On this week’s episode, I talk with Jessica Calarco about her book “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net” and the role of qualitative data in research and data visualization. Calarco, a sociologist from UW Madison, discusses her research on family life inequalities and the shift to a “DIY society,” where individuals, particularly women, manage risks without government support, leading to reliance on low-wage caregiving. She critiques the wealthy elite for discouraging collective social support and emphasizes the need for policy changes to ensure basic needs, caregiving opportunities, and work-life balance through measures like paid family leave. We also talk about Jessica’s data collection efforts, which involved more than 400 hours of interviews, surveys, and national studies, to understand human experiences deeply. She addresses critiques of qualitative research’s representativeness, arguing its strength lies in capturing life’s complexities.

Topics Discussed

  • Women as the Safety Net. o We explore how women, especially in a “DIY society,” have become the backbone of managing societal risks in the absence of substantial government support.
  • Policy and Structural Change. o Jessica argues the need for significant policy reforms to provide basic needs, enhance caregiving opportunities, and promote work-life balance. We also discuss the effectiveness of policy changes at federal, state, and local levels.
  • Qualitative vs. Quantitative Data. We talk about the differences between qualitative and quantitative data, emphasizing the former’s ability to capture the complexities of human experiences. We also talk about best practices in qualitative interviewing, focusing on empathy, attentiveness, and maintaining a balance between structured and open-ended questions.
  • Research Methodology. We discuss Jessica’s approach to data collection, which involved more than 400 hours of interviews, surveys, and national studies during the pandemic to gain deep insights. We also talk about some of the strategies she and her team used for managing emotional challenges and trauma in interviews.

Resources

Visit Jessica’s website and find her book “Holding it Together” on Amazon.

Guest Bio

Jessica Calarco is a Sociologist and Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jessica is an award-winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of four books, including Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net. Jessica has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. She also writes the Hidden Curriculum newsletter and is a mom of two young kids.

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Transcript

00:12 – 00:16
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I’m your host, John Schwabisch.

00:16 – 00:27
I’m very excited for this week’s episode because we spend a lot of time on this show talking about quantitative data, quantitative data collection, analysis, and data visualization.

00:28 – 00:34
But there’s a whole other world of qualitative data both in how it’s collected, how it’s analyzed, and how it’s communicated

00:34 – 00:37
or visualized to your reader, your user, your audience member.

00:37 – 00:43
And so on this week’s episode of the show, I’m really fortunate to have, Jessica Calarco join me on the show.

00:43 – 00:48
She’s the author of the new book, Holding It Together, How Women Became America’s Safety Net.

00:48 – 00:53
And you’re gonna hear in this interview, we’re gonna spend obviously a bit of time talking about her book.

00:53 – 00:58
So the content of the book and how women did become America’s safety net and what that means.

00:58 – 01:03
And so we’re spend the first 10 or so minutes of the interview talking about the actual content of the book.

01:04 – 01:15
But then we turn to where I think many listeners of this podcast are probably interested in, which is how do you go about doing qualitative research, qualitative data work?

01:15 – 01:18
How do you go about collecting that information?

01:18 – 01:21
How do you go about analyzing transcripts?

01:21 – 01:29
I mean, hundreds of transcripts, hundreds of interviews that Jessica and her team have conducted over the last three and a half, 4 years.

01:29 – 01:32
How do you go about disseminating that information?

01:32 – 01:38
How do you go about weaving it together with text in your book or your report or your brief or your blog post?

01:38 – 01:41
And then we talk a little bit about, yes, qualitative data visualization.

01:42 – 01:52
And we talk about ways in which she has worked with others, with her graduate students, with other colleagues to actually visualize and communicate qualitative data.

01:52 – 01:59
So if you are thinking about learning more about qualitative data work and analysis, I think this conversation could be one

01:59 – 02:03
of your starting places because Jessica is Jon to share a bunch of resources.

02:03 – 02:08
Of course, I have them linked in the show notes, but she’s going to share a bunch of resources and strategies and techniques

02:09 – 02:13
that she and her team use to collect this qualitative data.

02:13 – 02:19
And then she’s gonna talk about her methods of actually going through all of these transcripts to build out these stories

02:19 – 02:22
and then how she goes about weaving them together.

02:22 – 02:24
And in this case, weaving them together into her book.

02:24 – 02:31
So So I think you’re really Jon enjoy this episode if you are thinking about broadening your horizons into more qualitative data.

02:31 – 02:38
So here’s my conversation with University of Wisconsin Madison sociologist and author of the new book Holding It Together,

02:38 – 02:44
How Women Became America’s Safety Net, Jessica Killarney. Hi, Jessica. Great to meet you.

02:44 – 02:47
Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to meet you too.

02:47 – 02:53
I mean, I’m very excited to chat with you. First off, UW Madison.

02:53 – 02:59
So I’m an alum, so just got that, like, instant instant friendship because Badgers.

02:59 – 03:00
Absolutely.

03:00 – 03:03
And then, your new book, Holding It Together, which I have right here.

03:03 – 03:10
I also have the ebook version too, which I started reading, and then I was like, it’s really hard to, like, dog ear things

03:10 – 03:17
and, like, write even though the digital thing doesn’t work for me. So I like the paper one. So, so this was really fun.

03:17 – 03:19
And then your book on qualitative methods was really great.

03:19 – 03:22
So I’m I’m excited to talk with you all things qualitative.

03:23 – 03:29
So maybe we could start with, like, introductions, like, your background a little bit, and then we can we can talk about the book.

03:30 – 03:34
Sure. Sure. So I’m I’m a sociologist, at the at UW Madison.

03:34 – 03:41
Mostly I focus on inequalities in family life and education, with a particular emphasis on qualitative methods.

03:41 – 03:47
And, you know, in terms of ethnographic work with some of my earlier research, mostly on families and schools and more interview

03:47 – 03:50
based research with some of my newer projects, like, with this, with this new book.

03:51 – 03:58
That’s great. So okay. So I do wanna talk about methods, but I also want you to talk about the book itself, so the message of the book.

