Borrowers’ stories
What repayment
asked of a life.
Across the interviews, PSLF was more than a program borrowers joined. It became a way of counting time, organizing work, interpreting debt, and deciding what could happen next.
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A thematic landscape
Eight patterns connect
the borrower accounts.
The themes synthesize all 1,876 unique excerpts while retaining the wider code families already applied in Dedoose. They are interpretive and overlapping: the same account can illuminate work, household life, administration, and distress at once.
Counts describe excerpts connected to the exported code families used to develop each theme. They are not mutually exclusive prevalence estimates.
Corpus map
More connected excerpts →02
Explore the themes
Choose a card to follow
one thread through the corpus.
Each theme pairs a cross-interview interpretation with its related code families, survey outcomes, and lightly edited excerpts.
Read across methods
Pair borrowers’ stories
with the survey.
The qualitative themes explain how borrowers gave meaning to balances, payment counts, forgiveness status, stress, well-being, work, and household decisions.
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