Interviews allow the researcher to get at the stories and meanings of participants’ experiences (Dapzury Valenzuela and Pallavi Shrivastava):

This short video is an excellent introduction to interview techniques:

 

How to turn your interviews into a paper.

The following paper is an excellent example of how you can work interviews into your paper. This (delightfully meta) paper is built around interviews of 18 faculty doing SoTL research.  The paper consists almost entirely of qualitative research. The only statistics are a tabulation of how many of the interviewees came from which division (STEM, etc). Not an inferential statistic in sight.

Your (interview based) paper should include some theory and citations about interviews, such as appears in the documents embedded above. Additionally, the following paper is entirely about the theory and practice of interviews in SoTL research. Moreover, it is very plainly written:

Why bother with interviews?

Interviews (like oral histories) are interesting to read!

Interviews don’t require a large sample size to be relevant.

If your project entails an intervention being applied to only one class, such as changing the seating arrangement or introducing a strategy to increase retention, it is unlikely that you will be able to get statistically meaningful results due to the small sample size. However, if you present your intervention as a pilot study and include student interviews as to what they thought about the intervention, its impact on their attitudes, etc., you have the makings of a possibly publishable paper.

Focus Group Interviews

“With focus group interviews, the researcher is able to collect data from multiple participants and also to observe and record the interactions and group dynamics that unfold” (Lodico, Spaulding, & Voegtle, 2006).

Focus group interviews have some difficulties that you should be aware of: keeping track of who is saying what; a tendency towards either group think or chaos.

The following website is devoted to SoTL research involving focus groups.

https://facet.iu.edu/sotl/sotl-101/focus-groups.html

Here is a 30 minute video on moderating a focus group.