Coming to and becoming through

In less than an hour's time, I'll begin the last of the scheduled interviews for this project. While I anticipate scheduling still more (or at least a few more) interviews over the summer and fall, today marks the end of intense eleven week stretch of interview time—time that I was fortunate enough to spend with people willing to share with me their memories of, and experiences with, baking/cooking.  

Yesterday afternoon I interviewed the 100^th interview participant in this study. [Note: To date 113 people have participated in the study but some opted to fill out the questionnaire on their own time instead of sitting for an interview.] At the end of our time together he said something along the lines of, “I hope I had something different or new to offer—and that you hadn’t already hit a saturation point of hearing a lot of sameness of/in experience.” And the really amazing thing is that with regard to hitting a saturation point, well, I have not.

I can remember many weeks, particularly at the start of a week, wondering if maybe I should have ended sooner, capped things sooner, that surely what I’d be learning or hearing this week and the next and the next would only be minor variations on things I’d already heard before. And there certainly were common themes or responses. (At the start of most of the interviews, for instance, I’d ask people to complete three sentences, offering the word or words that first come to mind: Cooking for me is _______; baking for me is ________, and food for me is _____. By far, the most common responses to the last question was either “complicated” or “life.”  For the other two questions, common responses might be “therapeutic,” “joy,” “fun,” “a way of showing love,” “not something I enjoy,” “creative,” or, especially with baking, “precision.” But then, with my 100^th interview participant, a response I’d not heard before, and one that made me laugh: “Baking for me is a television show.”)

So I was often surprised at the end of each week (and thankful, after all, that I’d not capped things earlier) to find myself often, if not always, learning (hearing?) new things—something that, in turn, helped me (and continues to help me) to complicate, recast, and ultimately reconsider what I’d learned/heard in the previous weeks of interviews.

This is surprising. . .yet then again, not at all. Definitions of (or senses of, attitudes toward, etc.) baking and/or cooking are different, people are different, and so it stands to reason that they ways one comes to and becomes through one’s baking and cooking experiences would also be markedly different. And as a researcher/listener, I was constantly changing. At the end of each interview I was different—what I knew was different and, as a result, what I could think to ask and where, specifically, I wanted to linger was different. While the interview questions themselves stayed more or less the same over time, the order in which questions (as well as follow-up questions) were asked and, with this, the way stories would unfold, where that unfolding would take us, differed a lot depending on the participant. So that there was more difference than I anticipated is surprising. Yet not.   

I struggle with what to do now—how to begin the 12^th week—since I can no longer count on the interview schedule to tell me where to be, when to be there, and, generally speaking, how to be. So much of my sabbatical was spent not having to decide how best to use my days. While there were certainly days when the very last thing my body wanted to do was to sit in front of a computer for most of the day (shout out to Aleve for helping me through most days), it was nice not having to think about what I should do with my day or what I should be doing instead with my day. For the past eleven weeks, I always felt like I was spending my time in the best and wisest way.