[In this video, six people are having a conversation. The people’s names are Chelsea Jordan-Makely, Charissa Brammer, Amy Bahlenhorst, Sara Wicen, Carol Peeples, and Renee Barnes.]

Chelsea Jordan-Makely: The next question relates… some of you were touching on this a little bit but, what would you do when you had folks who were quiet or reticent during the interviews? How would you get people talking?

Amy Bahlenhorst: I think this was kind of a tricky one because you want to be careful not to use anybody’s name. It feels really uncomfortable to point at somebody and say, “hey you over there,” but that’s kind of what you have to do is catch somebody’s attention. And I think kind of the language that we would use is something along the lines of, “hey, we would really love to hear from anybody. We haven’t heard much from you. Is there anything you’d like to share? No pressure if you don’t want to.” And usually that person said something. Sometimes they didn’t, and you know, that’s OK too.

Sara Wicen: Yeah, adding on to that, I also like you have focus groups where one person’s kind of dominating the conversation. But I also had a couple of focus groups where there was only one or two people that I was speaking with and they were both very quiet or one person was just very quiet and in those cases like, yeah, going through asking the questions, asking…we had a list of primary questions and then under each question we had a few follow up questions which didn’t all get asked in each focus group, but they were very helpful for if somebody was not really responding well to the first question or not answering fully, then asking some of those follow up questions being a little bit more thorough and going through each one to see if those follow up questions sparked an idea that they’d like to share. But I think I definitely aired more on the side of not wanting to be pushy and if somebody…we were grateful for everyone participating, even if yeah, they gave pretty short answers and the transcript or focus group ended up not taking the full amount of time, that was OK too. And yeah, we’re still glad to have them come and share what they wanted to.

Carol Peeples: Yeah, you know, I’m reminded, you know, sometimes you can sit in a meeting and it’s the value of the nonverbal communication to communicate, to enabling communication. And it’s your, your eye contact your body language, your facial expressions, everything. As you’re engaging with people and that’s all lost. And so, I think back to this, but as it’s coming out to the researchers because the transcripts are gone, there’s no recording, right. So, we know what we were doing in the room, which was leaning in or smiling or, you know, making that eye contact or whatever, just to kind of…But that may be lost in translation really, as we come out to the final product. But I think that’s a huge part of what we probably were all doing in order to get more, illicit more, conversation from people.

Chelsea Jordan-Makely: I want to mention the one transcript I obviously wasn’t in the room, but a person is not participating or vocal throughout the interview and passes on every question in the schedule and then at the very end, “Is there anything else you’d like to share?” Just lets loose with a beautiful eloquent reflection…on the impact of library services for people who are incarcerated. So that’s not to informed consent, but to the point of people who might be reticent. Umm. And also I think uh, it’s maybe worth sharing here that one of the codes we added was neutrality because we had had a positive and a negative and then we realized that people can have no opinion also. [Laughter.] Fun. A fun grounded theory outcome. Should we move on to the next question?