TPC Journal V8, Issue 4- FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 4 359 Subjectivity statement. On the one hand, the first author lacked personal gang awareness and was sensitive to the participants’ lack of knowledge (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). On the other hand, she had observed disruptive incidents created by gang members in her schools and was conflicted about how to deal with gang members as a professional. This led to a preliminary literature review that suggested ideas about how PSCs may serve gang members in their schools via both responsive services and core curriculum responses. The potential biases were role ambiguity and professional development. These biases were addressed during the data collection and analysis through the use of a journal to record immediate reactions to completed interviews. Reflectivity during data collection is a valuable tool and is “considered essential to the research process” (Corbin & Strauss, 2008, p. 31). A journal housed field notes after each interview regarding participants’ body language, physical environment, and interviewer’s immediate thoughts and impressions. Journaling allowed for the constant comparison of data, looking for more data, and initial coding of collected data (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Procedure Data collection. Established university research policies for the protection of human subjects and the research policies of the school district were followed in order to gain access to schools and participants. After receiving institutional review board approval from the first author’s affiliated university and the school district’s research department, data collection was completed via interviewing participants, journaling, and reviewing documents. The primary source of data was individual semi-structured interviews using an open-ended questions approach and an interview guide (Patton, 2002). Observations of the school setting, participants, and reflections of each interview were noted by the first author/researcher in her journal (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). In addition to journaling, policy manuals and public relations documents were accessed from the school district’s website for the triangulation process (Patton, 2002). The school district’s documents informed the researcher of existing procedures and policies and potential access to related training opportunities. Participants were provided the interview questions in the moments immediately preceding the beginning of the interviews, giving them the opportunity to view questions and consider answers or emerging thoughts as needed. They were offered an opportunity to answer all questions. In order to enhance the analysis of the role of the PSC, interviews were conducted with SLs and PSCs working at the same schools. The interviews were conducted at the jobsites of the PSCs and SLs or at mutually agreeable locations. A digital voice recorder was used to record all interviews. Data analysis. The recorded interviews were played and reviewed immediately after face-to-face interviews, allowing for constant comparisons (Schwandt, 2001). Each individual audio-recorded interview was transcribed by a professional transcriptionist. Following transcription, the interviews were read twice by the first author before themes were highlighted and noted in the margins. Interview data were individually read for all PSCs with themes noted in the margins. Then, interview data were individually read for all SLs with themes noted in the journal. Finally, interview data were reviewed for each PSC and their corresponding SL with themes of each pairing noted by the researcher. Hand- coding was used to analyze data gathered from transcribed interviews with a focus on capturing essential concepts (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). The process of hand-coding involved deriving codes and the emerging themes to be organized into discrete categories leading to theory development (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). In the first or open coding stage, large general conceptual domains were identified in the reflective journal. Then, the researcher searched for relationships among the domains during the