DB #3 Qualitative Data Collection

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Glesne, C. (2015).  Becoming Qualitative Researchers (5th Edition). Pearson Education (US).

CH. 4

Chapter 4 Making Words Fly: Developing Understanding Through Interviewing

Think of interviewing as the process of getting words to fly. Unlike a baseball pitcher, whose joy derives from throwing balls that batters never touch, you toss questions that you want your respondents to “hit” and hit well in every corner of your data park, if not clear out of it—a swatted home run of words. As a researcher, you want your “pitches”—your questions—to stimulate verbal flights from respondents who know what you do not. From these flights comes the information that you transmute into data—the stuff of dissertations, articles, and books.

Getting words to fly is the subject of this chapter. It is a simple matter to express: Develop a clearly defined topic; design interview questions that fit the topic; ask the questions with consummate skill; and have ample time to “pitch” the questions to knowledgeable respondents. As with pitching balls, however, the process of creating good interviews takes practice.

What type of interaction is an interview? An interview is between at least two persons, but other possibilities include one or more interviewers and one or more interviewees. Interviewing more than one person at a time sometimes proves very useful: Children often need company to be emboldened to talk, and some topics are better discussed by a small group of people or a focus group, as discussed later in this chapter. In conventional approaches, researchers ask questions of one person at a time in the context of purposes they have determined. Respondents answer questions in the context of dispositions (motives, values, concerns, needs) that researchers need to unravel in order to make sense of the words that their questions generate. The questions, typically created by the researcher, may be fully established before interviewing begins and remain unchanged throughout the interview. These are called structured interviews. Questions often emerge in the course of fieldwork and may add to or replace preestablished ones. These are referred to as semistructured interviews. The researcher also may develop questions on the spot through dialog and interactions with only the research focus leading the way. These are known as unstructured or conversational interviews. Generally, qualitative researchers use semistructured interviews—the scenario for the advice in this chapter. They begin with a set of interview questions, remain open to re-forming and adding to those questions throughout the research process, and incorporate impromptu depth-probes as needed throughout interview sessions.

The questions you bring to the interview, therefore, are not set within a binding contract; they are your best effort before you have had the chance to use them with a number of respondents. However much you have done to create useful questions, you should think of them tentatively, so that you are disposed to modify or abandon them, replace them with others, or add new ones to your list of questions, or interview schedule. The more fundamentally you change your questions, however, the more you may have to return to people whom you thought you had finished interviewing in order to ask them questions that emerged in interviews with others. In general, it is not advisable to say final good-byes to respondents; leave the door open to return.

Interviews figure into research projects in different ways. You may want to learn about events or experiences that you cannot see or can no longer see, as in oral and life history interviews. Myrdal (1965) reconstructed—through oral history interviews with many people—the transition in rural China between the passing of Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime and the ascendancy of Mao Zedong. In a more recent example, Wieder (2004) elicited testimonies of teachers in South Africa who had fought apartheid. Oral history inquiries focus on historical events, skills, ways of life, or cultural patterns that may be changing (Rubin & Rubin, 1995). Life history inquiries focus more on the life experiences of one or several individuals. In Baba of Karo (1954), Smith re-created—through life history interviews—the story of a Nigerian woman of the Hausa tribe. Through oral and life history interviews, researchers work to “learn the rules, norms, values, and understandings that are passed from one generation of group members to the next” (Rubin & Rubin, 1995, p. 168). Oral and life history interviews can serve also as a kind of witnessing that challenges and counters the “official story,” through documenting voices silenced or ignored by the mainstream culture (Wieder, 2004).

Instead of interviewing about past experiences and events in people’s lives, you might want to seek perceptions and attitudes toward some topic, such as teachers’ opinions about state-mandated changes in the middle school science curriculum. How do they perceive the impact of the changes on their work as teachers? What is their attitude toward this impact? Concerned about the utility of the state’s curricular mandate, you might conduct interviews to obtain data that will be instrumental for understanding teacher conceptions of teaching science and perceived obstacles to implementing proposals for reform. This would be a form of topical interviewing that focuses more on a program, issue, or process than on people’s lives.

The opportunity to learn about what you cannot see and to explore alternative explanations of what you do see is the special strength of in-depth interviewing. To this opportunity add the serendipitous learning that emerges from the unexpected turns in discourse that your questions evoke. In the process of listening to respondents, you learn what questions to ask. Observation puts you on the trail of understandings that you infer from what you see, but you cannot, except through interviewing, get the actors’ experiences, perceptions, and explanations.

Developing Questions

Question Content

Novice researchers sometimes confuse research questions with interview questions, thinking that they can modify their research questions to produce their interview schedule. “Your research questions identify the things that you want to understand; your interview questions generate the data that you need to understand these things” (Maxwell, 2013, p. 77). Although interview questions should be related to research questions, interview questions tend to be more contextual and specific. Their development “requires creativity and insight, rather than a mechanical conversion of the research questions into an interview guide” (Maxwell, 2013, p. 101).

What, then, is the origin of the interview question? In ethnographic research, the experience of learning as participant observer often precedes interviewing and is the basis for forming questions. The things you see and hear about the people and circumstances of interest to you therefore become the nuggets around which you construct your questions. The questions are anchored in the cultural reality of respondents and drawn from their lives. Some questions may be generated directly from that cultural reality, particularly if the interview takes place where the respondent lives or works. The researcher interested in science education and project-based learning, for example, may ask questions about particular pieces of students’ work on the walls of the classroom. When Sarah interviewed student teachers about their classroom practices, she knew what to ask because she had both sat in their prepractice teaching-methods class and later watched them perform in their own classrooms. But she also could have known what to ask by having taught a teaching-methods class and supervised student teachers. In both cases, she could enhance the experiential foundation from which she generated questions by talking with others in the know, such as former student teachers and supervisors of student teachers, as well as by reading the relevant literature and acquainting herself with theories in the field.

Theory, implicit or explicit, underlying some behavior is an important source of questions. Daren, for example, planned to investigate “the returning dropout,” young people who dropped out of high school but later returned to study in an adult education program. Daren’s questions originated from his knowledge of the literature, his reasoning, and his experiences in adult education. They reflected theoretical considerations regarding his topic. He asked, for example:

For what reasons did returnees leave school in the first place? (suggests connection between leaving and returning to school)

How did parents react to their decision to drop out? (suggests likelihood of a parental role in leaving and returning)

Did they have friends who also dropped out? (suggests peer influence could motivate leaving and returning)

How did they learn about the adult education program? (suggests possible influence of the source of knowledge about the program)

In what ways were treatment of students and contents of instruction different in the adult program than in the high school program? (suggests appeal of some particular features of the adult program compared with the high school program)

These discrete questions do not amount to a theory; they do, however, reflect some of Daren’s implicit theory about how to go about understanding the complex phenomenon of returning to school. The answers he receives to these questions plus his continued reading on the topic will most likely suggest other theoretical perspectives around which to create new questions.

