Chapter 4 (007)

CHAPTER 4

WHERE CAN QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS TAKE PLACE?

in CHAPTER 3...

The previous chapter discussed forms that Qualitative Interview can take.

INTRODUCTION

- Discuss further types of interview

- Setting for the type of interaction that takes place and the data that can be generated

- Importance of various settings for face-to-face interviews, and variants of ' walking and talking' interviews

INTERVIEW SETTINGS

- Location of face-to-face interviews (as might be advocated in text books) would suggest ﬁnding a space that is available for use, convenient and accessible to participant and researcher.

- To avoid interruption and make an adequate sound recording of the conversation

- Privacy might be an issue and so a private rather than a public space is more suitable

MICRO-GEOGRAPHIES OF INTERVIEW SITES

- Often researchers oﬀer the choice of setting to the interviewee, who might like to meet in a public place in which they are comfortable.

- Noise aﬀecting the recording, being able to hear what each other says adequately, and privacy are practical considerations here.

- If other people are within hearing distance, or can enter the space where the interview takes place, this can create tension for both interviewer and interviewee and aﬀect how and what can be discussed.

- Interviewed in other public places or in their homes, they tended to talk more freely about their own opinions separate from organizational goals.

- The interview site, in all its messiness and social embeddedness, is a source of information and data beyond that generated in the interview.

- Seeing the participant in context (in their home, their classroom, their workplace), surrounded by the material culture of their created space, and possibly interacting with others in that space, oﬀers a wealth of information

WALKING AND TALKING

- In this version participants are accompanied on a ‘natural’ outing, rooted in everyday routines with the researcher asking questions, listening and observing, exploring the participant’s practices and experiences.

- They provide insight into perception, spatial practices, personal biographies, the web of connections between people and patterns of social interaction.

- conversations in place, or ‘talking whilst walking’, oﬀer the potential to add new layers of understanding for the social scientist

TOGETHER AND APART IN TIME AND SPACE

- In this section we discuss types of interviews where researcher and participant are separated in time and space.

- They might be in diﬀerent time zones or separate locations at any distance apart

- They could be responding to each other asynchronically via email or synchronically online via the appropriate software or instant messaging (Chen and Hinton 1 999)

Telephone Interviews

- In telephone interviews the researcher and participant are each in, and in control of, their own separate space, and possibly at a considerable distance, although their exchange is synchronous in time

- Advantages of the telephone interview are that it is cheaper, faster and, with participants who are hard to reach or located in diﬃ cult or dangerous places and spaces, safer.

- Disadvantages include the lack of face-to-face contact and so lack of information about the other from their appearance, non-verbal communication in the interaction and the physical context

- Lack of non-verbal communication similarly led to greater articulation from both researcher and participant in the exchanges.

- Technological development has led to the possibility of calls made online, with similar advantages to interviewing on a landline

- These and other rapidly developing modes of contact are expanding the scope and range of qualitative interviews

The e-interview

- In an email interview there are similarly no constraints on location, the participants can be widely geographically separated, including worldwide.

- Advantages of the technique: it is written, producing text, obviating the need for transcription, saving time and resources

- Although this might lead to a less spontaneous account than produced in other interview methods

- For the busy researcher and participant, the email interview oﬀers considerable ﬂexibility about when it takes place, with the participant in control of the ﬂ ow, their response triggering the next communication from the researcher.

- The researcher can have several interviews running at the same time, and both researcher and participant can have time for reﬂection on the responses, and on the future direction of the research.

- New skills are required of the e-interviewer not just technically being able to use email (a requirement for participants too) but for timing the ﬂ ow of questions and judging how the interview is progressing when it is hard to assess the meaning of time gaps

- Nicole Ison ( 2009 ) found email interviews useful for facilitating participation in research with people with impaired verbal communication.

- For Ison, ‘the overwhelming value of this method is its capacity to facilitate participation by individuals who are unable to undertake face-to-face interviews’.

CONCLUSION

- In this chapter we have considered the importance of the setting in which qualitative interviews take place and the eﬀects this can have on interviewer and interviewee and their interaction, inﬂuencing the type of data that can be generated.

- These eﬀ ects can be the most general – the inﬂuence of places and spaces on identity, perceptions, memories, emotions, the interaction of hierarchies of power at diﬀerent levels associated with individuals, institutions, organizations, society.

- And they can be the very speciﬁc on the participants in the face-to-face interaction, including noise, interruptions, distractions.

- We have indicated the ideal space for the pragmatic qualitative interviewer, and discussed types of interviews where the research activity takes place at a distance through various technologies.

- In Chapter 5 we discuss the tools that can be used in qualitative interviews.