Hello,
I am preparing a semi-structured interview schedule for an interpretative phenomenological analysis study on marginalized individuals' career experiences as impacted by COVID-19. The aim of the study is to explore how marginalized individuals conceptualize and make sense of career (e.g., what factors they perceive as facilitating or hindering achievement of their career goals) given their experience during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While it's important to let the participants talk freely about their experiences, how do I approach questions about their identity in relation to their perceived career options without automatically forcing identity to become a superordinate theme? My initial thought was to approach it more broadly (e.g., "what are some of your work goals / how did these come about?"), but what if the participants don't discuss identity? Is that okay? Perhaps I can ask if/how they perceive their experience to be (dis)similar to others, but this feels removed from the explicitly idiographic focus of IPA research.
Any help is appreciated. Thank you in advance for your guidance!
This is a problem in other methods as well (e.g., Grounded Theory). For IPA, I would rely on whatever advice you can get from the Smith, Flowers, and Larkin textbook.
- Badges
- Science topic