Your methodology also helps determine what kinds of things are asked about because of associated assumptions about what it is important to know. Theoretical assumptions of ethnography, for example, include these: Although highly variable and context specific, social behavior reflects patterns of a culture, and it is possible and important to discern and interpret these patterns. These assumptions guide the ethnographer in creating interview questions about the ways in which people do things, the kinds of experiences and attitudes they have, and the meanings they make of behaviors and perspectives. Narrative inquiry, although often similar to ethnography, places more emphasis on people’s stories and assumes that they are “a natural, obvious, and authentic window into how people structure experience and construct meaning in their lives” (Schram, 2006, p. 105). This and other theoretical perspectives of narrative inquiry lead the researcher to conduct multiple interviews with participants and to pay as much attention to how narratives are constructed as to what is said. A poststructuralist theoretical assumption is that if interviewers claim taking a neutral stance, “They create a hierarchical, asymmetrical (and patriarchal) relationship in which the interviewee is treated as a research ‘object’” (Rapley, 2007, p. 19), and the interviewee’s words are taken as something existing outside the research process. This perspective suggests that researchers must acknowledge the coproduction of interview data, and that they ought to engage with others in cooperative projects that focus on dialog, collaboration, and mutual self-disclosure. The content of your questions, therefore, may reveal more about you as the interviewer than is obvious at first glance.

Shaping Interview Questions

Interviewing parents about their perceptions of portfolio use as a means of assessing children’s performance in school, Todd stated, “I found I spent 45 seconds explaining each question, so I had to work to simplify them.” Researchers often begin with questions that make perfect sense to them but are less clear to research participants. Michael Patton’s chapter on interviewing in Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods (2002) has some of the best advice around on developing good interview questions. You might read also Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data (2005) by Rubin and Rubin to supplement the suggestions given here.

Figure 4.1 Types of Interview Questions to Consider and to Reconsider

Types of Questions to Consider (in Present, Past, and Future) Types of Questions to Reconsider and Revise

Grand Tour Questions Yes/No Questions

Experience/Behavior Questions Leading Question

Opinion/Value Questions Multiple Questions (phrased as one)

Feelings Questions Factual Questions (get your facts elsewhere)

Sensory Questions Uncomfortable Questions (at least during first interview)

Knowledge Questions (but not shaped as a test question) Why Questions

Patton (2002) describes categories to consider when developing interview questions, including experience/behavior questions, opinion/values questions, feeling questions, knowledge questions, sensory questions, and background/demographics questions (summarized in Figure 4.1). Experience/behavior questions are generally the easiest for respondents to answer and are good questions with which to begin an interview. Knowledge questions, in contrast, can give interviewees the impression of being tested. Respondents can readily feel embarrassed or at least uneasy when they have to say “I don’t know” to a question that you assumed they would be able to answer. If a knowledge question is factual information that can be obtained from documents or from one person in the know, such as the department chair, get the information there and drop the question from your interview list for other respondents.

Patton (2002) also suggests considering the aspect of time. That is, you can ask questions about the present, past, and future. Questions that ask for hypothetical musings about the future, however, tend to provide data that are neither thick in description, nor very useful during data analysis. The question “How would you like the sports medicine clinic to be in ten years’ time?” generates little other than a wish list. Exceptions exist, of course, but the past and present tend to be richer ground for stories, descriptions, and interviewer probes.

Developing different categories of questions (experience, feeling, background, etc.) is the first step. Then work carefully on shaping each question, as Todd discovered in his portfolio interviews with parents. Look through your questions and reword any that are dichotomous yes/no questions (“Do you participate in volunteer activities?”) because such questions guide respondents to give short answers. Rethink multiple questions (“Tell me about the last time you volunteered, how long you worked at the activity, and how you felt about doing so”) because the respondent will most likely talk more fully about one of your several questions and forget the others. “Why” questions (“Why do you do volunteer work?”) can also be problematic because respondents might answer from different perspectives, even though they could speak to several. For example, one interviewee might answer with a discussion of childhood experiences. Another might talk about his need to give something back to the community. Yet another might report how volunteer work puts her in contact with people she would not be with otherwise. As a result of your “why” question, you will generate a list of reasons for participation in volunteer activities, but your understanding of volunteer work would grow even deeper if you asked each respondent in separate questions about the role of family socialization, moral beliefs, and perceived rewards in the participation in volunteer work.

Presupposition questions can be useful also as a shaping guide. In a presupposition question, the interviewer presupposes “that the respondent has something to say” (Patton, 2002, p. 369). Novice interviewers often perceive the need to begin with a short-answer question such as “Are you satisfied with your volunteer work?” followed by the more open-ended questions: “In what ways are you satisfied?” and “In what ways are you not satisfied?” You can often presuppose that satisfaction (or some other attribute) is a part of the work and begin with a statement such as “I’m going to ask you now about your satisfaction and dissatisfaction with your volunteer work. Let’s begin with the ways in which it is satisfying for you.”

Presupposition questions are useful. Leading questions are not. It is easy to confuse the two. In leading questions, the interviewer makes obvious the direction in which he or she would like the answer to go. Imagine if you began a question with the following, “It seems that many people are focused on themselves, never thinking about environmental problems, homelessness, or poverty except as they, individually or possibly as a family, are affected. What led you to get involved in volunteer work?” If the question were asked in this way, could a respondent easily tell you that he spent spring break with Habitat for Humanity because his girlfriend had signed up to go? A presupposition question might, in contrast, presuppose that there are ways in which volunteer work is and is not meaningful (satisfactory, useful, etc.) to the respondent, but it does not lead the interviewee to answer in any specific way.

The following discussion is drawn from a study that Kelly Clark (1999) conducted with female academics who were among the first generation in their working-class families to attend college. Her process is an example of shaping questions for qualitative inquiry. It also demonstrates the importance of planning a series of interviews with the same person over time—if the research focus is on life experiences—so that rapport can be established and the time can be sufficient for delving into the deeper layers of a life.

Clark began by asking each woman what she did for work and to describe a typical day. Spradley (1979) refers to this type of question as a grand tour question, a request to verbally take the interviewer through a place, a time period, a sequence of events or activities, or some group of people or objects. Grand tour questions are good starting points because they ask for experiential detail that a respondent can easily, comfortably, and readily answer.

A common mistake in interviewing is to ask questions about a topic before promoting a level of trust that allows respondents to be open and expansive. Therefore, Clark followed up her first question with another easy-to-answer question about the women’s work: “How is it that you became involved in the work that you do?” The answers to this question allowed her to gently transition into the area she was particularly interested in learning about during the first interview session: the language used and feelings expressed regarding what it had meant and continued to mean to be a first-generation female academic. Clark planned to hold a minimum of three interviewing sessions with each woman. For the first session, she created questions that would reveal what the process of going to college had been like for each woman as well as reflective self-perceptions of why each had pursued the path she had. Questions for the second session were built on these interviews and probed into areas painful for some: the opportunities, choices, and systems of support that influenced each participant’s individual and educational development. The final session was deeply reflective, with questions designed to generate a detailed story of how each participant had gone about aligning a sense of self with higher education. By the second and third sessions, Clark could ask questions that would have been more difficult to ask in the first session because both rapport and the foundation for asking more complex, reflective questions had been developed.

First-draft questions are often too vague to elicit comprehensive responses. Asking “What was attending college like for you?” is so broad that a respondent might be tempted to either give a short-answer “okay” or launch into experiential stories that don’t necessarily pertain to your research interests. You can make such questions less vague by asking the respondent to recapture something by imagining it. Clark posed the following, “I’d like to have you go back to a time in your personal life that you’ve probably not thought about for a while. Remember when you were first introduced to the idea of going to college? There were likely many things you had to consider as the time drew nearer for you to spend your first day on campus. What did you imagine college to be like?” The idea is to provide mood and props for interviewees to recall something likely to be long unthought-about. You want to ask questions that will cause them to recapture the time, place, feeling, and meaning of a past event. Clark’s next question was a sensory one that continued to prompt for reflection upon events in the past as she asked, “Suppose I were present with you during one of your visits home. What would I see happening? What would be going on? Describe to me what one of those visits would be like.”

