52
data. To that end, I have ensured to use participants’ own words as much as possible to give
voice to their experiences as truthfully as possible.
Supplemental Supports to Strengthen the Study’s Claims
To assist me and ensure methodological integrity in
the study, I used additional data
sources, such as collage drawings, syllabi, and other documents participants shared with me. The
drawings collected during phenomenological Interview 2 were useful for triangulation as I asked
participants to draw themselves in a HyFlex course and then explain the drawing. I looked for
discrepancies between how they explained their drawings and how they described their
experiences in HyFlex courses. I initially used Zoom’s built-in transcription,
but the accuracy of
the transcriptions was not sufficiently accurate. I then turned to Otter.ai software. Even though it
still required some cleaning up of the transcripts, Otter.ai produced more faithful transcriptions. I
manually corrected any remaining transcription errors and transcribed any
inaudible parts that
existed in the interview recordings. After corrections to the transcriptions were complete, I wrote
profile vignettes for each participant making sure to use their words verbatim as much as
possible. I shared the corresponding vignettes and transcriptions with
each participant to check
for accuracy and ensure their voices and experiences were represented fairly and truthfully. I
obtained and incorporated feedback from my dissertation committee members throughout the
process of this study. I also used data memos throughout the process and mapped out my
research questions to the data sources than can best answer those questions as illustrated in Table
1.
