The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 40, No. 2 & Volume 41, No. 1 - 197

Spiritual Exchange

ate and undergraduate student participants.
The interviews were guided by a semi-structured protocol developed by the authors, and
the questions were answered by both partners
in the dyad. The ﬁrst interview focused on the
role of religion and spirituality in participants'
lives and stories about the development and
signiﬁcance of their worldviews. In that interview, the graduate-undergraduate dyads responded to general questions that were asked
of all participants (e.g., "How would you describe your worldview?" "Who has inﬂuenced
your worldview through your life?" and "What
difﬁcult experiences have you had in relation to
your worldview?") as well as unique questions
that surfaced organically in each conversation.
At the end of the interview, participants were
asked to take 10 photographs with a digital
camera to capture what their worldview means
to them. In the second interview, each member
of the dyad shared the pictures and relayed
their meaning and also asked questions about
and commented on the partner's pictures. The
dyads also discussed how the process of exchanging spiritual experiences and stories will
inform future interactions with people who
hold different worldviews. Prior to the third
meeting, the research team emailed each undergraduate participant the graduate student
researcher's interim research text depicting
the ﬁrst two interviews in a co-constructed narrative. The third meeting served as a member
check, when the undergraduate partners had
an opportunity to respond to the analysis. Each
interview lasted between one and two hours
and took place in private, quiet spaces. With
the permission of the undergraduates, the
research team audio-recorded the interviews
and generated verbatim transcripts and ﬁeld

notes. To protect participants' conﬁdentiality,
pseudonyms were used in all transcripts and
ﬁeld notes.
The exchanges were analyzed dialogically
(Riessman, 2008) to illuminate distinctive approaches to dialogue across difference. Within
dialogic analysis, language is not just studied
for "'what' is spoken and 'how,' the dialogic/
performance approach asks 'who' an utterance
may be directed to, 'when,' and 'why'" (Riessman, 2008, p. 105). The data collection yielded
an array of ﬁeld texts, including interview transcripts, ﬁeld notes, photographs, and graduate
student autobiographies, and these sources
served as the basis of interim research texts
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) that explored
the undergraduates' narratives in conjunction with the graduate students' narratives.
To generate the interim research texts using a
dialogic framework, the interim research texts
attended to context, interaction, and participants' interpretation of the exchanges (Riessman, 2008). Each transcript was analyzed by
the researcher who took part in the exchange
and also by another member of the research
team. Through an iterative process, including
group reﬂection, all interim texts were integrated and synthesized to highlight core ﬁndings of the study.

Trustworthiness
Throughout the study, the graduate student
participants attempted to clarify their own experiences through journaling and collective reﬂection to enhance the trustworthiness of our
interpretation of the ﬁndings. In addition, they
conducted member checks (Merriam, 2009)
by sharing the interim research texts with the
undergraduate participants and discussing the

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 40, No. 2 & Volume 41, No. 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 40, No. 2 & Volume 41, No. 1