The actual process of conducting the interviews took place over the course of about two months and involved traveling to locations all over the Central Valley. The interviews themselves were semi-structured and lasted anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours. Most interviews were conducted as focus groups comprised of 2 to 5 individuals. Where it was not possible to gather participants in one central location at one time, we conducted multiple consecutive one-on-one interviews. Of all the focus groups, half were sessions in which people from the same organization participated, while the interviews in two drew together people from different organizations working on the same issue. The remaining interview used geographic region rather than organization or issue as a common linking thread between participants.
Interview settings varied widely. In Earlimart and Visalia we met largely in participants’ homes, while the Fresno and Sacramento interviews took place in the conference rooms of agency offices. Chico and Allensworth fell somewhere in between; in Chico we met at the office of one of the participants’ organizations and in Allensworth at the local community center.
Altogether, we talked with a total of 22 individuals. All interviews were recorded and afterwards transcribed, a process that served as a first step in producing the analysis that follows. After transcription, each interview was read and different sections were coded thematically. Coding is a method of organizing in which the text of the interview, which often covers an array of topics, can be separated into thematic "chunks" of particular content. While reading through the interview, each chunk is assigned a heading or label (e.g., “barriers to working with universities” or “relationship to EJ framework”). Once the interviews from all six sites were coded, the content of the interviews was reorganized by theme. Creating a rough outline based on our three areas of interest, coded interviews were then reviewed once more. This time, thematic content was oriented according to where it belonged in the outline. As the process continued, the outline became increasingly complex and detailed, incorporating more and more of the themes and ideas expressed in the interviews. When all of the interviews had been reviewed, the result was a detailed outline that was then reworked into a more linear, logical narrative. Finally, the narrative was reviewed, and the most salient themes and patterns were identified. These are summarized in the concluding section of the analysis.