03:58 – 04:01
So why don’t you give folks, like, what are they gonna learn when they read this?

04:01 – 04:07
Yeah. So, essentially, the the core argument here is that that other countries have invested in social safety nets to protect

04:07 – 04:13
people from falling into poverty, you know, to give them a leg up and reaching opportunities, and and to make sure that people

04:13 – 04:17
have the time and energy to contribute to a shared project of care.

04:17 – 04:23
Whereas in the US, you know, billionaires and big corporations and their friends have decided that they don’t wanna pay for

04:23 – 04:25
those kinds of social safety net programs.

04:25 – 04:29
And so they’ve turned us into what I call a DIY society instead.

04:29 – 04:37
And the idea here is that people should be able to manage their own risks and responsibilities, you know, take care of themselves essentially without support from the government.

04:38 – 04:43
And the idea is that if they just make the right choices, if they just, you know, take the right steps, follow the right plan,

04:43 – 04:46
they shouldn’t need that kind of government support.

04:46 – 04:49
But the reality is that we we actually can’t DIY society.

04:50 – 04:56
Certainly, I think this breaks down most readily around caregiving in the sense that some people, children, elderly people,

04:56 – 04:59
people who are sick or disabled, often can’t take care of themselves, at least fully.

05:00 – 05:05
And also, some jobs don’t pay enough to actually allow people to support themselves on their own.

05:05 – 05:11
And so acknowledging those kinds of policy failures would destroy this illusion of a DIY society.

05:11 – 05:18
But the US is able to maintain that illusion by essentially relying on women to be this invisible glue that fills in the gaps

05:19 – 05:21
in our economy and the gaps in our social safety net.

05:21 – 05:30
So for example, women do almost 70% of the lowest wage jobs in the US economy, and those are disproportionately jobs in the caregiving sector.

05:30 – 05:32
Things like home health care and childcare.

05:32 – 05:38
And on top of that unpaid labor, women in the US are also doing almost twice as much underpaid labor.

05:38 – 05:42
Women are also doing almost twice as much unpaid labor as men are.

05:42 – 05:51
And that work is really crushing women, you know, multiply marginalized groups who often have nowhere to turn for support

05:51 – 05:57
in managing the kinds of challenges that they’ve been handed and nowhere to hide when others, you know, see them finding ways

05:57 – 06:00
to make it work and then asking them to do even more.

06:00 – 06:04
And yet I argue in this the second half of the book that, you know, we know what the problems are.

06:04 – 06:10
We know this is crushing us and and leaving us oftentimes worse off than our counterparts and other high income countries.

06:11 – 06:17
But we haven’t fixed these problems in part because the same billionaires and big corporations who brought us this DIY society

06:18 – 06:25
have also sold us a set of myths that are aimed at diluting us into believing that we don’t need a social safety net and also

06:25 – 06:32
at dividing us by race and class and gender and politics in ways that keep us from coming together across those differences

06:32 – 06:35
to really demand the net that that we all really desperately need.

06:35 – 06:44
Mhmm. What are your policy I don’t wanna say recommendations, but what are your, like, policy prescriptions to building out?

06:44 – 06:48
And I’m not gonna say building out the middle class because it’s really not the middle class that you’re focused on.

06:48 – 06:53
It’s really kind of, like, like, probably, like, at this point, like, 92% of the income distribution.

06:53 – 06:59
But, like, what are some of your policy prescriptions that you think would resolve some of the challenges you just mentioned?

06:59 – 07:05
And I tend to think about it in sort of 3 big buckets in the sense that we need policies first that allow all people to live with dignity.

07:05 – 07:10
And I think this will get us to kind of somewhere some of where we’re going later on in the conversation around empathy.

07:10 – 07:16
But I think we have this safety net right now that is built on the notion that you have to prove that you are deserving of

07:16 – 07:20
support, either by being so destitute that you just can’t possibly take care of yourself.

07:20 – 07:24
And if you are in that boat, there’s a lot of stigma and shame that comes with needing support.

07:25 – 07:31
Or by, you know, showing that you have worked really hard and so you deserve things like tax credits on your, you know, on

07:31 – 07:33
your home mortgages, you know, things like that. Right.

07:33 – 07:39
And so that notion of deservingness, if we flip the script and say, no, there are things that we all just basically need as

07:39 – 07:41
human beings, to have a life with dignity.

07:41 – 07:47
Things like affordable housing, things like sufficient, you know, healthy food, things like clean water, things like access to education.

07:48 – 07:53
That really should just be basic access for everyone, to be able to live a life with dignity.

07:53 – 07:55
So I think that’s one big bucket.

07:55 – 07:58
Another key piece here is about making sure that people have access to opportunities.

07:59 – 08:06
And this can mean things like support with caregiving, you know, childcare for families so that they do have the opportunity to engage in paid work.

08:06 – 08:12
Things like free college to make sure that people have access to those kinds of opportunities that can, you know, give them

08:12 – 08:16
access to different types of jobs in our society. Things along those lines.

08:16 – 08:23
And then the 3rd bucket is really about making sure that people have the time and energy and incentive to contribute to this shared project of care.

08:24 – 08:29
And this is where things like, you know, not only paid family leave, having time to, you know, take off to care for your families,

08:29 – 08:32
your loved ones, but also things like limits on paid work hours.

08:32 – 08:39
Things like the 4 day work week or 35 hour work week limits, that we’ve seen in other countries be very effective, in kind

08:39 – 08:46
of limiting the extent to which our paid jobs can take over our lives and meaning that there’s less pressure to invest more

08:46 – 08:52
time in paid work simply to be able to have the money that you need to have that level of security because you know that you

08:52 – 08:54
have your bases taken care of instead.

08:54 – 09:02
Do you think the policy challenges are primarily at the federal level, or are a lot of these or at least some of these at the local or the state level?

09:02 – 09:09
I mean, certainly, I think we’ve seen some states make inroads in terms of putting in place policies like, you you know, affordable

09:09 – 09:13
child care, things like universal pre k, things like even guaranteed paid family leave.

