how the patterns were playing out on a larger scale and kind of use in the book a mix of the two types of data. right In terms of the qualitative data, I mean, this to me, one of the the strengths I see in qualitative data is the idea that you can elicit empathy in yourself as the researcher and in your reader. And I talk about this in in ah qualitative literacy in my book with Mario Small, and that it's it's cognitive empathy. And and cognitive empathy is is different than um
00:14:58
Speaker
You can't totally empathize with someone, oftentimes because their circumstances are very different from your own. But it's a way of being able to understand someone's life in the way that they understand it themselves, to achieve that sense of um kind of appreciation for the the context of their lives, the decisions that they're making, and to do so in a way that at least acknowledges their perceptions, their meanings, their realities as they perceive them. And so I think there's there's value in qualitative data particularly in that it resonates with people differently than quantitative data, that when you hear a story that does echo your own life, that's powerful in a way that simply seeing a data point that matches your beliefs, you know, it doesn't quite ring that same way. And similarly, hearing the story of someone whose life might be very different from your own, but seeing it presented in a way that offers a window into that experience and treats that person's life, you know, as um not as an oddity to be sort of explored, but instead as as
00:15:56
Speaker
sort of a rich and meaningful experience grounded in the context in which they live and the messages in which you know they've been exposed to, um that that kind of a portrait can help to inspire that cognitive empathy um for readers as well. And that's you know really my hope with the book is that this resonates with readers on a personal level and also helps them to feel a stronger sense of empathy um toward people whom they might otherwise disagree with or be critical of in their larger lives.
00:16:20
Speaker
Right. So I think one of the critiques, I would say unfair critiques that people have of qualitative work, it's like, oh, you've only talked to, you know, a small number, it's not, you know, statistically representative. And what you do actually, I think, uniquely well in this book, I should note is combine the quantitative data with the qualitative data, which I think is kind of the most powerful way to sort of tell those stories. But but when you hear people say that, oh, you know you you know it's not a representative sample. um You've you know you spoken to 200 families, 200 moms, 100 blah, blah, blah. like How do you think about countering that argument?
00:17:00
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think what I'm trying to, what i what I typically argue in that sense is that the value of qualitative data is not in telling you how common some pattern is, but in helping to explain where patterns come
Importance of Qualitative Data Beyond Metrics
00:17:10
Speaker
from. It helps to reveal mechanisms, to be able to trace processes, to link ideas together in ways that um simply just, you know, that large scale quantitative data are often not well equipped to do, especially if we're talking about panel data where you can look at associations, but you can't necessarily say,
00:17:26
Speaker
what the causal impact is of one factor on another. Whereas if you are actually talking to people, if you are, you know, asking them questions, and especially if you're following them over time and seeing how things play out, um that that's a way to actually be able to understand, you know, what is, what is driving this particular decision that they're making? Or what is, you know, how, how is their life playing out in these particular ways? And you can start to see those causal processes, those causal mechanisms in a way that quantitative data, especially kind of, you know, panel survey type data, often isn't similarly equipped to do. And it can also um
00:17:57
Speaker
through the kind of careful analysis of qualitative data, looking at the use of the the way people use language, the way people kind of, you know, even contradict themselves at times can reveal larger cultural structures. um You know, the way people think is often shaped by the the kinds of the kinds of ideas that we're exposed to. And we can see echoes of that in the way that people talk about themselves and narrate their lives and starting to see the justifications that people use and how those kind of map on to larger you know I do some um qualitative content analysis in the book too in terms of bringing in analyses of things like parenting books, you know like kind of secular and religious parenting books and the kinds of messages that these are teaching. And when you can literally see echoes of the kinds of messages in these books in the way that parents are talking about raising their children, you can start to see the emphasis of these kinds of media-based messages, these kinds of you know cultural ideas on the way that people understand and and make decisions in their own lives.
00:18:49
Speaker
yeah So tell me a little bit about your best practices.
Best Practices for Conducting Sensitive Interviews
00:18:55
Speaker
I use that term loosely, but best practices when it comes to conducting interviews. Like I think there are a lot of people who have, I mean, a lot of say for myself, like I went through grad school as an economist, zero qualitative methods training, right? Like how to pick that up.
00:19:09
Speaker
as I'm doing it at at the Urban Institute, right? Doing interviews, sort of learning from my colleagues who do this day in and day out and sort of picking out what are the what are the best practices. but But for you, when you are talking to these families, when you're talking to these moms, what are some of the things that you are you know always trying to do? What are some of the ways that you're able to elicit these stories? Like what are those best practices for you and your team?
