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Contents
Methods
We interviewed 14 technical communicators in New Zealand and 5 in Australia over the course of a few weeks via Zoom during the Spring 2021 semester as a class of undergraduate technical communication majors and minors. We called for interviewees via social media and snowball sampling based on an initial interviewee, who had contacted the principal investigator, our instructor, a year earlier to talk about prior research. That initial interviewee shared an electronic flier we made calling for participants and helped us to locate organizations that would also help to share the flier with their members. After gathering a list of people who responded to our flier and who were interested in being interviewed as part of our project, we divided them up among the eight students in our class.
To prepare for the interviews, we completed CITI training and read some sixty-four articles in the literature about Australia and New Zealand and about international TPC in general. The articles relevant to framing our research have been cited in this article. We also obtained IRB approval from our institution. We then contacted each technical communicator to set up an interview and give them a consent form. Due to the differences in location and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we reached out through email and held the interviews via Zoom. Before conducting the interviews, as a class we formulated a series of questions for semi-structured interviews. We gathered demographic data, such as age, ethnicity, gender, occupation, and years of experience. The rest of the questions pertinent to this article follow.
- What is your education/training?
- How did you get into the field of technical communication?
- What does it mean to be a technical writer/communicator?
- How do you talk about yourself as a technical communicator?
- What ethical considerations inform your work?
- What positive change have you made or do you try to make (at work or in the larger community)?
- What constraints do you face in enacting such changes?
- How are these types of contributions valued (or not)?
Each interview was then transcribed by the student researcher who conducted the interview and collaborated into a mutual document available to all of the student researchers. As a group, we coded according to the following themes, which emerged after discussing the interview data as a class over the course of several weeks.
- Value
- Innovation
- Work techniques
- Community
- Ethics
- Inclusivity
- Power
- Adaptation
After coding for these themes, we composed reflective analytical memos by first revisiting the transcribed interviews and making notes in the margins of our electronic documents (Hesse-Biber, 2007) that we used to develop initial analyses of our findings. We then coded the interviews again, this time narrowing down our article to focus on what emerged from these themes as most prominent in the transcripts. This was an iterative process that produced the following themes represented in the findings of this article listed here:
- Ethics
- Adaptation
- Value
- Community
- Work techniques
Student researchers spent several weeks writing about the coded data and revising those writings about the data into this article. We sometimes worked in pairs and other times in groups, taking turns writing different sections of this article. We spoke with each other and our instructor about how to shape this article and about what the findings mean. That work is represented in the next few sections. All names of participants are pseudonyms.
There are limitations to this study. We are undergraduate researchers from the United States who conducted all interviews via Zoom or telephone; we did not get to visit the workplace sites of these participants or their home countries because of COVID-19 restrictions and issues of time and money. As outsiders, we inevitably bring a different view to the research and the way we interpret the findings. Future studies in New Zealand and Australia will require travel to the countries and workplaces of participants and the inclusion of interviewees in interpreting the data.