09:13 – 09:20
And so I think if anything, what we’ve seen is that this is possible to do at the state level, but it also drives larger inequalities

09:20 – 09:29
in the sense that the states that are putting in place these protections are often also the states where, other protections exist around, say, reproductive freedom.

09:29 – 09:37
And I talk in the book about how, attacks on reproductive freedom, whether through policy or through culture, operate to trap

09:37 – 09:43
women in these kinds of systems of exploitation, make it easier for them to, be pushed into precarious situations, which can

09:43 – 09:47
lead them to getting pulled into low low wage jobs, oftentimes low wage caregiving jobs.

09:47 – 09:54
And so I think what we’ve seen is that the the lack of response at the federal level has left it to the states in ways that

09:54 – 10:00
drive huge inequalities between women in different states in terms of both the the precarity that they face in terms of reproductive

10:00 – 10:05
freedom and also the kinds of, the lack of support that they get on the policy side as well.

10:05 – 10:14
Right. I wonder if you get pushback on the focus on women, in this book and and whether people are like, well, what about men?

10:15 – 10:21
You’ve mentioned a a lot of different factors that disproportionately affect women, and and you talk about in the book, but particularly women of color.

10:21 – 10:26
But, like, what is your response to that when someone says, well, what about men?

10:26 – 10:29
Yeah. Certainly. So I think there’s a couple things going on here.

10:29 – 10:32
And first, it’s about recognizing who is kind of disproportionately carrying the burden.

10:32 – 10:39
And this has to do with the fact that in this DIY society model, everyone who has a little bit of privilege has an interest

10:39 – 10:45
in helping themselves get further ahead by pushing any sort of risk and responsibility they face further downstream.

10:45 – 10:51
And so often that means men pushing risk and responsibility onto the women around them, you know, their wives, their mothers,

10:51 – 10:54
their girlfriends, you know, their daughters even in some cases.

10:55 – 11:01
And then for those women, the the choice is then between, do I carry that responsibility myself, or do I have enough privilege

11:01 – 11:08
to then push some of that risk and responsibility, some of that caregiving responsibility, for example, onto other women who

11:08 – 11:10
are in more vulnerable positions than my own?

11:10 – 11:16
And that’s part of how we get to a situation where for, you know, relatively affluent white women that the choice is between,

11:16 – 11:21
you know, do I it’s sort of a moral dilemma in the sense of, do I do this responsibility? Do I do this work myself?

11:22 – 11:23
Or do I push this Jon another woman?

11:23 – 11:30
Oftentimes, a woman of color, a low income woman who is struggling to make ends meet, but whose underpaid work allows me to,

11:30 – 11:33
you know, keep my job and compete with men in the workforce.

11:33 – 11:41
And so it’s sort of this, trickle down effect of of the way that we pass the buck care wise and risk wise in our in the in this kind of a DIY model.

11:41 – 11:47
And so that’s why I think the focus is on women in part because it allows us to see these dynamics in terms of both what privilege

11:47 – 11:54
can buy you in terms of outsourcing care and also what happens when you are in those multiply marginalized positions where

11:54 – 12:01
you often have no choice, but to to do the the unpaid caregiving work for your family and the underpaid work, that makes,

12:01 – 12:05
you know, paid work possible, for others, in your community as well.

12:05 – 12:12
Right. So we’ve been talking about 10 minutes on the content of the book, and probably most people who listen to this podcast are like, this isn’t about data.

12:12 – 12:13
What am I why am I listening to this?

12:13 – 12:16
So let’s let’s talk about the data part.

12:16 – 12:25
A lot of the folks that I talk to on the show are doing quantitative data work, But qualitative data is its own skill set,

12:25 – 12:28
its own challenges, both visually and also just going through the data.

12:28 – 12:32
And I wanna start with what you mentioned earlier on this concept of empathy. There are 2 quotes.

12:32 – 12:36
I’m gonna read them because there are 2 quotes in the book that really, like, I underline double underline.

12:37 – 12:43
There’s one where you say, if you believe that some people are simply lazy, that they will mooch off others without giving

12:43 – 12:48
back what they can, then it’s easy to oppose a more universal safety net, which you’ve you’ve already mentioned today.

12:48 – 12:56
And and the other one, an absence of empathy also pushes us toward a more punitive social safety net, one that disciplines people for needing government support.

12:56 – 13:01
And you’ve already talked about the lack of empathy in this DIY society and our policies.

13:02 – 13:10
But can you talk a little bit about, I guess, a sort of a 2 part question, the data you use for the book and how empathy comes

13:10 – 13:13
into play when you’re doing your interviews, when you’re doing your focus groups?

13:14 – 13:21
Yeah. So the data for the book come primarily from about 400 hours of interviews, that my team and Jon conducted with, families

13:21 – 13:26
that we’ve been following, families with young children that we started following back in 2018, when they were when one of

13:26 – 13:33
when, the the woman and the partner, they were all women who identified, for the study, when when when the woman partner was pregnant.

13:33 – 13:39
And so we started following them, asking them a whole extensive survey about their kind of parenting decisions that they planned

13:39 – 13:45
to make, and then followed those same women over time, checking in with them at 6 months 12 months 18 months postpartum.

13:45 – 13:51
And then we also did 3 waves of pandemic focused data collection with the moms and with their partners because we were still

13:51 – 13:57
in the field when the pandemic hit, and it just became so apparent so quickly through, the inter the follow-up interviews

13:57 – 14:02
that we did, you know, how much of an impact this was having on families with young kids.

14:02 – 14:09
And so we, we started by recruiting these moms in prenatal clinics, mostly in Indiana, and then followed them over time, though

14:09 – 14:13
some of them spread out over the course of the project with 250 families that we started with.

