Using Qualitative Longitudinal Interviews to Track the Career Intentions and Identity Development of PhD students

Simon Williams, Research Assistant Professor, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA.

This seminar will discuss some of the benefits and challenges facing large-scale qualitative longitudinal qualitative research (QLR), drawing on my experience of two ongoing research projects - the National Longitudinal Study of Young Life Scientists and the Academy for Future Science Faculty. In these projects, we are following the career intentions and identity development of a diverse group of PhD students in the biomedical sciences from across the United States. Such a longitudinal approach is enabling us to explore whether, and more importantly how and why, students’ early career intentions are, or are not, realized.

I also discuss some of the challenges we, as a research team, have encountered as a result of the large, complex data set that often accompanies QLR. Finally, I discuss some of the strategies for data collection and analysis that these projects are employing.