Using the life grid interview technique in STEM education research

Background Qualitative interviewing is a common tool that has been utilized by science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education researchers to explore and describe the experiences of students, educators, or other educational stakeholders. Some interviewing techniques use co-creation of an artifact, such as a personal timeline, as a unique way to elicit a detailed narrative from a respondent. The purpose of this commentary is to describe an interview artifact called a life grid. First used and validated in medical sociology to conduct life course research, we adapted the life grid for use in research on undergraduate STEM education. We applied the life grid interview technique to two contexts: (1) students in an advanced degree program reflecting on their entire undergraduate career as a biology major and (2) students in an undergraduate physics program reflecting on a multi-week lab project. Results We found that the life grid supported four important attributes of an interview: facilitation of the respondents’ agency, establishment of rapport between interviewers and respondents, enhanced depth of the respondents’ narratives, and the construction of more accurate accounts of events. We situate our experiences with respect to those attributes and compare them with the experiences detailed in the literature. Conclusions We conclude with recommendations for future use of the life grid technique in undergraduate STEM education research. Overall, we find the life grid to be a valuable tool to use when conducting interviews about phenomena with a chronological component.