Representing Researcher Identity with I-Poems

In this methods paper, we describe the use of participant-generated I-poems as a tool to represent data from qualitative interviews. I-poems are poems composed of I-statements a participant made during an interview. This form of qualitative analysis highlights a participant's voice and self-focused statements within a text. For our study, we adapted the I-poem method so that participants created an I-poem themselves from their interview transcripts to represent their researcher identities. It was important to us to use a participatory method of analysis because it gave participants agency in how their identities were interpreted and expressed. We believe participant-generated I-poems will be useful for researchers who want to learn about participants' beliefs in their own terms or those who want to use participants' knowledge as a lens to analyze the qualitative data they help produce. To that end, we discuss the methods and results of our study using I-poems to represent researcher identity as a case study to show how the participant-generated I-poem method can be used to analyze interview data in a new way. We recommend applying I-poems to other engineering education research agendas.