February 17, 2025

Leadership Fellow & Intern Project Memo 1 - First Qualitative Interviews and Tools

I began interviewing counseling leaders this morning for a qualitative inquiry. I’m conducting the research in relation to my time as a Leadership Fellow and Intern with Chi Sigma Iota (CSI). Currently the research is not formalized with IRB approval; the desired outcome is an article in the CSI Exemplar. But even in this informal inquiry with CSI counseling leaders, I feel incredibly grateful and excited.

Quick reflections on research and talking to people

Firstly, I love research. Since I’m currently not pursuing a doctorate (and may never; I will write a post overviewing some of my thoughts as to why), I’ve needed to create my own research opportunities. This is part of me making my own opportunities, alongside my more formal inquiry into problems of professional competence. Between these two projects, and a previous one focusing on contemplative pedagogy in counselor education, I can easily see a future of staying engaged in research projects for years to come. I still have yet to figure out the funding side, and I’m decidedly “in the red” here. Part of the research process is getting it out there, which means physically getting out to conferences. An ongoing, open-ended reflection still. Part of what makes this worth it comes down to the people involved. In general, I love talking to passionate, driven, and selfless people. My time in CSI has allowed me to interact with leaders in the field who are working toward a positive vision for professional counseling, and I feel quite grateful.

Tools of the inquiry

I like talking tools. So far, I’m vibing with Zoom’s paid plan ($15/month, hoping to only need it for 2 months or so…again, independent researcher problems!), and their transcripts are actually quite good. I found a GitHub tool that cleans up Zoom .vtt files locally in your browser! Pretty nifty as it saves the repetitive cleaning at the front end, and allows me to focus more on content during the rewatch.

Since this first inquiry is informal, and my coinvestigator and I are still feeling out methods, we’re playing with a pretty generic approach coupled with thematic analysis. In the spirit of experimenting, I’m using Obsidian with an ultra-cool plugin, Quadro, to analyze and code the data. It is still early stages, but I’m getting the hang of it I think. The plugin is opinionated―in that the workflow reportedly aligns with a Grounded Theory approach―but the workflow seems flexible enough. I have also been aware of another qualitative workflow by Ryan Murphy, and I may try in the future. Either way, Obsidian’s ease of hyperlinking and extensive plugin ecosystem seems like a quite powerful tool for qualitative data analysis. Maybe I’ll document more of my process here in the future…

Research Memos


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