Interviewees readily participated in answering Clark’s questions because doing so caused them to reflect upon their actions and perhaps to put pieces of their lives together in ways that they had not before. Because Clark had been a first-generation college student herself, by the third session the interview became more conversational in tone with back-and-forth sharing. By the third session, she could also ask directly about each respondent’s life epiphanies, occurrences or realizations that “cut to the inner core of the person’s life and leave indelible marks on them” (Denzin, 2008, p. 120). It is these kinds of personal experience stories that are often most meaningful for both interviewer and interviewee.

You don’t want to make respondents feel uncomfortable by asking questions on topics that are too personal or sensitive before they are ready to talk about such things. Similarly to Clark’s interviewing process, Lawrence-Lightfoot (1997b) began her portraiture work by “encouraging the actors in the expression of their strengths, competencies, and insights” (p. 141). Through starting interviews with a focus on what was working and why, both interviewer and interviewee could then move on to exploring “the dark shadows of compromise, inhibition, and imperfection that distort the success and weaken the achievements” (p. 142). Problems and insecurities are not ignored, but they are put in context and work best if they are not the initial thrust of interview questions.

With some topics (e.g., controversial or very sensitive issues), however, it may not be easy to get a respondent’s personal opinion. In asking questions, you have a choice of voices, and thus of degrees of directness and generality. You can ask, “Do you,” “Do nurses like you,” “Do nurses at your hospital,” or “Do nurses in general.” The scope of the voice increases with each example as, accordingly, the degree of personal disclosure decreases. Whenever you sense that your questions are too personal to be asked directly, you can expand the generality and assume that the longer respondent talk, the more likely they are to speak in a personal voice.

That some questions are designated as warm-up questions suggests that others are best asked at the end. Stuhlmiller (2001), for example, conducted experience-based interviews with rescuers in the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, California, an emotional topic. Toward the end of each interview, she asked questions such as “What did you learn about yourself from your encounter?” or “What advice would you have for others?” (pp. 75–76). These kinds of questions “directed narrators to consider the positive or growth-promoting aspects of the experience and enabled such thoughts to linger after the interview” (p. 76).

When you are reasonably comfortable with the form and substance of your questions, give attention to their order. Which belong at the beginning because they are easy to answer and answering them will reassure respondents that your questions are manageable? Which belong at the beginning because they are foundational to what you will ask later, or because they will give you the time needed to promote rapport? Which questions should be asked in special sequence? Which should be kept as far apart as possible because you want to minimize how the answer to one question might affect the answer to another? Which should be asked at the end because they are of a summary, culminating, or reflective nature? Of course, we all know what happens to the best-laid plans of researchers. Your logical order may be sundered by the psychological order that emerges from your respondents’ answers.

Figure 4.2 Questions to Ask of Your Interview Questions

Question to Ask of your Interview Questions Example Possible Revision

Are you asking yes/no questions? Do you have the chance to provide input into what happens at the campus art museum? Can you give me an example of how a faculty member has had input into exhibitions or programs at the campus art museum? (Then probe for how interviewee has been involved.)

Are you asking relatively closed questions disguised as open-ended questions? What do you see as the most important thing the museum can do to get faculty to make use of its art in classes? Think back to when you first came to teach here. Tell me how you first became acquainted with the campus art museum? Followed up by: How did you begin to consider ways to make use of the museum in your classes?

Do you work at setting a conversational tone with your questions that, at the same time, prepares the interviewee to give you rich responses? How has the museum affected your learning outside of classwork? Learning often happens outside of class. You might see something somewhere, for example, and then seek out more information on your own. What kinds of things have you learned through your involvement in the campus art museum?

Are you working to set up a conversational tone but end up with a leading question? Curators at campus museums often are expected to teach and yet are not given the same status as faculty in other departments. How does it work here? In some campus art museums, curators hold administrative positions and in others they are also classified as faculty. Tell me about your position. (If faculty, probe for how classified and any tensions inherent in this dual responsibility position.)

Are your questions so broad that the respondent may feel overwhelmed instead of interested in answering? Please tell me about your experiences as a director of an art museum. Describe for me the various hats you wear as director of the museum.

Are your questions asked on such a general level that respondents immediately have to qualify their answers in some way? How do you think institutional administrators view the campus art museum? Politics at universities and colleges is a constant and constantly changing. Tell me about the museum’s relationship historically with university presidents, provosts, and boards of trustees. Followed by: How would you describe the museum’s relationship with the current administration?

Are you asking for a list, when you’d really like descriptive experiences? What jobs, assistantships, or internships are available for students at the museum? Describe for me your job [assistantship, fellowship] with the campus art museum. How did you get it? Followed by, What do you like about it, find frustrating, etc?

Are your questions fair? That is, do you ask about more than one side of an issue? What kinds of things frustrate you about your job as a museum curator? Tell me what your job consists of on a typical day at the museum? What aspects do you enjoy most about your job? What kinds of things frustrate or challenge you?

Are your questions more like probes than well-developed questions? Meaning of museum—academic and extracurricular? Not all colleges or universities have campus art museums. I’m curious to learn from your perspective what going to a school with an art museum has meant to you? (Probe: How has it affected you academically? Beyond the classroom?)

Finally, look at each question and ask of it, “What will answers to this question contribute to my research questions?”

Not needing to keep things straight, as you see it, they may talk in streams of language that connect to various parts of your questions, but that in no way resemble your planned order. You then learn new ways that your questions connect. As a final check, see Figure 4.2 for some questions to ask of your interview questions.

Revising and Piloting Interview Questions

View the process of interview question construction as a continuing interaction among your topic, your questions, a few collaborators, and your reflective thoughts. First, think of it as a three-way interaction among the researcher, the tentatively formed topic, and interview questions—tentative because in so thinking you are optimally open to what is known to be most realistic: that interview questions will change. Write questions, check them against your topic, possibly revise your research statement, and reconsider the questions.

Think of question development as a four-way interaction when collaborators enter the picture. These collaborators or facilitators are agreeable peers, who will read drafts of your questions in light of what you communicate as the point of the study. They bring their logic, uninvested in your study, to the assessment of your questions, and they give you the basis for returning to your computer to create another draft. These facilitators tell you about grammar, clarity, and question–topic fit. Some facilitators may be informed by experience with the people and phenomena of your research topic and thus can ascertain if your questions are anchored in respondents’ cultural reality. No doubt, the most effective collaborators are local facilitators, persons local to the research site who will work closely with you. Your greatest challenge is to create questions that respondents find valuable to consider, as well as questions whose answers provide you with pictures of the unseen, expand your understanding, offer insight, and upset any well-entrenched ignorance.

Finally, pilot your questions. Ideally, pilot respondents are drawn from the actual inquiry group. Urge pilot respondents to be in a critical frame of mind so that they do not just answer your questions but, more important, they reflect critically on the usability of your questions. Since formal pilot studies are not always feasible, you might design a period of piloting that encompasses the early days of interviews with your actual respondents, rather than a set-aside period with specially designated pilot respondents. Such a period, if conducted in the right frame of mind—the deep commitment to revise—should suffice for pilot purposes.

In reflecting on developing interview questions about the experiences of first-generation college students, Sean observed:

It was the pilot interview phase that most clearly informed my interview questions. Which questions resonated with my interviewee, and which ones fell to the ground (figuratively during the interview and literally during coding of the interview)? It is also the point at which the experience of the first-generation student leaves the crisp pages of research documents and becomes a responsive, interactive experience—one that says, “Huh?” at the end of a poorly worded question or continues at length in response to a good one.