00:19:31
Speaker
Yeah, so one of the things that I did with this project that I'm very grateful that we did in hindsight, in part because I was doing the interviews with it with a team of graduate students and with varied levels of experience with collecting qualitative data, um was that we always did surveys before each wave of interviews. And those surveys included fairly detailed um background questions, as well as questions about the circumstances of of mother's lives and their partner's lives. And what that allowed me to do was set up essentially a flagging system um where we knew which mothers were facing the most difficult circumstances the ones who had, you know, whether that was economic hardship or difficult partner relationships or um physical trauma after birth, for example. um And what we did was we sort of triaged who was going to do each interview based on, you know, the level of difficulty that that interview was going to likely, you know, involve. um and So I would do the kind of the most sensitive ones where I had a handful of other you know team members who had a lot of experience in the field. um
00:20:23
Speaker
do those, whereas graduate students who are relatively new to interviewing tended to do the interviews that were we expected would be relatively light and in terms of content in those kinds of ways. And so that for me was um huge in terms of, I mean, these were interviews that had a lot of trauma.
00:20:38
Speaker
um and a lot of hardship and a lot of difficulty. And so making sure that I was taking care of my team in addition to putting people in place that were highly experienced to handle those more sensitive interviews was really important in part because there's there's a risk when you're conducting interviews with people about sensitive parts of their lives.
00:20:55
Speaker
um New interviewers often shy away from hard things, whether that's negative emotions, if someone breaks down in tears, if someone you know starts to kind of sound like they're tearing up, um it's it's very easy for new interviewers to just kind of quickly jump to the next question. But that actually risks signaling to the person that you're interviewing that your their emotions are too much for you as the researcher. And so they will start to feel guilty, start to feel bad, or can start to feel bad about you know, the negative emotions that they're feeling in the moment. and So being willing to kind of sit with someone in those hard moments, the way that you would with a close friend or family member, you know, getting comfortable with the negative parts and also learning tools to um to to probe gently around those kinds of difficult experiences um while also finding ways later on in the interview to circle back to more hopeful things, to give people a chance to feel more empowered, to feel a stronger sense of agency. So like
00:21:46
Speaker
I always like to end my interviews on thinking about you know hopes for the future or advice that people would give to others, something that especially if we've hit on a lot of difficult content can give them a chance to just feel a little better as we end things as opposed to kind of leaving things on ah on a really difficult or dark note. um And similarly, in terms of you know the actual interviews themselves, I think another key thing here is um a willingness and an ability to to follow up effectively um in interviews that this is one of the the keys in my view to achieving cognitive empathy um is the ability to notice when people are sort of leaving you breadcrumbs um and and kind of people will often, you know, we do this in conversation. We we draw hints at things where we're like, I'm not sure if you want to go there, but like this is something I'm thinking of, you know, like this is what's going on in the back of my mind.
00:22:32
Speaker
um And when we notice those things, it actually signals to our participants that we're hearing them, that we're listening carefully, that we and that we're willing to kind of follow that lead in ways that kind of sticking to a carefully prescribed interview script um just signals that really we just care about getting the questions answered and not that we really care about understanding their lives in the full context of their experiences. And so I think that's another place we're learning to probe effectively, kind of following those breadcrumbs, noticing things where people have kind of mentioned things that seem unrelated, um but oftentimes are alluding to bigger parts of their lives that um that are maybe maybe deeply significant. I interviewed this one mom who kept mentioning kind of the time in her life when her and her husband first got together. And so eventually I stopped and said, hey, can can you tell me about how you and your husband first got together?
00:23:17
Speaker
And it turned out that he was actually married to someone else at the time and that they had an affair and that um and then he ended up breaking up with his previous wife and this caused all kinds of chaos and turmoil. And so kind of being willing to kind of follow that lead and talk to her and ask her questions about that thing that kind of kept coming up, you know, was a way into understanding much better the kind of context and contours of her current life and circumstances as well.
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about that because it's like, it's partly psychology, right? Like the way you've, you've described some of this. So to follow these threads, I'm guessing have, um, have a script, had a set of questions that you come in with. Do you find that you sacrifice some of those questions further down on your sheet when you follow some of these threads and and you're okay with that because you end up in a.
00:24:04
Speaker
you You don't have then the same set of answers from every person you've interviewed, but you're you're maybe enriching the data in different ways. Yeah, exactly. so And I think certainly there's differences of opinion among qualitative researchers about how closely you should stick to the script.