14:13 – 14:19
And then during the pandemic, in part because we wanted to see how is this, you know, very particular qualitative sample mapping

14:19 – 14:26
Jon larger patterns, I also fielded 2 national surveys, each with about 2,000 parents, from across the US, one through Ipsos

14:27 – 14:33
and one through Qualtrics, to kind of just get a sense of how, how the patterns were playing out on a larger scale, and kind

14:33 – 14:36
of use in the book, a mix of the 2 types of data.

14:36 – 14:36
Right.

14:36 – 14:43
In terms of the qualitative data, I mean, this to me, one of the the strengths I see in qualitative data is the idea that

14:43 – 14:48
you can elicit empathy in yourself as the researcher and in your reader.

14:48 – 14:55
And I talk about this in in qualitative literacy in my book with Mario Small, that it’s it’s cognitive empathy.

14:55 – 15:03
And and cognitive empathy is is different than, you can’t totally empathize with someone, oftentimes because their circumstances are very different from your own.

15:03 – 15:11
But it’s a way of being able to understand someone’s life in the way that they understand it themselves, to achieve that sense

15:11 – 15:19
of, kind of appreciation for the context of their lives, the decisions that they’re making, and to do so in a way that at

15:19 – 15:22
least acknowledges their perceptions, realities as they perceive them.

15:22 – 15:25
And so I think there’s there’s value in qualitative data, particularly in that it resonates with people differently than quantitative data.

15:25 – 15:29
That when you hear a story that does echo your own life, that’s

15:35 – 15:40
powerful in a way that simply seeing a data point that matches your beliefs, you know, doesn’t quite ring that same way.

15:40 – 15:46
And similarly, hearing the story of someone whose life might be very different from your own, but seeing it presented in a

15:46 – 15:55
way that offers a window into that experience and treats that person’s life as not as an oddity to be explored, but instead

15:55 – 16:01
as a rich and meaningful experience grounded in the context in which they live and the messages in which they’ve been exposed

16:01 – 16:07
to, that that kind of a portrait can help to inspire that cognitive empathy, for readers as well.

16:07 – 16:12
And that’s, you know, really my hope with the book is that this resonates with readers on a personal level and also helps

16:12 – 16:20
them to feel a stronger sense of empathy, toward people whom they might otherwise disagree with or be critical of, in their larger lives.

16:20 – 16:27
Right. So I think one of the critiques I I would say unfair critiques that people have of qualitative work is like, oh, you’ve

16:27 – 16:32
only talked to, you know, a small number. It’s not, you know, statistically representative.

16:32 – 16:39
And what you do, actually, I think, uniquely well in this book, I should note, is combine the quantitative data with the qualitative

16:39 – 16:44
data, which I think is kind of the most powerful way to sort of tell those stories.

16:44 – 16:49
But but when you hear people say that, oh, you know, you’ve you know, it’s not a representative sample.

16:50 – 16:55
You’ve, you know, you’ve spoken to 202 100 families, 200 moms, a 100 blah blah blah.

16:55 – 17:00
Like, how do you think about countering that argument?

17:00 – 17:05
Yeah. I mean, I think what I’m trying to what I what I typically argue in that sense is that the value of qualitative data

17:05 – 17:10
is not in telling you how common some pattern is, but in helping to explain where patterns come from.

17:10 – 17:18
It helps to reveal mechanisms to be able to trace processes, to link ideas together in ways that, simply just, you know, that

17:18 – 17:23
that large scale quantitative data are often not well equipped to do, especially if we’re talking about panel data where you

17:23 – 17:28
can look at associations, but you can’t necessarily say what the causal impact is of one factor on another.

17:28 – 17:33
Whereas if you are actually talking to people, if you are, you know, asking them questions, and especially if you’re following

17:33 – 17:39
them over time and seeing how things play out, that that’s a way to actually be able to understand, you know, what is what

17:39 – 17:45
is driving this particular decision that they’re making, or what is you know, how how is their life playing out in these particular ways?

17:45 – 17:50
And you can start to see those causal processes, those causal mechanisms in a way that quantitative data, especially kind

17:50 – 17:54
of, you know, panel survey type data, often isn’t similarly equipped to do.

17:54 – 18:02
And it can also, through the kind of careful analysis of qualitative data, looking at the use of the the way people use language,

18:02 – 18:08
the way people kind of, you know, even contradict themselves at times can reveal larger cultural structures.

18:08 – 18:14
You know, the way people think is often shaped by the kinds of, the kinds of ideas that we’re exposed to.

18:14 – 18:19
And we can see echoes of that in the way that people talk about themselves and narrate their lives and starting to see the

18:19 – 18:26
justifications that people use and how those kind of map Jon to larger you know, I do some qualitative content analysis in

18:26 – 18:31
the book too in terms of bringing in analyses of things like parenting books, you know, like kind of secular and religious

18:31 – 18:34
parenting books and the kinds of messages that these are teaching.

18:34 – 18:40
And when you can literally see echoes of the kinds of messages in these books in the way that parents are talking about raising

18:40 – 18:45
their children, you can start to see the emphasis of these kinds of media based messages, these kinds of, you know, cultural

18:45 – 18:49
ideas on the way that people understand and make decisions in their own lives.

18:49 – 18:54
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about your best practices.

18:55 – 18:59
I’ll use that term loosely, but best practices when it comes to conducting interviews.

18:59 – 19:03
Like, I think there are a lot of people who have I mean, well, I’ll just say for myself.

19:03 – 19:07
Like, I went through grad school as an economist, 0 qualitative methods training. Right?

19:07 – 19:11
Like, how to pick that up as I’m doing it at at the Urban Institute. Right?

19:11 – 19:17
Doing interviews, sort of learning from my colleagues who do this day in and day out and sort of picking out what are the what are the best practices.

19:17 – 19:24
But but for you, when you are talking to these families, when you’re talking to these moms, what are some of the things that

19:24 – 19:26
you are, you know, always trying to do?

19:26 – 19:28
What are some of the ways that you’re able to elicit these stories?

19:28 – 19:31
Like, what are those best practices for you and your team?

