We collected data concerning the SE teacher’s social embeddedness in the teacher community through event sampling (Ecological Momentary Assessment, Shiffman, 2000) based on reflective audio notes on an MP3 player. The chosen time sample was eight months, the first and major segment of his first year upon entering the new environment. Rather than asking a participant to remember or retrospectively generalize past experiences, the idea of event sampling is to record naturally occurring situations or contexts longitudinally in tens of snapshots of personal experiences and observations concerning the phenomenon of interest (Reis & Gable, 2000). The instructions of event sampling, in the present case, guided the participant to reflect on the following two open questions: 1) What kinds of issues you are considering related to your workplace community, teaching, and the new school? and 2) From whom are you seeking advice concerning the problematic issues? The SE teacher was instructed to make notes whenever issues corresponding the instruction emerge. The first author of this study made monthly visits to the SE teacher’s school and moved the audio files for further analysis. Altogether the principal participant created 47 audio recordings of event sampling across the period. The material corresponded to 41 transcribed pages. The advantage of using an MP3 player was that audio files were given accurate recording dates and times, which made systematic analysis possible.