00:24:17
Speaker
I typically tend to have you know a handful of questions where these are the core topics that I want to make sure that I cover. and so And then I'll have other things that if I have time, I want to get to as well. And so I'll try to make sure that I'm at least getting at those core ideas. um But other than that, I tend to let things go pretty freely in part because I also know that you know with most of the studies that I'm doing, I'll have a chance to come back to these and talk to these people again.
00:24:38
Speaker
And so if there's things that I don't get to, that's part of the beauty of longitudinal interviewing too, is that you can you know fill in those gaps later if there are things that you don't ask. um But I think there's also value in in giving people a chance to tell their story in a holistic way, in a sense that it is often it leads oftentimes to what Mario and I talk about as as more palpable answers, answers that aren't simply generalizations, you know essentially what we're doing as the qualitative data analysts is generalizing from people's experiences about you know larger phenomena in the world. And if our questions ask people to generalize about their own lives, then essentially we're making generalizations of generalizations and we don't necessarily get to the kind of, we don't see how people came to those generalizations, which is really the beauty of qualitative data. And that you can say, okay, give me an an actual example of that, or it's you know tell me how that works in practice.
00:25:27
Speaker
um in ways that were with ethnography, you know seeing how that actually plays out in practice, in ways that can help you to see not only how people generalize about their own lives, but also in terms of the generalizations that we make ground those as closely as possible and in lived realities.
00:25:42
Speaker
yeah I have several questions for you, but I wanted to ask because you're dealing with difficult questions, different, difficult circumstances, maybe trauma. What are the steps that you take for yourself and for your, for your team? Like, um you know, coming out of some of these interviews that I'm sure are difficult for the interviewer as well as the interviewee.
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, there's a terrific book chapter um by sociologist Lacey Abrego about what she calls accompaniment. um And I have my students read that you know in the qualitative methods courses that I teach, and I have my students read it when they're working on ah on an interview team with me, um because it offers ah an important window into the kinds of negative emotions that come up when you're dealing with trauma or difficult subjects, both for the interview participant and for the interviewer. And it talks about kind of the um the ways that you can help take care of your participants in interviews, but also, you know, having someone to debrief with after interview, you know, after conducting a difficult interview, having someone, you know, even if there's some qualitative scholars who recommend like wearing different clothes to do interviews than you would in your kind of day to day lives, because you can take those clothes off at the end of the interview um in a way that can kind of put some mental distance between, you know, the
00:26:50
Speaker
the work that you're doing as an interviewer and, you know, the mental work of of the rest of your life. And so I think there's, you know, there's, there's tools that we can use. I think that's um there's a number of tools that we can use, whether oftentimes psychological um to help ourselves navigate through those difficult moments. And definitely and having people to debrief with, I think is one of the the the most important ones. And, you know, just spending time memoing and reflecting to on difficult things that interviews might bring up for you um in your own life and the process of conducting. Right.
00:27:17
Speaker
Right. Okay. So you have identified your interviewees in this book.
Analyzing Interview Transcripts Efficiently
00:27:23
Speaker
Uh, it sounded like it was it was starting a prenatal clinics and following folks through. You've done your interviews. And so what are your, what's your process about navigating your way through all of those, all that interview texts? Because I think this is the thing that people get overwhelmed about, especially who are not trained in these methods. Like I've got even just one hour, I've got one hour of transcript. How do I pull anything out of this? So like, what are your, what are your methods for that?
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah, there's a couple different strategies, especially with this much data, it can be really hard to wrap your head around. And so one of the things that we did um with the with the interviews was we had um interviewers actually fill out a post interviewer survey, um where they identified the key themes in the interview, illustrated, you know, identified key quotes that might have or key ideas that might have illustrated those themes, pointed to things that like, what were the questions that we didn't ask? What were the things that you know, what are the things we should follow up on?
00:28:14
Speaker
And so those survey responses for me, you know, then I can create a table out of those and kind of look through them and identify, okay, what are the major themes? or I can help to sort sort people into different categories and say, this person kind of falls in this bucket, this person kind of falls in that bucket. And so, you know, that's another place where both the post-interview survey data and the pre-interview survey data ah become really important for helping to sort of start to categorize people um in terms of their experiences. And then once I have a sort of sense of like, you know, who are the you know white evangelical Christian moms, for example, or who are the moms who are stay-at-home moms versus the ones working for pay full-time,
00:28:48
Speaker
once I can sort them into buckets, then depending on what I'm trying to do analysis-wise, I can sort the interviews and then read them in in groups, essentially, and look for... There's a a terrific book by Stefan Timmermans and Ido Tivori about... and They have a couple of books on abductive analysis, and their most recent one is ah is a book about how to do abductive analysis. And one of the things that they recommend that um is a practice very similar to what I use in my own research is essentially reading the data, especially kind of clustered sets of data to identify things that are surprising or interesting in light of what we already know and identifying index cases of those kind of surprising or interesting things.