Be prepared to let some questions fall to the ground.

The example shown in Figure 4.3 is taken from the work Kristina and her facilitators did on her questions for interviews with African women about their perceptions of their legal rights as women. Presented here are only a few of her questions from each of her subsequent drafts, so you can get an idea of how her questions evolved through her dedication to making them good questions and through feedback from classmates, pilot interviewees, and me.

How a question is worded matters. Gubrium and Holstein (2009, p. 46) give examples of ways in which similar but differently worded questions prompted different kinds of stories. “As you look back over your life, what are some of the milestones that stand out?” led interviewees to focus on various professional milestones. The question “If you were writing a story of your life, what chapters would you have in your book,” however, generated narratives drawn from the interviewees’ overall life stories. The process of drafting and redrafting interview questions requires time, thought, and effort. Your research will benefit, however, with finely honed questions that elicit interesting and engaging information. The data you get are only as good as the questions you ask.

Figure 4.3

Example of Developing Interview Questions

DRAFTS OF KRISTINA’S QUESTIONS BRIEF COMMENTS ON EACH DRAFT

Draft 1, October 2

1. How would you describe the position of women in your country, both economically and socially?

2. I want to talk to you about any experiences you or your mother and other women that you know have had about owning property. How did you or the women you know gain property?

3. How did you come to understand what rights a married woman has compared to her husband?

Draft 1

Notice how broad and general the first question is. Because it is such a large question, it would be difficult to know where to start in answering it.

Again, where does one start and with whom—you, your mother, or other women? And what is meant by “gain”? What is meant by “property”?

Question 3 is less broad than the others, but it still feels vague. How would you answer it?

Draft 2, October 9

In many countries around the world, women have inferior social and economic positions compared to men. This inferior position sometimes makes it difficult for women to exercise their rights in issues of marriage and property. I want you to describe first the rights women in your country face when it comes to marriage issues, and then we’ll come back to the rights of women relating to property.

1. What kinds of rights do women have in your country around the issue of marriage?

Now I want to talk to you about issues relating to marriage. I’m going to divide this issue into two topics. First I want to talk about what rights a woman has when she is married, the kinds of things she can and cannot do, and rules or laws that may apply to a married woman. Then I want to talk about the same issues, only concerning divorce.

2. What kinds of rules or laws apply to married women?

3. What experiences have you had that helped you to understand what rules or laws apply to married women?

Draft 2

These preliminary words, an attempt to be more conversational in her approach, clearly state Kristina’s position and could silence or lead women to answer in certain ways.

Question 1 remains quite broad and vague and asked at a general level rather than engaging the women in discussing their own experiences.

Kristina’s preliminary to the next questions is a worthwhile attempt to be more conversational and to alert the women to what kinds of questions are to come, but the words “I want to talk to you about . . .” or “I want to talk about . . .” do not work to bring the interviewee into the interview. It is also difficult to follow all the information presented.

Question 2, like 1, is too broad, vague, and general.

Question 3 finally gets at the woman’s experience. Look at how this question seems more engaging than Question 3 of Draft 1.

Draft 3, November 11

1. If you had to generalize and describe how women in your country live, what would you say?

Now I want to talk to you about issues relating to marriage. I’m interested in the sorts of rights a married woman has, the kinds of things she can and cannot do, what kinds of rules or laws apply to married women. These rights don’t necessarily have to be actual laws but can be what is expected of a married woman.

Draft 3

Nice beginning, but again very broad and difficult to answer.

Kristina might say “Now I would like to hear about . . .” which situates her as the learner in the interview process. What she goes on to say is useful and clarifying information for the interviewee.

2. What kinds of laws or rules apply to a married woman?

3. What do you think about these kinds of rules or rights?

Question 2 continues to be asked at a general level, but the introduction makes it easier to think about an answer. Being a “knowledge” question, it could be regarded as an uncomfortable kind of test question by interviewees.

Question 3 is a nice follow-up, and, I suspect, where the interviewee information will become more interesting.

Draft 4, November 18

I want to talk to you about your understanding of how women perceive marriage, divorce, and property rights in your country. I’m mostly interested in your perceptions of these issues, regardless of your knowledge about specific laws that apply to women. I’m going to break this interview into three sections, beginning with marriage, then we’ll talk about divorce, and finally we’ll talk about women’s property and inheritance rights.

1. I’d like you to tell me about the laws or customs concerning women and marriage in your country. How would you describe them? (probe for role of women, role of men, how roles have changed)

2. How were you raised to think about marriage? (probe for role of mother, father, friends, school, government programs)

3. What would you teach your children about women and marriage? (probe for differences between teaching sons and daughters)

Draft 4

Nice, clear introduction that sets out the scope of the interview and specifies that Kristina wants to understand the women’s perceptions, not their knowledge of their country’s laws.

Question 1 is at a general level, but clear and direct with good prompts for areas in which to probe.

Question 2 gets at the interviewee’s socialization. It would prompt reflective and, most likely, engaging answers.

Question 3 is an excellent question to get at the interviewee’s values and opinions.

Conducting the Interview

Interviews do not have to take place in sterile, formal settings. Make use of opportunities that allow you to learn from and with others in multiple places.

Where? When? How Long? How Often?

Where will you conduct your interviews? You need to find convenient, available, appropriate locations. Select quiet, physically comfortable, and private locations when you can. Defer to interviewees’ needs, however, because their willingness is primary, limited only by your capacity to conduct an interview in the place they suggest. If, for example, a location’s lack of privacy dampens, if not defeats, open discussion, or if its noise level precludes hearing, then the available site is not workable. If meeting where radios or televisions blare, a gentle request will generally suffice to get sets turned off or at least down. A room set aside for the researcher on a regular basis is ideal for interviews with students conducted at school. Otherwise, you may have to use your creativity and move around, depending on the time of day; the lunchroom, auditorium, backstage, campus picnic table, and gymnasium are possible places. Teachers, counselors, and administrators are easier to meet because they have classrooms and offices.

When will you meet? “Convenient, available, and appropriate” apply also to the time of the interview. Appropriate means when both you and the respondent feel like talking. Again, however, you take what you can get and defer to the preferences of interviewees. School-based interviews often occur during a teacher’s free period and a student’s study hall. Barring these opportunities, before and after school and lunchtimes are other possibilities. Meeting counselors and administrators requires fitting into their schedules when free of appointments.

What should you do to prepare for interviews other than be familiar with your questions and have your recorder ready? Learn as much as you can about interviewees and their lives, work, and relationship to the topic before actually meeting with them. You do this to understand the terminology that might be used, to know the kinds of questions that might serve as good follow-ups, and to better enjoy the process. Ives (1995) provides a good example: “I remember one young girl, interviewing an old woodsman, who asked what they cut down the trees with. ‘Well, girlie,’ he said with a kind of amused contempt, ‘we used an ax, that’s what we used!’ Girlie looked him right in the eye: ‘Poll or double-bit?’ she said.” (p. 36)

How long will your interview last? An hour of steady talk is generally a suitable length before diminishing returns set in for both parties. There are exceptions, for example, when less time is available to the respondent. Take what you can get, while trying to promote regularity—of location, time, and length of interview—so that you can say to your respondent at the interview’s end, “Same time and place next week?”

