Observing Team Fieldwork

1. The most surprising experience was that all people we interviewed were supportive. They shared their opinions, personal stories, and feelings freely.
What went well include the team work, the communication with the targeted audience, and the insights’ generation. The team spirit was spectacular. All team members were engaging and well prepared. Each one treated others with respect and welcomed different voices. As a result, the team perform well in the task and had a lot of laughs and joys. We had great chemistry with respondents. In the fieldwork, we adjusted our question-asking strategy. Instead of following the questionnaire, we followed the respondents’ stories and logic. The reason is respondents felt more engaging when we did so.
Overall, it was a smooth and fun process. We adopted the strategy of “diverge + converge” to combine teammates’ observations. In the diverge stage, everyone freely shared his or her observations, feelings, and interpretations. Other teammates shared their feelings and interpretations on others’ observations to build up. In the converge stage, we combined similar observations and added details into each one of the final candidates. Another reason why it went on well is it was agreed that disagree was ok. When there were conflicting observations, we raised the hypothesis on reasons and leave them for future exploration if they were key to the solution.
It was handy to combine similar ideas. But it took us efforts to bring the synthesis into another level. At first, we grouped ideas by themes and brainstormed new ideas under each theme. Secondly, we put these themes in the timeline of before and after college. The followed up step is to explore the relationship between themes and ideas falling into the same place on the timeline. New ideas came out with the organization of different
The stage of “Define” is inspiring. We changed the focus of the project. Before coming out to fieldwork, we targeted at University students because they were relevant to our topic. After communication with them, we felt it was too late to reach them in University stage. They needed a longer time to prepare and it took time to shift their perception and attitudes. We had a debate on how early we would contact students- high school, junior high school, or primary school? The earlier the easier to cultivate the financial thinking mode, whereas less relevant to the topic. Fieldwork difficulty was also considered. American laws forbid the interviews with people below 18 years old unless authorized by parents. In the end, it was agreed to choose high school students considering they were relevant with the topic, able to digest the financial information, and there was enough time before they need to apply for a financial loan. To tackle the difficulty of approaching them, we set a flexible target for interviews which include University students, parents of high school students, and the teachers of high school. Parents are the key decision makers in students’ loan and are easier to contact. Teachers are familiar with a large quantity of students’ needs and attitudes. By the contacting of university students, we aim to dig out their stories in high school and identify both successful factors and unsuccessful factors in handing financial