19:31 – 19:35
Yeah. So one of the things that I did with this project that I’m very grateful that we did in hindsight, in part because I

19:35 – 19:41
was doing the interviews with a with a team of graduate students, like, with varied levels of experience with collecting qualitative

19:41 – 19:44
data, was that we always did surveys before each wave of interviews.

19:44 – 19:52
And those surveys included fairly detailed, background questions as well as questions about the circumstances of of mothers’ lives and their partners’ lives.

19:52 – 19:58
And what that allowed me to do is set up essentially a flagging system, where we knew which mothers were facing the most difficult

19:58 – 20:07
circumstances, the ones who had, you know, whether that was economic hardship or difficult partner relationships or, physical trauma after birth, for example.

20:07 – 20:13
And what we did was we sort of triaged who was going to do each interview based on, you know, the level of difficulty that

20:13 – 20:16
that interview was going to likely, you know, involve.

20:16 – 20:21
And so I would do the kind of the most sensitive ones where I had a handful of other, you know, team members who had a lot

20:21 – 20:24
of experience in the field, do those.

20:24 – 20:29
Whereas graduate students who are relatively new to interviewing tended to do the interviews that were you know, we expected

20:29 – 20:33
would be relatively light in in terms of content in those kinds of ways.

20:33 – 20:40
And so that for me was, huge in terms of I mean, these were interviews that had a lot of trauma, and a lot of hardship and a lot of difficulty.

20:41 – 20:47
And so making sure that I was taking care of my team in addition to putting people in place that were highly experienced to

20:47 – 20:52
handle those more sensitive interviews, was really important in part because there’s there’s a risk when you’re conducting

20:53 – 20:55
interviews with people about sensitive parts of their lives.

20:56 – 21:02
New interviewers often shy away from hard things, whether that’s negative emotions, if someone breaks down in tears, if someone,

21:02 – 21:05
you know, starts to kind of sound like they’re tearing up.

21:05 – 21:09
It’s it’s very easy for new interviewers to just kind of quickly jump to the next question.

21:09 – 21:16
But that actually risks signaling to the person that you’re interviewing that your their emotions are too much for you as the researcher.

21:16 – 21:23
And so they will start to feel guilty, start to feel bad, or can start to feel bad about, you know, the negative emotions that they’re feeling in the moment.

21:23 – 21:29
And so being willing to kind of sit with someone in those hard moments the way that you would with a close friend or family

21:29 – 21:36
member, you know, getting comfortable with the negative parts, and also learning tools to, to to probe gently around those

21:36 – 21:42
kinds of difficult experiences, while also finding ways later on in the interview to circle back to more hopeful things, to

21:42 – 21:46
give people a chance to feel more empowered, to feel a stronger sense of agency.

21:46 – 21:51
So, like, I always like to end my interviews on thinking about, you know, hopes for the future or advice that people would

21:51 – 21:57
give to others, something that, especially if we’ve hit on a lot of difficult content, can give them a chance to to just feel

21:57 – 22:02
a little better, as we end things as opposed to kind of leaving things on a on a really difficult or dark note.

22:03 – 22:09
And, similarly, in terms of, you know, the actual interviews themselves, I think another key thing here is, a willingness

22:09 – 22:12
and an ability to to follow-up effectively, in interviews.

22:12 – 22:21
That this is one of the the keys in my view to achieving cognitive empathy, is the ability to notice when people are sort of leaving you bread crumbs.

22:21 – 22:24
And and kind of people will often you know, we do this in conversation.

22:24 – 22:29
We we drop hints at things where we’re like, I’m not sure if you wanna go there, but, like, this is something I’m thinking of. You know?

22:29 – 22:32
Like, this is what’s going on in the back of my mind.

22:32 – 22:38
And when we notice those things, it actually signals to our participants that we’re hearing them, that we’re listening carefully,

22:38 – 22:44
that we and that we’re willing to kind of follow that lead in ways that kind of sticking to a carefully prescribed interview

22:44 – 22:50
script, just signals that really we just care about getting the questions answered and not that we really care about understanding

22:50 – 22:52
their lives in the full context of their experiences.

22:52 – 22:58
And so I think that’s another place where learning to probe effectively, kind of following those bread crumbs, noticing things

22:58 – 23:04
where people have kind of mentioned things that seem unrelated, but oftentimes are alluding to bigger parts of their lives

23:04 – 23:07
that, that are maybe, maybe deeply significant.

23:07 – 23:13
I interviewed this one mom who kept mentioning kind of the time in her life when her and her husband first got together.

23:13 – 23:14
And so, eventually, I stopped and said, hey.

23:14 – 23:17
Can can you tell me about how you and your husband first got together?

23:17 – 23:22
And it turned turned out that he was actually married to someone else at the time and that they had an affair and that this,

23:22 – 23:26
and then he ended up breaking up with his previous wife, and this caused all kinds of chaos and turmoil.

23:26 – 23:32
And so kind of being willing to kind of follow that lead and talk to her and ask her questions about that thing that kind

23:32 – 23:39
of kept coming up, you know, was a way into understanding much better the kind of context and contours of her current life and circumstances as well.

23:39 – 23:44
Yeah. So it’s really interesting to hear you talk about that because it’s, like, it’s partly psychology. Right?

23:44 – 23:46
Like, the way you’ve you’ve described some of this.

23:46 – 23:53
So to follow these threads, I’m guessing have, have a script, had a set of questions that you come in with.

23:53 – 24:02
Do you find that you sacrifice some of those questions further down on your sheet when you follow some of these threads and

24:02 – 24:07
and you’re okay with that because you end up in a you you don’t have then the same set of answers from every person you’ve

24:07 – 24:10
interviewed, but you’re you’re maybe enriching the data in different ways?

24:10 – 24:17
Yeah. Exactly. So and then I think, certainly, there’s differences of opinion among qualitative researchers about how closely you should stick to the script.

24:17 – 24:22
I typically tend to have, you know, a handful of questions where these are the core topics that I wanna make sure that I cover.

24:22 – 24:25
And so and then I’ll have other things that if I have time, I wanna get to as well.