How often will you meet? This is a variable, depending upon the purpose of the research. A life history interview could not be completed in an hour. Some have taken dozens of hours (Atkinson, 2002). Even most topical interviews require multisession interviews to yield trustworthy results. Just how many sessions will depend on the length of the interview schedule and interview sessions, the interest and verbal fluency of the respondent, and the probing skills of the researcher. You might say to respondents, “I would like to meet with you at least two times, maybe more, but no more than is comfortable for you. And you may—without any explanation—stop any particular session or all further sessions.” Then, it is your challenge to make the interview experience so rewarding that having multiple sessions is unproblematic.

How many different interviews should you schedule for any one day? Stan was interested in how students and teachers perceived the effects of an innovative bilingual program. He negotiated release time from his work for one day a week for two months. During that time, he planned to conduct his interviews. He scheduled back-to-back interviews with five or more people on each research day. Stan soon became frustrated with delays and last-minute changes and yet was determined to complete twenty interviews during the first month. Despite personal time constraints, Stan needed to extend the time period allotted for interviews. The limited time, no matter how hard Stan worked, would not do justice to his inquiry. By scheduling interviews back to back, he did not have time to reflect upon and journal about each interview after its occurrence and thereby learn from it before the next interview. With such a tight schedule, he was likely to be more focused on getting through his questions than on listening, probing, and learning new questions that he should be asking. In addition, his anxiety over time was likely to be noted by his participants, and they might give him shorter answers to speed up the process. Although not always following this advice, I tend to agree with O’Reilly (2005, p. 143) who advocates no more than two in-depth interviews a day.

In the above example, Stan could consider the phone or email as a way to follow up on some of his first interviews. He possibly could hold some interviews online through programs such as iChat or Skype. Internet-based interviews, although generally not as ideal as face-to-face interviews, have advantages for some research projects (Meho, 2006). They can save time and expense for transportation. They allow the researcher to access people from many different geographic areas and in politically sensitive or dangerous locations. Email interviewing has the additional benefit of decreasing the cost or time involved in transcription. It can also enable conversations with some groups that might not be as willing or able to participate in face-to-face interviews, such as people with special characteristics (stroke survivors or those with speech impediments), the difficult to reach (executives), second-language speakers, or those who are particularly shy. If interviewing through email, however, you and your respondents need to agree to multiple exchanges over an extended period of time so that you can probe into responses, ask for clarifications, and follow new lines of thought.

The Interactive Nature of Interviewing

Interviewing is not quite the same process for all its practitioners, any more than teaching, nursing, or counseling is. Its variability derives from who is conducting the interview with whom, on what topic, and at what time and place. Interviewing, in short, brings together different persons and personalities. Gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, and age, and all their possible combinations, can make for very different interview exchanges. Depending on the topic, the location of the interview, and the temper of the times, the nature of the interaction will change as well. If you are a European American researcher interviewing a Mexican American official of the Mexican American Political League on the subject of farm workers, in the league’s business office, during the heated times of a strike, you will conduct an interview that is imaginably different from one you would conduct if you are a Mexican American researcher, interviewing the same officer, on the same subject, in your office, at a time when labor peace prevails.

To help you think through the possible interviewing effects of gender, race, sexual orientation, class, and other social locations, look at Inside Interviewing, an edited book by Holstein and Gubrium (2003). For examples, Reinharz and Chase (2003) describe how the gender of the interviewer can affect whether or not female interviewees reveal some information and where they feel comfortable being interviewed. Dunbar, Rodriguez, and Parker (2003) discuss ways in which factors associated with race interact with both the asking and the answering of interview questions. Kong, Mahoney, and Plummer (2003) draw attention to how “postcolonial gay identities are not merely the additive experiences of race, gender, class, and sexuality . . . ; rather, they are the result of multifarious and contradictory sets of oppression within specific institutional arenas” (p. 99). The major point is that the interview is an interaction that will vary depending upon the makeup of participants. You have no control over some aspects, but you can work to make the interaction comfortable and conducive to an exchange. You can be fully present to the other person and open to learning new ways of looking at and being in the world.

You also need to be willing to learn how to interact appropriately by the cultural standards of the people you are interviewing. This may mean socializing before the interview and sharing a meal. It may mean that responses are not given in a straight, forward way. They may be answered in a circular fashion or involve storytelling with implied answers. Cultural differences occur between and within countries. Ives (1995) writes of doing research in Maine, where he learned that his role as interviewer entailed being able to be “silent, reserved, maybe looking at the floor, maybe not” (p. 45).

No matter what identity categories describe researcher and interviewee, no one person is exactly the right interviewer, any more than there is a right practitioner in the case of teachers, nurses, or social workers. All researchers have personal strengths and weaknesses that form the basis of their interview styles. Just as in nonresearch life, some persons engender nearly instant trust; they can safely ask direct, probing questions on hot topics early in an interview relationship. Some can make blunders and get excused over and over because they are eminently forgivable. Some create such an atmosphere of reflection and nurturance that respondents line up to be interviewed. Learn who you are, how you operate, and make the best of it. Do not expect the same reception from all respondents. They will take to you as variably as people do in general. This means that you will conduct some exhilarating interviews, and others may not be helpful at all. Of course, your unsuccessful interview encounters should not always occur with the same type of person.

A number of things occur simultaneously in interviewing. First and foremost is your listening. Interviewers are listeners incarnate; machines can record, but only you can listen. At no time do you stop listening, because without the data your listening furnishes, you cannot make any of the decisions inherent in interviewing: Are you listening with your research purposes and eventual write-up fully in mind, so that you are attuned to whether your questions are delivering on your intentions for them? If they are not, is the problem in the question, in the respondent, or in the way you are listening? Has your question been answered, and is it time to move on? If so, move on to what question? Should you probe now or later? What form should your probe take? Do you need to probe further the results produced by your probe? The spontaneity and unpredictability of the interview exchange precludes planning most probes ahead of time; you must, accordingly, think and talk on your feet, one of those many interview-related skills that improves with practice.

You listen and you look, aware that feedback can be both nonverbal and verbal. You observe the respondent’s body language to determine what effects your questions, probes, and comments are having. Do you see indicators of discomfort, and is the source of that discomfort in the physical conditions of your interview site or in the topic to which you are stimulating a response? Do you see signs of boredom, annoyance, bewilderment? What might be their source and their remedy, and is it within your means to provide a remedy?

Although listening and looking are critical, you forgo their gains unless you remember. You want to remember your questions so you won’t constantly look down at your list, and so you won’t be taken off guard when your questions are being taken out of order. You want to remember what has been said—by you and by the respondent—in this session and in previous ones. You want to recall what you have heard, so that you can pick up on past points in order to make connections, see gaps and inconsistencies, avoid asking some questions, or rephrase other questions when your first attempt at questioning fell short of your expectations and needs. You must, of course, remember to bear in mind your research questions so that what you are listening to is being assessed in respect to your research needs.

You must also remember your responsibility for the quality of the respondent’s experience. Are you attending to aspects of the interview that make it comfortable and interesting for the respondent, even if the topic stirs difficult memories? How satisfied respondents are can affect their willingness to continue to talk to you, the effort they put into their talk, and what they may tell other interview candidates about being your interviewee. Narrative researchers Gubrium and Holstein (2009) note how the interview is a collaborative enterprise:

No matter how minimal, collaboration should not be discounted. Indeed, sometimes declining to participate in conversational give-and-take can put an end to a storyline; an apparent lack of attention or interest can put a damper on any story. Conversely, measured participation may also facilitate storytelling, essentially allowing the narrator to command the floor in order to produce the extended turn at talk needed to formulate a story. (p. 97)

Try thinking of your role as that of a collaborator whose conversational actions facilitate others in the telling of their stories.

