Where do I find the data to construct personas, and how do I build them?

Introduction

So, you've decided that personas can help your curriculum development efforts by instilling empathy in the design process. You want to give marginalized groups a voice as you build your instructional media with the goal of creating an inclusive classroom environment. Now, you just need to figure out how to do it! This blog entry will point you in the right direction.

Finding Data

The first place to look for the information you need is within your own organization. Various references discuss "market research reports and interviews with product support specialists and other subject matter experts"(1) as a source for persona data. In the academic world, these sources correlate to demographic data, such as the diverse makeup of previous classes and the disclosures listed across applications for incoming students, as well as professors who are versed in diverse cultural frameworks—you likely already have teachers who are experts in subjects ranging from Feminist studies to African American literature to Islamic studies. You may also have professors who are experts in Anthropology. Inviting these subject matter experts into your design room, and making your curriculum design a multidisciplinary endeavor, will aid the design process because these educators have helpful knowledge.

Qualitative research can provide valuable information about diverse individuals. "Qualitative data is perhaps the most useful type of information for creating 'full' personas that seem like real people . . . such elements include work and home context, motivation, goals, and fears" (2). Methods for obtaining such data include focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires with open-ended questions. Qualitative research provides a baseline of information that you can expand upon or validate with quantitative research.

Quantitative research incorporates surveys, questionnaires, and interviews with closed-ended questions, and data analysis. Data analysis can include comparing standardized test results across different subjects to find patterns based on demographics, which might inform designers on areas that require specialized attention. "Quantitative data usually comes from large numbers of users collected via a method that promotes both efficiency and rigor"(3). Collecting this quantitative data representing large numbers of people is an important part of persona design. For example, an interview with a focus group of English Learners (ELs) might reveal that they faced challenges across a broad range of subjects—including math, but that wouldn't necessarily mean that your persona representing an EL student should have a harder time with mathematics. However, those qualitative insights gained from your focus group might lead you to pursue quantitative data, such as that shown in Figure 1 (below). 

Figure 1. U.S. Department of Education information reflected reading achievement levels for English Learners and non-English Learners (Native Speakers). Note: While the information reflected here may be dated, when paired with qualitative data obtained from current students, it provides a justification for this information as a metric in persona creation.

Learning that EL students score significantly lower in reading in fourth grade, and often fail to close the gap in later years, and learning from the same study that "gaps for mathematic achievement are very similar in both the degree of the difference in scores as well as the pattern of increase with additional schooling" (4) provides a justification for building a persona with reading and math skills that are below those of students whose primary language is English. The persona then represents all students who have similar challenges, so that curriculum can be designed with a goal of helping them to close the identified learning gap. Qualitative data is most useful when it represents large bodies of information, and sources outside your organization offer datasets that represent entire populations.

In addition to direct interviews, surveys, focus groups, and questionnaires with individuals you find locally, there are organizations whose purpose is to collect information that can be useful to you in your quest to build personas that represent your diverse students. Here are some resources that will prove useful (text retrieved from the "About" section of each site:

• ICPSR is an international consortium of more than 810 academic institutions and research organizations. ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community.

• Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It does not take policy positions. The Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data-driven research. Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder.

• Statista is a global data and business intelligence platform with an extensive collection of statistics, reports, and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries.

• The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary statistical agency of the U.S. Department of Education. It is one of thirteen principal federal statistical agencies1 whose activities are predominantly focused on the collection, compilation, processing, or analysis of information for statistical purposes.

The sites referenced above offer a wealth of statistical data, and there are too many sources to begin to list them all in this blog. The key takeaway is that the information you need to build realistic personas is available from a combination of internal and external sources.

Building and Using Personas

Now that you know how to find the information you need to build personas, you're probably trying to decide who's going to create them. There are companies that specialize in persona creation, such as Buyer Persona Institute and Mnemonic AI, that promise to build personas with varying degrees of complexity. However, these organizations and others like them are built around marketing. Marketing companies may be willing to leverage their expertise to build learner personas that can benefit curriculum development rather than selling products, but there are persona development tools that educators can use to craft their own persona databases. For efficiency, an institution might build a multidisciplinary team whose purpose is to craft personas for use in multiple courses. After the personas are created, an assigned advocate would represent them in the curriculum design process. This advocate might be a staff member, or it might be a graduate student; the key is that the representative studies the persona's frameworks to understand their limiting constraints enough to voice concerns on their behalf. Once these processes are in place and persona builders are identified, the next step is to craft the personas.

In the interest of conciseness, I won't restate in detail the instructions and tools for crafting personas that are readily available online, but following is a list of tools and references that you can use to craft high quality learner personas that will help you to design inclusive curriculum:

• The Persona Lifecycle is the primary reference used in creating this blog entry and offers detailed insights about personas and instructions for building them. While this reference is designed from a marketing perspective, its information is equally applicable to building educational personas.

• UXPRESSIA is a website that allows users to build personas by entering data into customized profiles. It promises to leverage AI to assist users in improving their personas.

• Xtensio is an online website that allows customers to build personas that are as complex or simple as desired. This site is focused on marketing, but the templates are fully customizable, and you can modify the fields to reflect multicultural frameworks.

The references above are a small sampling of the resources that can aid you as you build personas. Figure 2 (below) shows persona templates from the websites referenced above. You can find countless other templates online, all fully customizable, or you can build your own templates.

Figure 2. These images show persona templates used on UXPRESSIA (left) and Xtensio (above). Both can be customized to reflect whatever datasets are required.

Once your personas are built, you'll be able to use them for multiple applications. You can also ensure they remain relevant through reviews involving focus groups and regularly scheduled surveys. As your personas change over time, they will continue to represent the changing needs of your students.

Thanks for reading, and I hope I've piqued your interest in how personas can help you create and maintain inclusive learning environments.

Citations

1. Pruitt and Aldin, 2006, p. 49.

2. Pruitt and Aldin, 2006, p. 130.

3. Pruitt and Aldin, 2006, p. 121.

4. Quintana et al., 2012, p. 39.

Follow the References link at the top of the page for a full list of references.