Qualitative Interviewing Approaches and practical issues

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Qualitative Interviewing Approaches and practical
issues

• 05/02/2008
• Marta Trzebiatowska

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Lecture outline

• Qualitative vs. quantitative interviews
• What is distinctive about qualitative
  interviewing?
• Implications for interview design
• Categories
• How to prepare for an interview
• Sampling/choosing your interviewees
• Group interviews (focus groups)
• Interview schedule and setting up an interview
• Conduct during an interview
• Truth and validity
• Recording and transcribing
• Bryman (2004), Ch15 and Ch 16

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Qualitative vs. quantitative

• Qualitative interviews
• Unstructured/semi-structured
• Schedule flexible
• Speaking off-topic as desirable
• Rich and detailed answers desirable

• Quantitative interviews
• Structured
• Schedule rigid
• Speaking off-topic as an obstacle
• Brief and easily coded answers desirable

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What is distinctive about qualitative
interviewing?

• Intense listening
• A systematic effort to hear data
• Respect for your interviewees
• In-depth exploration of the topic
• Openness to new understandings and meanings
• A great adventure (Rubin and Rubin, 1995)

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How do qualitative interviews differ from
conversations?

• The researcher has a goal
• Interviews are a research tool
• Interviews are recorded
• More depth than an ordinary conversation
  (probing, listening without interrupting)
• The data are analysed and shared through
  publications
• With strangers and acquaintances

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Implications for interview design

• 1. Finding out detailed information about how
  your interviewees understood what they saw, heard
  and experienced
• It helps to understand what they think and ground
  it in the context of their experience (nuance,
  detail, evidence)

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Implications for interview design

• 2. Awareness of our relationship with the
  interview partner
• How do they perceive us?
• How do these perceptions affect what they reveal?
  
• Obligation on both sides

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Implications for interview design

• 3. Qualitative interviews are personal!
• Who you are and how you deal with the interview
  situation matters
• Your reactions (verbal, facial expressions,
  gestures) will determine the interviewees
  reactions mutually reinforcing

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Categories

• Unstructured interviews
• Semi-structured interviews
• Topical oral histories
• Life (hi)stories
• Evaluation interviews
• Focus group interviews

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Life (hi)stories

• Focus on the experience of the individual and
  what they felt as they passed through different
  stages of life
• A window on social change

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What do we consider when preparing for a life
story interview?

• a sketch of the stages or phases of your life
• a sense of the pivotal events in your life
• key themes around work, love and play
• conflicts
• key people
• the artefacts of your life
• your changing body and the places in has been
• spiritual quests coherence and contradiction in
  your life
• a chart of how you have seen yourself at
  different stages of your life who are you now,
  how have you changed?
• life secrets you cannot tell (Plummer, 2001 123)

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Group interviews/focus groups

• A focus group
• A group interview
• Centred on a specific topic
• Co-ordinated by a moderator/facilitator
• To generate qualitative data by capitalising on
  the interaction within the group setting

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When to use focus groups?

• When developing guidelines for future research
• The purpose of the research is to uncover factors
  relating to complex behaviour
• When looking for ideas emerging from the group

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Preparing for qualitative interviewing

• Whats the problem? What do I want to know?
• Start from a broader theme, then narrow it down
• The topic will be modified by what the
  interviewee says
• Is your topic appropriate for qualitative
  interviewing?

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Research topic

• You must be interested in the issues and the
  topic must be grounded in the lives of your
  interviewees
• Ideas for qualitative interviewing come from
  everywhere
• Curiosity or political commitment may motivate you

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Sample

• Representative not always possible
• Depends on the topic you may wish to interview
  individuals who have the kind of knowledge you
  are interested in (purposive sampling)
• Snowball sampling
• Theoretical sampling (interviewing until you
  reach data saturation and letting your theory
  guide your choice of interviewees)
• or interviewing whoever you can get hold of!
  (convenience sampling)

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Interview schedule

• An outline of questions/ a script is a good idea
• Main questions
• Follow-up questions
• Probes
• Open-ended or closed questions?

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Interview schedule an example

• Ideas about child-rearing
• How would you described a good child as opposed
  to a bad child?
• How do you think they become good or bad
  children?
• When your children grow up, what kind of
  qualities would you like to see in him or her?
• Do you see yourself as a good and competent
  mother?
• Do you think people hold mothers responsible for
  how their children turn out?
• (From The Cultural Contradictions of
  Motherhood, Hays, 1996, Yale University Press)

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Setting up an interview

• Either pre-arrange it or seize the moment and
  interview someone on the spot
• A letter/a phone-call/face-to-face
• Explain what an interview implies, questions,
  what happens to data, interviewees rights

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Time

• How many interviews overall?
• How many interviews in one day?
• Interviewing is exhausting physically and
  emotionally
• Intense listening requires prolonged
  concentration
• No more than 3 a day
• Between 45 mins and 2 hrs each

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Place

• If possible let your interviewee choose the
  setting
• Whose territory?
• Physical space as important as symbolic
  positioning of the interview in the lives of your
  participants
• Food, drink

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Conduct during an interview

• How to begin?
• How to ask questions?
• Pussyfooting around the informants avoiding
  confrontation
• Probing What do you mean by that?
• Devils advocate seeking out confrontation
• Leading questions suggesting an answer

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Examples

• Do you think the media affects the way you feel
  about your body? WRONG!
• Are men more religious than women? WRONG!

• How are female bodies portrayed in the media?
  BETTER
• How do men/women practise religion? BETTER

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Truth and validity

• Interviewees wish to tell it like it is
• Problematic
• Many interviewees believe in objectivity
• doing poststructuralism with your informants,
  i.e. deconstructing the dominant discourses with
  them f.ex.
• What do you think about the way eating
  disorders are perceived by the majority of
  people? Do you agree/disagree with these
  perceptions/opinions?

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Recording interviews

• Notes
• Tape/digital recorder
• Video-recording
• Most people agree but some may not and they
  usually have a good reason.

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Transcription and Translation a Linguistic and
Ethnographic Task

• Transcription do it ASAP
• A laborious process
• Ethnographic translation interpreting,
  constructing, converting observations into words
• Linguistic translation collecting and
  presenting data in more than one language