Related to the quality of the respondent’s experience is remembering to monitor negative reactions. Unless involved in projects that focus on learning through dialog, you may need to keep in check your disagreement with “disagreeable” views you hear. When Bonnie learned that a nurse she was interviewing was seriously uninformed about the care and treatment of confused older patients, she could not vent her irritation to the nurse and still maintain access. The venting may be acceptable and consistent with Bonnie’s role as a nurse, but not with her role as a researcher. Keeping roles separate is hard but sometimes essential if you mean to collect data from people whose experiences and perspectives differ from yours.

Finally, remember to keep track of time when interviewing in time-conscious cultures. Then, time remains for you to make some usefully culminating statements, such as, “Here’s the ground we covered today. I was pleased to learn about such and such. Would it be okay for next time if we went back to this point and that point before we turn to the next subject?” In this way, you review and pave the way for your next interview session. You keep track of time so you can keep your promise to use only an hour and avoid overstaying your welcome or causing interviewees to be late for their next commitment. Take the time to negotiate and verify details of your next meeting, and be punctual for each appointment.

Listening, looking, and remembering in the comprehensive terms suggested here require developing your concentration. This means shutting off the myriad other aspects of your life so that you can fully attend to the needs of your interview. Achieving the appropriate level of concentration can be physically and emotionally draining, particularly in your early days as an interviewer. It is not excessively far-fetched to say that if you are not tired at the end of an interview session, then you might wonder about the quality of the session. Interviewing is a complex process. Because there are so many acts to orchestrate, effective interviewing should be viewed the way good teaching is: You should look for improvement over time—for continuing growth—rather than for mastery or perfection.

Probing

In-depth interviewing is conceived of as an occasion for patiently probing—for getting to the bottom of things in order to do justice to the complexity of the topic. Researchers operate from the assumption that they cannot exhaust what there is to know about a subject. They may stop investigating because they have run out of time or have satisfied their particular research conceptualization, but while the research remains in process, interviewing is a “what-else” and “tell-me-more” endeavor. The next question on your interview schedule should get its turn only when you have stopped learning from the previous one and its spinoffs. Don’t view your list of questions as simply “something to be ‘gotten through’” (Ives, 1995, p. 51). Follow up on what respondents say with probes, remaining open to learning what you should have asked but didn’t know enough to consider. This is where patience comes in.

You need to concentrate on being patient in order to give due, unrushed attention and deliberation to the responses you elicit. Rush and the world rushes with you: If you communicate your satisfaction with short-shrift replies, then you teach respondents how minimal your expectations are. Say, “Tell me more,” and your interviewees will learn how to respond accordingly. You will find that the better you probe, the longer your interview time becomes. Short interview sessions are generally the mark of inexperienced or poor interviewers. With experience, the length and, often, the number of sessions increases.

Your probes are requests for more: more explanation, clarification, description, and evaluation, depending on your assessment of what best follows an interviewee’s words. Probes take numerous forms; they range from silence, to sounds, to a single word, to complete sentences. Learn which forms work best for you. Silence is easy to use, if you can tolerate it. Too little silence, and you fail to have made clear that you were inviting more talk; too much silence, and you may make the interviewee squirm. The magical right amount of silence indicates “Go on. Take your time. I’m not in a hurry.” Silence leaves time for thought. It is better than a menu of choices, as is rephrasing the question if it elicits no answer, or saying, “We can come back to that later if nothing comes to mind.” Used judiciously, silence is a useful and easy probe—as is the bunched utterance of “uh huh, uh huh,” sometimes combined with a nodding head.

Longer, more directive probes take various forms. You might say, “I’m not sure I got that straight. Would you please run that by me again?” Or you could summarize what you thought you heard and then ask, “Did I understand you correctly?” Both types invite a rethinking by the respondent, and with rethinking may come elaboration. The summary alternative can also be used to preface, “Is there anything more you’d like to add to this?” Probes also can be simple questions: “How did that happen?” “What made you feel that way?” And more complex conditional questions: “If you had returned to graduate school fifteen years ago,

how might your life look different now?” Pelto (2013, p. 166) identifies the request, “Can you give me an example of that?” as one of the most useful probes. As he observes, when first asked a question, respondents often reply with abstractions or generalizations. Asking for an example gets at the experiences and details, the descriptive level, that you want in your interviews. Your field notebook can come in handy for some kinds of probes. If interviewees describe how something was set up, you might ask them to draw it for you in your notebook or you might sketch your perception of what the person is saying and then ask if you got it right.

Figure 4.4 is a portion of Terry’s interview transcript with David, a child in her elementary classroom. Terry was interested in learning styles and in how children described their own learning processes. She talked to her class about theories of learning before conducting interviews. In this example, Terry used probes to expand and more fully understand David’s perspective on his learning. The left column presents a portion of the interview while the right column contains comments on the probes.

As this example demonstrates, it is clearly not the form of your probe that is most critical. It is your intent to probe, supported by your patience to linger and inquire rather than get on with completing the interview. The more nervous you are, the less patient you will be to probe, and the less you will find occasion to do so. Missed opportunities for probing, however, plague us all. You will read your interview transcripts and find many occasions to groan over opportunities forgone. You were too tired, too satiated with ideas, or just didn’t grasp what was being said. Given the intent to probe, the requisite habit and skill will develop—although you will always probe less than you could (as you learn when replaying the recording or reading the transcript).

Recording, Transcribing, and Tracking

Recording

How will you note your face-to-face interviews? Whether by hand, audio, or video recording is a matter of your needs and the respondents’ consent. It is not quite a toss-up as to whether you note by hand or recorder. With handwritten notes (or notes typed into your laptop computer or tablet with a keyboard), you are closer to being done writing when your interview is over; this is their distinct advantage. Also, noting by hand is less obtrusive and less intimidating to some persons. But be aware of the message your respondent may deduce whenever you stop taking notes: the risky “I no longer am noteworthy.” You will also feel less in control of the interview when, as you handwrite or type notes, your attention is focused on the struggle to keep up with the respondent’s talk (even knowing that this generally cannot be done), and you can only intermittently maintain eye contact and attend to all of the verbal and nonverbal cues that have bearing on the procedure. Interviewees may generally be patient and slow down, even waiting for you to catch up if you explain your desire to note their words as fully as possible. Recording devices, however, provide a nearly complete documentation of what has been said and permit easier attention to the course of the interview.

If taking notes by hand, you will want to work at getting down verbatim as much as possible, and then to allow time immediately after the interview to fill in as many of the missing pieces as you can remember. Use a different color pen (or font if typing into your computer) to indicate that notes are from your memory and not taken during the interview. Some novice interviewers, when noting by hand, feel compelled to switch into third person and to create a summary of the conversation. Consider the difference between the following two notations:

I . . . I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was a senior and just wasn’t thinking about it. But my mom kept leaving out brochures about the [college] nearby. One weekend, she said, “Hey, let’s go over to [college]. I want to see what it’s like.” So, we went over there, got to join in a tour being led by some college kids, and. . . .

She said that her mom was a big influence in her attending college.

Summarized notes defeat the purpose of in-depth interviews. You want to write what interviewees say in the manner in which they say it. A surer way to do this is by recording.

