From Ethnography to Items

Abstract

As part of a sequential exploratory mixed methods study, 9 months of ethnographically guided observations and interviews were used to develop a survey examining graduate engineering student retention. Findings from the ethnographic fieldwork yielded several themes, including international diversity, research group organization and climate, perception of value, and individual and group learning. In this article, the authors present the final themes from the ethnographic analysis and discuss how these data were configured into constructs and survey questions. The authors discuss the final survey, including validity and reliability analysis, and how constructs were developed to test hypotheses for future studies. The article concludes with implications for mixed methods researchers interested in using qualitative methods to create new surveys.