In spring 2023 we conducted a series of interviews with the aim of finding out a bit more about how we understand this thing we call ‘The GFSC Collective’, and what its members want from being a part of it. These interviews were conducted with 14 current ‘members’ of the collective — both studio staff, and wider collective members. We conducted the interviews in pairs, with each person documenting their interview partner’s responses — and we intentionally paired up people who most likely would not have met before. We were keen for these interviews to provide a chance for everyone to air their thoughts, ambitions, ideas, concerns, and anything else collective related, and we hope that this format, and the questions provided, offered a safe space in which to do so.
The questions we asked were:
Why did you come in to the GFSC community?
What do you hope to get from being here?
What do you need to be here?
What current projects would you like to work on?
What things would you like to work on that we are not currently thinking about?
What would you like to be paid for, and/or is there anything we can do to help professionally?
Once all interviews had been completed, we carried out a quantitative data analysis process known as ‘coding’ — not to be confused with the other kind of coding! In this process, each sentence of each interview is analysed methodically, and any emerging themes are pulled out, with that quote and others which emerge around that theme listed underneath them. Many quotes appear in multiple places, and pretty much everything someone says in an interview will find a way into this coding process one way or another.
During this process, many expected themes will emerge, but if the process is being done well, new ideas will also often appear as well, that the person carrying out the coding may not have expected.
All interviews are anonymised and equal weight is given to every interviewee, though with this particular data set this was somewhat more challenging. These interviews were recorded by a number of different people, with a number of different note taking styles, rather than as direct transcripts (which are the gold standard for this practice, but which would have been too time consuming to create). This means that, while all interviews were around 15 minutes long, some have extensive notes, while others are far lighter.
Nonetheless, I hope that most people will read this report (and the accompanying coding document if they are interested: https://www.notion.so/gfsc/1-1-collective-interviews-analysis-75d61a0e8ce542cbb9ceb635c417474f?pvs=4) and feel that the findings which have emerged resonate with them.
The answers to the first two questions ‘why did you come here’ and ‘what did you hope to get’ tended to merge substantially.
The core areas were:
People are seeking out connection and friendship. A few people were also interested in ‘networking’ connections — to further their work or professional practice, but the vast majority of people framed it first and foremost as a desire for friendship. (There are of course much bigger and more complex conversations to have about how we define ‘community’, but that probably falls outside the remit of this report).
Many people, further on in the interviews, expressed a strong desire to meet more people ‘face to face’ (i.e. in video calls, like our monthly collective meetings) and even, where possible, in person. This was expressed with sufficient frequency and sufficient enthusiasm that it certainly feels like a key theme.