Many respondents will agree to the use of a recorder. Depending on the sensitivity of the topic, you may decide to wait until after the end of the first session to ask permission to record, when the respondent should feel more comfortable with you, the topic, and the process. Give due attention to the quality of your equipment. You do not need the frustration of trying to decipher words on the recording after the interview. Digital recorders have advantages over analog recorders; they store data in a format that can be downloaded as a sound file directly onto your computer, making it easier to manage, store, and transcribe interviews than dealing with boxes of cassettes. The sound quality is generally better as well on digital recorders. Most recorders have built-in microphones, but these are less effective than an external microphone; best of all are lapel microphones that can be attached to both researcher and respondent, particularly if in a somewhat noisy interview site or if you are interviewing persons who are soft-voiced.

Even when using a recorder, get in the habit of taking notes while you interview. Get used to writing while the other person is talking. Get comfortable with not always looking the speaker in the eye. Keep the pen going, even when looking at the interviewee. Your notes may not be as complete as you might seek to make them if you did not have the recorder, but they will serve as backup if the recorder fails. You will be competent in taking notes—and prepared to do so if someone does not want you to use the recorder. In addition, you will be able to easily jot descriptors, questions, and thoughts that arise during the interview without distracting the respondent because he or she will have become accustomed to your writing.

Remember that a different sort of noting continues after the interview, whether you are recording by hand or machine. As soon after a session as possible, pull out your field journal and write. Write descriptors about where the interview took place. Was anyone else present during the interview? What kind of gestures did the interviewee make? Regarding what to note after interviews, Ives (1995) suggests, “simply ask yourself if this or that bit of information would help anyone listening to the tape or reading the transcript to make better use of it” (p. 38). In addition to better situating and describing the interview, reflect upon the process. How do you think the interview went? What might you have done differently? How might you want to reshape some of your interview questions, or should you discard some altogether and add new ones?

Transcribing

If you are recording interviews with an analog recorder and plan to transcribe them yourself, borrow or rent a transcription machine with a foot pedal for reversing and advancing the tape, so that your hands are free to type. The machine rewinds the tape a little when you stop it, so you don’t miss the first word or two when you begin the tape again. Doing this by hand is frustrating. Lorna reflected upon her transcription process without a transcribing machine:

The worst problem was in transcribing the interviews verbatim. My initial attempts at home left me somewhat crazed; it took me about one hour to transcribe about ten minutes of conversation. In desperation, I hired someone to do this. However, the expensive transcriptions contained numerous “???,” where the words were obscured. . . . I then had to go over the entire tapes to fill in missing parts of the interaction.

If using a digital voice recorder, you will download the sound files to your computer. Free software allows you to play the recordings and to pause as needed while you type the words into a text area. If you plan to transcribe a number of files, purchase a USB foot pedal so you do not have to constantly lift your hands from the keyboard and move your eyes from the monitor to use the mouse to stop, slow down, or rewind your recording. If you have an iPad, you might want to try the program Audio Note. It allows you to type notes using a keyboard while recording the interview. The program inserts time codes every time the “return” key is hit, allowing you to match typed notes with the recording and to transcribe exact sections of the interview later on.

Whether recordings are analog or digital, transcription remains onerous, and qualitative researchers await the day when speech recognition software easily accomplishes this task. Although such software is getting better, generally it still needs “training” to recognize the voice of the speaker, making it good for transcribing dictation from one person, but not for transcribing the voices of different interviewees. What some researchers are doing is a kind of simultaneous translation, in which they use earphones to listen to a sentence in a recorded interview, pause the recording, and then speak the same words into their computer equipped with speech recognition software trained to their voice (Gibbs, 2007; Mears, 2009). According to those who use and like this process, repeating aloud each word of the interview evokes thoughts and possible insights that simply typing the words would not. Carolyn Mears (2009) describes herself as a convert, using voice recognition software not only to transcribe, but also to “take notes” on texts she is reading. When she comes upon a paragraph that she might want to quote, she reads it out loud, and the software types it into her document file.

When transcribing, it can be helpful in the long run to type the first name of interviewees in UPPERCASE, followed by a colon, every time they begin speaking. Not only can you see the name easily this way, but you can also search forward for parts of a specific interview (Gibbs, 2007). If doing sensitive research (use of drugs), then you need to use pseudonyms for participants’ names from the start. If your research involves something less sensitive (principals’ attitudes toward tenure for teachers), then it might be easier to use the interviewee’s real first name until all data are collected. Then, a pseudonym list can be compiled, and you can search forward and replace real names with pseudonyms. Some researchers use initials or even numbers for names of interviewees. I find it difficult to associate initials or a number with a specific interview and to keep them straight when comparing and contrasting during analysis.

Do you have to transcribe everything, particularly if parts of the interview seem off-topic? Hatch (2002) provides this advice, “It’s my training that ‘everything is data’ that leads me to tell students to transcribe everything and save data reduction for later in the research process” (p. 113). Ideally, you transcribe everything, but also, you really might not need the feast descriptions or recipes conveyed in the early part of an interview following a special holiday. Whether or not you transcribe each utterance in the recording varies with research approaches and goals. If focused on cultural patterns and understandings, you can leave out most of the ums and somewhat ignore pauses and overlaps in conversations. If doing narrative ethnography or conversational analysis, however, you will want to transcribe in a way that shows pauses, overlaps, silence, and the details of struggling for the right word (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009). In narrative ethnography and conversational analysis, you also will want to include your questions and prompts in the transcriptions, whereas doing so is less important in other approaches.

For some, transcribing is agonizing, not only in time demanded—estimate at least four hours to transcribe an hour of recording—but also in toll on the body, compounding the research agenda with visits to physical therapists to deal with repetitive strain injuries. Yet, paying someone to transcribe is expensive, and as Ives (1995) states, “Like it or not, the ideal person to transcribe an interview is you” (p. 75). So get good equipment and seize whatever means can be afforded to minimize the demands of transcribing. Ideally, you find yourself immersed in the interview, provided with the opportunity to listen again to what was said, and to reflect not only on your topic, but also on the interview process itself. “I know of no better way than self-transcription to teach what good interviewing is and is not, what succeeds and what does not,” states Ives (1995, pp. 75–76). While transcribing, be sure to keep your research field journal open to jot new questions, connections, and ideas as they appear to you—the bonus rewards of self-transcription. Transcribe as soon after each interview as possible. If you wait until you have completed all of your interviews before transcribing them, you have waited too long to learn what they can teach you.

Tracking

Regardless of the means you select to record your interview, keep an account for every respondent and interview. Include identification data that at a glance give characteristics (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, experience, occupation) that have bearing on your respondent selection. These identification data allow you to keep track of whom you have seen, so you can be mindful of whom else to see. Other items you may want to note include questions covered, old questions requiring elaboration, where to begin next time, special circumstances that affected the quality of the interview, and reminders about anything that might prepare you for subsequent interviews. Although you will want to create a tracking sheet that best meets your purposes, see Figure 4.5 for an example.

After you have transcribed several interviews and entered a number of pages of field notes into computer files, a peculiar phenomenon occurs. Paranoia sets in that something will happen to your data. Someone will steal your computer. Your apartment or house will burn down. Or you’ll just wake up one morning and it’s not there. All have most likely happened. It’s best to back up your files on a memory stick or a removable hard drive. You also may want to save your files on the Internet through a program like Dropbox.

Some Typical Problems in Interviewing

Fortunately, it is only once that you can do something for the first time (or do we believe that because it is consoling?). Helen somberly reflected about beginning to interview:

Things don’t always work the way you plan. It took me a month to get access. Then when I got there I learned the interview guides had not been passed out. I had asked the principal to identify teachers who knew a lot and found he had simply told various people that they would meet with me. About a third of the way through the first interview, I realized that the pause button was still on on my tape recorder.