00:29:26
Speaker
And then comparing the rest of the data, you know, say like maybe there's a particularly interesting case of a stay-at-home mom. I'm going to kind of keep that case open on one side of my desktop and I'm going to compare it to all the other stay-at-home moms and say like, is this is she illustrative of a larger pattern or is she more of an outlier?
00:29:40
Speaker
and start to kind of create data matrices where I'm tracking what are these patterns, what's interesting here, um and then writing memos that unpack you know what might be explaining this, what are the next things to to unpack here. I very rarely jump in with a data set like this and just start sort of open coding. It's it's too big and it tends to get too overwhelming way too quickly.
00:30:00
Speaker
Instead, if I use coding, it much more tends to be toward the end of a process where I've used memoing, used this kind of index casing um to identify what I think is going on, having a theory of of kind of you know this is what I think is makes sense of this particular type of experience, and then I'll go through systematically and say, you know does the data fit the theory or not? you know Does each mother kind of or each partner um you know follow this pattern or not, where are the outliers, you know, what might explain those outliers. And so it's a more strategic use of coding um as opposed to trying to jump in from the beginning with coding and doing a lot more sort of memo-ing and theorizing, especially with, you know, the volume of data. I also do a lot of kind of treating these interviews almost like life histories because we do follow them over time and writing memos where I sort of synthesize and summarize, you know, let's but like look at this mother's experience over time. How would I tell her story in a fairly condensed way? um And then using those sometimes to analyze instead of looking at the full set of transcripts too.
00:30:52
Speaker
Right. And then when it comes to your process of writing in particular this book, because what you don't do in the book is sort of like, start with, I mean you do start in the introduction with sort of an ah an illustrative story but like, it's not like every chapter starts with a story and then you go into your analysis right it's like they're it's all kind of interwoven together which is why it's such a good read.
00:31:13
Speaker
So how do you think about your writing? Do you get to a point where you're like, I need a story here? Are you like, what's that what'sapp process like for you? Yeah. And then this was a book that I wrote in many, many drafts. um And so I think this was something that it's, it it didn't come out onto the page this way um as, you know, very rarely does anything ever have come out exactly the way that it gets published. But this was a place where, um and I think I did ah ah an early draft of the book, like a full draft of the book that I shared with a group of um trusted sociologist friends who came out for a book workshop. And so, i and they helped me sort of rework, um you know, these are the core ideas that belong in the book. And here's where you could maybe reorganize some things to kind of interweave things better or, you know, change around the chapter orders.
00:31:53
Speaker
And so this is another place where I think relying on, you know, trusted people to look at our work um and help us see, you know, where am I to, an example, illustrate this better? How might you bring in some stories? um At the same time, I think this is also a um ah practice that I've i've honed a little bit through some op-ed writing um and and more public style writing because it is sort of, um it it's closer to that model than a typical academic kind of model where you're often, you know, maybe you lead with an example, then you go into some data, like, you know, some some like quantitative data that maybe you bring in a personal anecdote, there's sort of ways to weave back and forth. And so I think um practicing styles of writing other than just traditional academic stuff is is useful for me too. Yeah. Okay. So I don't think there's any, I'm flipping through it. I don't think there's any data vis in the book. There's a lot of data in the book, quantitative and qualitative, but you've done, obviously you've, you've published a lot. So I wanted to ask about,
00:32:44
Speaker
qualitative data is in the, in the work that you've done where you have actually like
Innovative Visualization of Qualitative Data
00:32:47
Speaker
database. Now, aside from word clouds, because we're going to avoid word clouds on the show, but like what what are some of your approaches to trying to create visualizations out of all this qualitative data that you have?