24:25 – 24:29
And so I’ll try to make sure that I’m at least getting at those core ideas.

24:29 – 24:35
But other than that, I tend to let things go pretty freely in part because I also know that, you know, with most of the studies

24:35 – 24:38
that I’m doing, I’ll have a chance to come back to and talk to these people again.

24:38 – 24:43
And so if there’s things that I don’t get to, that’s part of the beauty of longitudinal interviewing too, is that you can,

24:43 – 24:46
you know, fill in those gaps later if there are things that you don’t ask.

24:47 – 24:53
But I think there’s also value in in giving people a chance to tell their story in a holistic way, in a sense that it gives

24:53 – 25:01
often it leads often times to to what Mario and I talk about as as more palpable answers, answers that aren’t simply generalizations. You know?

25:01 – 25:08
Essentially, what we’re doing as the qualitative data analyst is generalizing from people’s experiences about, you know, larger phenomena in the world.

25:08 – 25:13
And if our questions ask people to generalize about their own lives, then, essentially, it’s we’re making generalizations

25:14 – 25:20
of generalizations, and we don’t necessarily get to the kind of we don’t see how people came to those generalizations, which

25:20 – 25:23
is really the beauty of qualitative data. And that you can say, okay.

25:23 – 25:25
Give me an an actual example of that.

25:25 – 25:31
Or, you know, tell me how that works in practice, in ways that or with ethnography, you know, seeing how that actually plays

25:31 – 25:37
out in practice, in ways that can help you to see not only how people generalize about their own lives, but also in terms

25:37 – 25:42
of the generalizations that we make, ground those as closely as possible in in lived realities.

25:42 – 25:49
Yeah. I have several questions for you, but, I wanted to ask be because you’re dealing with difficult questions, different

25:49 – 25:57
difficult circumstances, maybe trauma, What are the steps that you take for yourself and for your for your team?

25:57 – 26:03
Like, you know, coming out of some of these interviews that I’m sure are difficult for the interviewer as well as the interviewee.

26:03 – 26:08
Yeah. There’s a terrific book chapter, by, sociologist, Lacey Abrego, about what she calls accompaniment.

26:09 – 26:14
And I I have my students read that, you know, in the qualitative methods courses that I teach, and I have my students read

26:14 – 26:20
it when they’re working on Jon on an interview team with me, because it offers an important window into the kinds of negative

26:20 – 26:26
emotions that come up when you’re dealing with trauma or difficult subjects, both for the interview participant and for the interviewer.

26:26 – 26:31
And it talks about kind of the, the ways that you can help take care of your participants in interviews, but also, you know,

26:31 – 26:36
having someone to debrief with after interview you know, after conducting a difficult interview.

26:36 – 26:42
Having someone, you know, even if there’s some qualitative scholars who recommend, like, wearing different clothes to do interviews

26:42 – 26:47
than you would in your kind of day to day lives, because you can take those clothes off at the end of the interview, in a

26:47 – 26:52
way that can kind of put some mental distance between, you know, the the work that you’re doing as an interviewer and, you

26:52 – 26:54
know, the mental work of of the rest of your life.

26:54 – 26:57
And so I think there’s, you know, there’s there’s tools that we can use.

26:57 – 27:04
I think that’s, there’s a number of tools that we can use whether oftentimes psychological, to help ourselves navigate through those difficult moments.

27:04 – 27:09
And definitely, you know, having people to debrief with, I think, is one of the the the most important ones.

27:09 – 27:15
And even just spending time memoing and reflecting too on on difficult things that interviews might bring up for you, in your

27:15 – 27:17
own life and the process of conducting.

27:17 – 27:23
Right. Okay. So you have identified your interviewees in this book.

27:23 – 27:28
It sounded like it was it was starting at prenatal clinics and following folks through. You’ve done your interviews.

27:28 – 27:36
And so what are your what’s your process about navigating your way through all of those all that interview text?

27:36 – 27:42
Because I think this is the thing that people get overwhelmed about, especially who are not trained in these methods.

27:42 – 27:45
So, like, I’ve got even just 1 hour, I’ve got 1 hour of transcript.

27:45 – 27:47
How do I pull anything out of this?

27:47 – 27:49
So, like, what are your what are your methods for that?

27:49 – 27:54
Yeah. There’s a couple different strategies. Especially with this much data, it can be really hard to wrap your head around.

27:54 – 28:01
And so one of the things that we did, with the with the interviews was we had, interviewers actually fill out a post interviewer

28:01 – 28:06
survey, where they identified the key themes in the interview, illustrate you know, identified key quotes that might have

28:06 – 28:11
or key ideas that might have illustrated those themes, pointed to things that, like, what were the questions that we didn’t ask?

28:11 – 28:14
What were the things that, you know, what are the things we should follow-up on?

28:14 – 28:21
And so those survey responses for me, you know, then I can create a table out of those and kind of look through them and identify, okay, what are the major themes?

28:21 – 28:28
Or I can help to sort people into different categories and say, this person falls in this bucket. This person falls in that bucket.

28:28 – 28:35
And so, that’s another place where both the post interview survey data and the pre interview survey data become really important

28:35 – 28:39
for helping to sort of start to categorize people, in terms of their experiences.

28:39 – 28:44
And then once I have a sort of sense of, like, you know, who are the, you know, white evangelical Christian moms, for example,

28:44 – 28:48
or who are the moms who are stay at home moms versus the ones working for pay full time.

28:48 – 28:55
Once I can sort them into buckets, then depending on what I’m trying to do analysis wise, I can sort the interviews and then

28:55 – 29:03
read them in in groups, essentially, and look for there’s a, a terrific book by, Stefan Timmermans and Ido Data about, They

29:03 – 29:08
have a couple of books on abductive analysis, and their most recent one is a book about how to do abductive analysis.

