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Different phenomenographers define phenomenography differently, and there are distinct movements
within the phenomenographic tradition, some of which are more closely tied to specific research methods
than others are. Some of these variants could well be called methods or methodologies. Hasselgren et al.
(n.d.) give an overview of the main flavors of phenomenography (see also Åkerlind, 2005c; Bowden and
Green, 2005).
Enough generic talk.
17.3 Here is what we did in practice
17.3.1 We collected data from interviews with programming students
The way we conducted the interviews accommodates many of the considerations from the previous section.
The interviewers
To improve the trustworthiness of our research, we wished to have an interviewer who was independent
of UUhistle’s development. On the other hand, the author of the thesis would be doing much of the
analysis, some of it during the interviewing process, so we also wished to involve him in the interviewing
so that he could make use of the early analysis to explore emergent themes in more detail.
Consequently, two researchers collaborated to do the interviews. One interviewer, Jan Lönnberg,
interviewed five students, and the author of the thesis interviewed six, making eleven interviews in total.
The author was in charge of student selection.
Both interviewers had some experience with phenomenographically motivated interview studies from
earlier projects.
Student selection
Our interviewees were students taking the spring 2010 offering of CS1–Imp–Pyth described in Section 16.4.
A couple of weeks into the course, all the students of CS1–Imp–Pyth answered an online questionnaire
in which they were asked to rate their programming background, their attitudes towards programming,
and the workload and difficulty of the CS1 course so far. We used the answers to this questionnaire,
and the results from the assignments submitted, to mold our interviewee selection process so that we
got a mix of interviewees with different backgrounds, attitudes, and estimates of course difficulty, as well
as a mix of scores from the course assignments. Such a selection, we felt, would give us a good basis
for exploring the variation in ways of experiencing. The interviewees also came from a variety of degree
programs within engineering.
We surmised that students who had a harder time with the course or were less enthusiastic about it
would have more trouble seeing VPS in a rich way and might be a good source of data for studying partial
understandings of the phenomenon. We therefore skewed our selection process towards such students,
inviting more of them and fewer of the experienced and motivated students. The selection process was
unformulaic and involved randomly picking out names from a list until we had what appeared to be a
suitable mix.
Given our research interest, we ensured that all our invitees had submitted an answer to at least one
VPS exercise; most had submitted many.
The interviews were conducted partially in parallel to the experimental study described in Chapter 19.
We checked that none of our invitees had been part of the experimental group in that other study.
Both the interviewers had taught at our university in past semesters. We confirmed from our
department’s records that none of the students was interviewed by a researcher that the student had
previously taken a class with.
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