Using the LifeGrid Interview Technique in Science Education Research

Qualitative interviewing is an essential tool 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. Here, two groups of education researchers from physics and biology come together to describe an interview artifact called a LifeGrid. First used and validated in medical sociology to conduct life course research, the LifeGrid was demonstrated to reduce recall bias and facilitate an interview. We apply the LifeGrid interview technique in two educational contexts: 1) students in an advance 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. Specifically, we elaborate on how the LifeGrid facilitates respondents' agency, establishes rapport between interviewers and respondents, affects the depth of the respondents' narratives, and constructs accurate accounts of events. We situate our experiences with respect to those attributes and compare and contrast them with the experiences detailed in literature. We conclude with recommendations for future use of the LifeGrid technique in undergraduate STEM education research. Overall, we find the LifeGrid to be a valuable tool to use when conducting interviews about phenomena with a chronological component.