Analyzing the Interviews

The research design is a multiple-case study in which the cases are treated as a series of independent experiments that confirm or disconfirm conceptual insights. Since my objective was to generate rather than to test theory, I designed the study in an open-ended fashion to allow unplanned themes to emerge from the data.

The analysis of the interviews followed an inductive grounded theory development process.^[11] In the early stages of interviewing and analyzing interview transcripts, I searched the data for categories that reflected similarities across participants on types of career-change trajectories. Three rough categories of career-change strategies emerged almost immediately: 1) growing a side project; 2) generating job offers or temporary assignments by talking to headhunters and canvassing old friends and coworkers; and 3) taking a sabbatical or time-out from full-time work, usually to go back to school or take courses. As these categories emerged, I used the theoretical sampling approach to make sure I had enough examples of each type to afford comparison.

In the next stage of the data collection and analysis, I used an iterative process of moving back and forth between the data; the relevant literature in psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior; and my emerging concepts to begin to develop more abstract conceptual categories. Following the methods described by Robert Sutton and Kathleen Eisenhardt, I compared my emerging conceptual model; data from the study; and the literature on identity, career adaptation, and professional socialization to guide decisions about what other kinds of people to interview and what other themes to develop.^[12] Along the way, new case studies raised fresh questions; new rounds of comparing and contrasting the case studies sharpened and differentiated the contours of the conceptual categories. As new concepts or categories emerged, either from the literature or the data, I searched the other to find evidence for the theme or to refine it conceptually.

The result is a conception of working identity as both noun and verb: a set of self-conceptions in transition that people work and rework like “working drafts” for whom they might become. In practice, they elaborate, revise, and update these possibilities, allowing them to grow in contour and detail until a fully grounded new working identity emerges.