29:08 – 29:14
And one of the things that they recommend that is a practice very similar to what I use in my own research is essentially

29:14 – 29:20
reading the data, especially kind of clustered sets of data, to identify things that are surprising or interesting in light

29:20 – 29:27
of what we already know and identifying index cases of those kind of surprising or interesting things and then comparing the rest of the data.

29:27 – 29:31
You know, say, like, maybe there’s a particularly interesting case of a stay at home mom.

29:31 – 29:36
I’m gonna kind of keep that case open on one side of my desktop, and I’m gonna compare it to all the other stay at home moms

29:36 – 29:40
and say, like, is is she illustrative of a larger pattern, or is she more of an outlier?

29:41 – 29:47
And start to kind of, create data matrices where I’m tracking what are these patterns, what’s interesting here, and then writing

29:47 – 29:52
memos that unpack, you know, what might be explaining this, what are the next things to, to unpack here.

29:52 – 29:56
I very rarely jump in with a dataset like this and just start sort of open coding.

29:56 – 30:00
It’s it’s too big, and it tends to get, you know, too overwhelming way too quickly.

30:00 – 30:06
Instead, if I use coding, it much more tends to be toward the end of a process where I’ve used memoing, used this kind of

30:06 – 30:12
index casing, to identify what I think is going Jon, having a theory of of kind of you know, this is what I think is makes

30:12 – 30:14
sense of this particular type of experience.

30:15 – 30:18
And then I’ll go through systematically and say, you know, does the data fit the theory or not?

30:18 – 30:24
You know, does each mother kind of or each partner, you know, follow this pattern or not? Where are the outliers?

30:24 – 30:25
You know, what might explain those outliers?

30:25 – 30:31
And so it’s a more strategic use of coding, as opposed to trying to jump in from the beginning with coding and doing a lot

30:31 – 30:34
more sort of memoing and theorizing, especially with, you know, the volume of data.

30:34 – 30:40
I also do a lot of kind of treating these interviews almost like life histories because we do follow them over time and writing

30:40 – 30:42
memos where I sort of synthesize and summarize.

30:42 – 30:44
You know, let’s, look at this mother’s experience over time.

30:44 – 30:47
How would I tell her story in a fairly condensed way?

30:47 – 30:52
And then using those sometimes to analyze instead of looking at the full set of transcripts too.

30:52 – 30:59
Right. And then when it comes to your process of writing, in particular, this book because what you don’t do in the book is

30:59 – 31:05
sort of, like, start with I mean, you do start in the introduction with sort of an an illustrative story, but, like, it’s

31:05 – 31:08
not like every chapter starts with a story, and then you go into your analysis. Right?

31:08 – 31:12
It’s like they’re it’s all kind of interwoven together, which is why it’s such a good read.

31:13 – 31:15
So how do you think about your writing?

31:15 – 31:20
Do you get to a point where you’re like, I need a story here, or are you like, what’s that process like for you?

31:20 – 31:22
Yeah. And then this was a book that I wrote in many, many drafts.

31:23 – 31:26
And so I think this is something that it’s it it didn’t come out onto the page this this way.

31:26 – 31:32
As, you know, very rarely does anything ever, come out exactly the way that it gets published. Yeah.

31:32 – 31:38
But this was a place where, and I think I I did a, an early draft of the book, like, a full draft of the book that I shared

31:38 – 31:42
with a group of, trusted sociologist friends who came out for a book workshop.

31:42 – 31:47
And so and they helped me sort of rework, you know, these are the core ideas that belong in the book, and here’s where you

31:47 – 31:52
could maybe reorganize some things to kind of interweave things better or, you know, change around the chapter orders.

31:52 – 31:58
And so this is another place where I think relying on, you know, trusted people to look at our work, and help us see, you

31:58 – 32:01
know, where might an example illustrate this better?

32:01 – 32:02
How might you bring in some stories?

32:03 – 32:08
At the same time, I think this is also a practice that I’ve I’ve honed a little bit through some op ed writing, and and more

32:08 – 32:15
public style writing because it is sort of, it it it’s closer to that model than a typical academic kind of model where you’re

32:15 – 32:19
often you know, maybe you lead with an example, then you go into some data, like, you know, some some, like, quantitative

32:19 – 32:22
data, then maybe bring in a personal anecdote.

32:22 – 32:24
There’s sort of ways to weave back and forth.

32:24 – 32:29
And so I think, practicing styles of writing other than just traditional academic stuff, is is useful

32:29 – 32:34
for me too. Yeah. Okay. So I don’t think there’s any I’m flipping through it.

32:34 – 32:35
I don’t think there’s any data in the book.

32:35 – 32:38
There’s a lot of data in the book, quantitative and qualitative.

32:38 – 32:45
But you’ve done obviously, you’ve you’ve published a lot, so I wanted to ask about qualitative dataviz in the in the work

32:45 – 32:47
that you’ve done where you have actually liked dataviz.

32:47 – 32:54
Now aside from word clouds, because we’re gonna avoid word clouds on the show, but, like, what what are some of your approaches

32:54 – 32:59
to trying to create visualizations out of all this qualitative data that you have?

32:59 – 33:07
Yeah. So I have a paper that I published with one of my, graduate students, Monica Heilman, that is, published in visualization studies. She’s a trained visual artist.

33:07 – 33:12
And so we worked with the the pandemic data in particular, especially the early waves of the pandemic data.

33:12 – 33:14
I’ve never had a response like that.

33:14 – 33:16
We we did 65 interviews in 4 weeks.

33:16 – 33:20
Like, basically, it was it was just a, a bonkers level of data collection.

33:20 – 33:26
But, I think there were a lot of moms who felt very isolated and overwhelmed in those early this was April May of 2020 and

33:26 – 33:30
just kind of feeling completely overwhelmed by pandemic parenting.

33:30 – 33:35
And and so one of the things that Monica and I did with those data was to synthesize and summarize, you know, what are the

33:35 – 33:37
key themes, the key challenges that mothers are facing?

33:37 – 33:43
And then she created visual representations, illustrations, pen and ink illustrations of those kinds of challenges.