00:32:59
Speaker
Yeah. So I have a paper that I published with one of my graduate students, Monica Heilman, that is ah published in visual studies. um She's a trained visual artist. And so we worked with the the pandemic data in particular, especially the early waves of the pandemic data. I've never had a response like that. We we did 65 interviews in four weeks. like but basically it was It was just ah a bonkers level of data collection. yeah But um I think there were a lot of moms who felt very isolated and overwhelmed in those early, with this was April and May of 2020 and just kind of feeling completely overwhelmed by pandemic parenting, and and so one of the things that Monica and I did with those data was to synthesize and summarize, you know, what are the key themes, the key challenges that mothers are facing? And then she created visual representations, illustrations, pen and ink illustrations of those kinds of challenges, things like, you know, the the feeling of sort of identity loss around, you know, not being able to connect to paid work, the feeling of sort of claustrophobia around being at home with your partner and your kids and trying to do paid work at the same time, ah the sense of loss of community that came from from COVID restrictions
00:33:58
Speaker
um And so we illustrated those and and we kind of worked back and forth on drafts of them and then she kind of penned the the final versions that went into the piece and for us that was, and we've we've shared that with a number of people and then they found it a sort of really powerful representation of the kinds of challenges that that mothers in particular were um were facing during those early pandemic weeks and months and so I think that was you know, one of the ways that we tried to to visually capture these kinds of data. um And certainly you can't capture everyone's experience, but having a sort of collection of images um that tried to capture sort of what were the very types of challenges that mothers were facing um during this time was was one of the things we tried to do there.
00:34:35
Speaker
And then other ways, i mean I think the other place where thinking about visual representation comes up for me is often in presenting data, um you know and and in the sense that you know if I'm standing up in front of an audience or or talking about my book, you know I could put quotes up on the slide, um but I don't like to do that because I feel like it um you know the audience is going to read those quotes faster than I can read them aloud. and It also, I think, takes away from my ability to almost perform the quotes with emphasis, with meaning, with kind of um the way that you would kind of act them out. um And so I think saving the quotes and putting up, you know, illustrative images, um you know, of people who maybe it's, you know, not typically it's not the people who are actual participants, um but finding images that either represent um aspects of what they're saying, you know, graphic type, you know, icon type images or things like
00:35:22
Speaker
you know sometimes photos of people um that represent aspects of their lives or aspects of their identities um that can give people a sense of the person behind the quote or a sense of the experience behind it even if they're not from the actual data itself.
00:35:37
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder about that because I've suggested this to folks and a lot of, I don't know, a lot, yeah ah folks who do qualitative work, they hesitate on that part. Cause like you said, you don't usually have pictures of the people you've interviewed.
00:35:53
Speaker
um But to you know if you're doing a study on behavior among some group and you get a picture of people who look like that group from you know Unsplash or from iStock or Dettie and you put it up, i think I think some people hesitate to put up an image that's not from that specific person. And I wonder, I have my own view on that, but i want I want to get your take on Yeah, I mean, i think it's certainly um I think it's certainly an imperfect science in that sense. and And there are certainly hesitations. I typically do add a disclaimer at the bottom of the slides that says like these pictures do not represent the yeah people that were that were out that were participants in the interviews. I think at the same time, i'm I'm hesitant to use photography in my own work, even if some IRBs would allow that, in part because
00:36:39
Speaker
I'm often doing work with families and so even if you know mom and dad consent to be part of the interview you know is it okay if kids you know what they want and so I think it's just too easy to link people together in ways that I tend to err on the side of you know not disclosing in those kinds of ways and and so because of that at the same time I think there is something about um seeing images of people that can help us to kind of get into that empathy mindset or put our listeners or our readers into that empathy mindset in a way that um might not be possible um with without that kind of imagery in the background. And so I think certainly you can do things with, you know, um
00:37:14
Speaker
icon-type imagery that illustrates ideas, but oftentimes people, especially people expressing types of emotion. um And so I'll often use them in that way if I can find a picture of someone who kind of like illustrates the kind of the kind of frustration or the kind of elation or the kind of sadness that someone's experiencing, that those kinds of
Conclusion and Resources
00:37:31
Speaker
emotionally evocative images are are the ones that I tend to gravitate toward as as um helping to to show ah the feeling behind the quote as well.
00:37:40
Speaker
Right. Okay. That makes sense. Um, okay. So holding it together, how women became America's safety net. Love the book. Um, if folks have questions for you, they want to invite you to talk. They want to invite you to come give a full day qualitative methods training. Cause you don't have anything else going on, right? With research and students. Um, where should folks reach out to you to find me? Sure. So you can find me on my website at jessaphecolarco.com.
00:38:06
Speaker
Great, okay, so folks should check it out. You should definitely check out the book, Holding It Together with Jessica Clarko. Jessica, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. And good luck with what I'm sure is a thank you so much. I really appreciated the conversation.
00:38:25
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you will check out Jessica's new book, Holding It Together, How Women Became America's Safety Net. And I also hope that you will take just a moment out of your day to rate or review this show wherever you listen to your podcasts, be it Spotify,
00:38:43
Speaker
iTunes, on my website, on YouTube, wherever you get it. I hope you'll just take a moment. It really does help me expand the reach of the audience, which in turn helped me find more and more guests to bring you great content to help you be a more effective data communicator. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.