Page 48 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Moving between places
nomad before our respondents did. Once they had used the term, we asked what they mean by the term. The semi-structured nature of our interviews further allowed us to tailor the interview if other interesting topics emerged. We interviewed different people in each phase of the research, and our interview guide evolved throughout our study.
Besides interviews, we also found it essential for our understanding and in accordance with inductive methods of the phenomenon to immerse ourselves in the field (Eisenhardt, 1989). We did so by conducting observations in ten co-working spaces internationally (Amsterdam, Berlin, Canggu, and Ubud), visiting a two-day practitioner's conference about (and organized by) digital nomads as well as embarking on a two-week field visit to two digital nomad hotspots in Southeast Asia (Canggu and Ubud). These additional data sources complemented the interview data because (a) people tend to forget to articulate many of their daily routine actions (in interviews) due to the recall effect (Golden, 1992), (b) people tend to construct a coherent self-narrative after the fact (Fachin & Davel, 2015). By observing their actions directly in the field with our participants, we reduced both biases. The field visits permitted us to develop a better understanding of the interactions of the nomadic workers with their material environment.
We took an 'observer as participant' perspective and developed informative relationships with our respondents as well as experiencing different places for work ourselves. A challenge of our ‘observer as participant’ status was the need to inform digital nomads about us being researchers. This did not lead to exclusion but rather to heightened interest, and we tried to divert this in order not to become an active participant and influence our respondents. As researchers, we sometimes took a moment to walk away from being in the field and allow our reflections on the observations and conversations, which may have led to missing relevant interactions or events.
2.3.2 Data analysis
We integrated the verbatim transcribed interviews, and in-depth 46