33:43 – 33:48
Things like, know, the the feeling of sort of identity loss around, you know, not being able to connect to paid work, the

33:48 – 33:54
feeling of sort of claustrophobia, around being at home with your partner and your kids and trying to do paid work at the

33:54 – 33:58
same time, the sense of loss of community that came from from COVID restrictions.

33:58 – 34:01
And so we illustrated those, and we kind of worked back and forth on drafts of them.

34:01 – 34:05
And then she kind of penned the final versions that went into the piece.

34:05 – 34:10
And for us, that was and we’ve we’ve shared that with a number of people, and and they found it a sort of really powerful

34:10 – 34:16
representation of the kinds of challenges that that mothers in particular were were facing during those early pandemic weeks months.

34:16 – 34:22
And so I think that was, you know, one of the ways that we tried to, to visually capture, these kinds of data.

34:22 – 34:29
And, certainly, you can’t capture everyone’s experience, but having a sort of collection of images, that tried to capture

34:29 – 34:35
sort of what were the the varied types of challenges that mothers were facing, during this time was was one of the things we tried to do there.

34:35 – 34:40
And then other ways I mean, I think the other place where, thinking about visual representation comes up for me is often in

34:40 – 34:46
presenting data, you know, in in the sense that, you know, if I’m standing up in front of an audience or or talking about

34:46 – 34:53
my book, you know, I could put quotes up on the slide, but I don’t like to do that because I feel like it, you know, the audience

34:53 – 34:56
is going to read those quotes faster than I can read them aloud.

34:56 – 35:03
And it also, I think, takes away from my ability to almost perform the quotes with emphasis, with meaning, with kind of, the

35:03 – 35:05
way that you would kind of act them out.

35:05 – 35:11
And so I think saving the quotes and putting up, you know, illustrative images, you know, of people who maybe it’s, you know,

35:11 – 35:17
not typically, it’s not the people who are actual participants, but finding images that either represent, aspects of what

35:17 – 35:24
they’re saying, you know, graphic type, you know, icon type images or things like, you know, sometimes photos of people, that

35:24 – 35:31
represent aspects of their lives or aspects of their identities, that can give people a sense of the person behind the quote,

35:31 – 35:37
or a sense of the experience behind it, even if they’re, not from the actual data itself.

35:37 – 35:49
Yeah. I wonder about that because I’ve suggested this to folks and a lot of, I don’t know, a lot, yanny, folks who do qualitative work, they hesitate on that part.

35:49 – 35:52
Because like you said, you don’t usually have pictures of the people you’ve interviewed.

35:54 – 36:00
But to, you know, if you’re doing a study on behavior amongst some group and you get a picture of people who look like that

36:00 – 36:09
group from, you know, Unsplash or from Istock or Getty and you put it up, I think I think some people hesitate to put up an

36:09 – 36:12
image that’s not from that specific person.

36:12 – 36:17
And I wonder I have my own view on that, but I wanna I wanna get your take on

36:17 – 36:24
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s certainly, I think it’s certainly an imperfect science in that sense. And and there are certainly hesitations.

36:24 – 36:29
I typically do add a disclaimer disclaimer at the bottom of slides that says, like, these pictures do not represent the actual

36:29 – 36:31
people that were that were that were participants in the interviews.

36:32 – 36:41
I think at the same time, I’m I’m hesitant to use photography in my own work even if some IRBs would allow that in part because I’m often doing work with families.

36:41 – 36:46
And so even if, you know, mom and dad consent to be part of the interview, you know, is it okay if kids you know, would they Jon?

36:47 – 36:53
And so I think it’s just too easy to link people together in ways that I I tend to Jon the side of, you know, not disclosing in those kinds of ways.

36:53 – 37:01
And so because of that, at the same time, I think there is something about, seeing images of people that can help us to kind

37:01 – 37:07
of get into that empathy mindset, or put our, you know, listeners or our readers into that empathy mindset in a way that,

37:07 – 37:11
might not be possible, with without, that kind of imagery in the background.

37:11 – 37:16
And so I think, certainly, you can do things with, you know, icon type imagery that illustrates ideas.

37:16 – 37:21
But oftentimes, people, especially people expressing types of emotion, And so I’ll often use them in that way.

37:21 – 37:27
If I can find a picture of someone who kind of, like, illustrates the kind of the kind of frustration or the kind of elation

37:27 – 37:33
or the kind of sadness that someone’s experiencing, that those kinds of emotionally evocative images are are the ones that

37:33 – 37:40
I tend to gravitate toward, as as, helping to to show, the feeling behind the quote, as well.

37:40 – 37:47
Right. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. So Holding It Together, How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Love the book.

37:48 – 37:51
If folks have questions for you, they wanna invite you to talk.

37:51 – 37:59
They wanna invite you to come give a full day qualitative methods training because you don’t have anything else going on, right, with research and students.

38:00 – 38:02
Where should folks reach out to you to find you?

38:02 – 38:04
Sure. So you can find me on my website at jessicacalarco.com.

38:06 – 38:08
Great. Okay. So folks should check it out.

38:08 – 38:11
You should definitely check out the book, Holding It Together. It is Calarco.

38:11 – 38:14
Jessica, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

38:14 – 38:19
And, good luck with what I’m sure is a long, long book tour across many universities.

38:19 – 38:21
So, so thanks for coming on the show.

38:21 – 38:23
Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciated the conversation.

38:25 – 38:28
Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that.

38:28 – 38:34
I hope you will check out Jessica’s new book, Holding It Together, How Women Became America’s Safety Net.

38:34 – 38:42
And I also hope that you will take just a moment out of your day to rate or review this show wherever you listen to your podcast,

38:42 – 38:47
be it Spotify, iTunes, on my website, on YouTube, wherever you get it.

38:47 – 38:48
I hope you’ll just take a moment.

38:49 – 38:57
It really does help me expand the reach of the audience, which in turn helps me find more and more guests to bring you great

38:57 – 39:00
content to help you be a more effective data communicator.

39:00 – 39:05
So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.