Making the best of bad times may be all that you can manage as you try to salvage something from an interview, at least chalking it up as an occasion to get to know your respondent.

Remembering to check your recorder comes easier after your initiation. Beyond problems most commonly associated with the novice’s early days are others that can occur to anyone at any time. For example, a respondent does not answer the question you ask. What is going on? The reason may simply be that the person has innocently (without a hidden agenda) taken a fancy to discussing something else. If you can listen as gracefully to off-target talk (in your terms) as you do to on-target talk, then the time you lose may be more than offset by the enhanced quality of the respondent’s answers. With the serendipity that abounds in qualitative research, the perceived off-target talk may lead into a relevant and related territory of which you were not aware, opening up a new path for understanding. Or it may simply be that your question was not clear or the respondent was too nervous to concentrate. Look for other suitable words in which to recast your question. If restating does not help, go on to other questions rather than risk conveying frustration or making the interviewee feel inadequate.

The reason for not answering a particular question, or for respondents’ turning the focus of talk to topics of their own, may be more complex. Jennifer had a respondent who brought the talk around to safety in the nursery school, when Jennifer had the virtues of outdoor play on her mind. In time, Jennifer realized that her respondent gave very little time in her program to outdoor play and was saving herself from embarrassment in an interview that was directed exclusively toward outdoor play. In still more time, Jennifer realized that she needed to preface her interviews with the clearest possible statement that her inquiry on outdoor play was free of advocacy, so that respondents could continue to feel good about themselves—whether they did or did not include outdoor play in their nursery school program.

Such prefacing is critical to effective interviewing because respondents logically conclude that if you ask a lot about something, you must think it is important. This may be true, but it does not necessarily make you an advocate. To the extent that you appear to be an advocate, your respondents may become defensive, or they may tell you what they think you want to hear. Try explaining that you believe both successful and unsuccessful teachers emphasize outdoor play; that you are not making judgments about success; that you want only to understand the place of outdoor play, or lack of it, in the nursery school curriculum. If it is there, what are the reasons? If it is not, then, again, for what reasons?

When respondents show a pattern of turning away from your questions, they may be saying obliquely what they won’t say directly: “I don’t want to continue this interview.” Other forms of resistance to being interviewed are missed appointments and short replies. The resistance may be apparent or real. Apparent resistance may result from respondents’ being preoccupied with personal matters that preclude concentrating on the interview. If they want to talk about their personal problems, your listening may clear the deck for them to return to the questions. Cutting short the session and postponing further sessions for a few weeks may also work. Do not prematurely conclude that respondents’ resistance is tantamount to a wish to terminate all further interviews. It may be, however, that your questions are treading on matters too sensitive for them to discuss with you. Be gently direct. If you observe resistance, ask about it: “It seems to me that you have not been comfortable. . . . Are there areas you’d rather not talk about?” You might even ask, “Do you think we ought to stop the interviews?” If you do not hear yes, then judge the quality of what you’re hearing as you continue. If it is poor, shorten your list of questions and end the sessions sooner than planned.

Far removed from the problem of resistance is the problem of the nonstop talker. Respondent fluency is wonderful if on-topic, but if not, then learn to redirect the flow of talk. Making a wordless sound or a physical sign, such as a slightly upraised hand, may stop the stream of words so you can apologize for your interruption and pick up on something the respondent has said that you can probe. Or summarize what the respondent has said, and then bridge to where next you wish to go. The idea is to avoid making an abrupt shift to a topic distant from where the respondent’s talk had been.

In interviews, as in ordinary conversations, people make contradictory statements. Consider the possibilities that contradictions connote: the evolution of the respondent’s thinking about the topic; the respondent’s confusion about the topic; the respondent’s being comfortably of two minds about the topic. Is the topic generating the contradictions worthy of clarification? If so, then probe further into the respondent’s most recent statement, right then and there. You can raise the topic again at your next session, inviting more thought on it. You could also take the two seemingly contradictory positions and put them into a question like the following: “I’ve heard some people say . . . I’ve heard other people say . . . What is your thinking about these two positions?” When the respondent has replied, you can continue: “Is it possible that both are right?” The point is that when you ask questions, especially about complex matters, you cannot reasonably expect complete, carefully considered responses to be readily at hand. If you allow respondents time to think, then you will get more reflective replies. It may also be that, when explained, the responses that at first appeared contradictory to you are not at all.

Though not a problem in the same sense as those just stated, you may find it difficult to decide whether or not the interviews—a particular session or the entire series with one person—went well. In one sense, “going well” means getting answers that fit the questions you ask and that you can visualize as part of your forthcoming report; careful listening will indicate whether this criterion is met. In another, more serious sense, going well means creating connection and trust so that the talk delves below the surface of things and is meaningful to interviewees as well as to you. Clearly, the more one deems a person trustworthy, the more he or she will speak fully and frankly to that person. Thus, judging how the interviews are going may be tentative at first—you feel good about the interview because the flow of talk was easy, smooth, uninhibited, and on target—and confirmed or challenged later as relationships develop (or don’t), and as you continue to learn through your fieldwork.

Focus Group Interviews

Facilitating a discussion on a particular topic among a selected set of people, or focus group interviewing, has gained popularity in recent years. Gathering a group together to answer questions on a topic is not, however, a new data-gathering technique. During World War II, for example, focus group research was used to develop effective training material for the troops (Morgan, 1997). After the war, focus groups were used primarily for market research until the 1980s, when health researchers, in particular, began using group interviews to develop better means of education related to health issues like contraception and AIDS prevention. Other disciplines increasingly embrace focus group research. Group interviews are particularly useful in action and evaluation research, where participants express multiple perspectives on a similar experience, such as the implementation of a particular policy. A focus group can also be valuable in a pilot study. If participants are selected from the research site and know that part of their purpose is to assist in creating the research design, they can help you learn about aspects of the research site—language, norms, customs—in addition to helping you figure out overall research questions, participant selection and data collection strategies, and, perhaps, ways in which the research can better involve and contribute to the community or group being researched.

I tend to use focus group interchangeably with group interview, although some distinguish differences. For example, Bloor and Wood (2006) state, “Group interviews tend to proceed as a question-and-answer session with the researcher posing the questions, whereas focus groups will be characterized by more debate among the participants themselves perhaps facilitated by focusing exercises” (p. 99). Using these definitions, a researcher might set up a group interview to save time and travel by being able to interview more than one person over the same time period. Each participant would be expected to answer the same question in turn. In contrast, the researcher would use a focus group to better understand how a group would discuss some issue and elicit multiple perspectives in the process. Group interviews, as defined above, are not an ideal way to do interviews. They allow for neither confidentiality nor ease in the conversational and probing aspects possible in individual interviews. Although group interviews, in this light, might be the only means for data collection in some situations, they set the scene for neither the depth nor the intensity that can be reached through both one-on-one and focus group interviews.

Morgan provides a comprehensive discussion of focus group research in his text Focus Groups as Qualitative Research (1997). He suggests that “the simplest test of whether focus groups are appropriate for a research project is to ask how actively and easily the participants would discuss the topic of interest” (p. 17). Planning focus group research requires some different design decisions than are needed for one-on-one interviews: Where can you meet as a group? Whom should you invite to participate in each group? How many people should be in each group? How many groups should you include? Morgan gives sound advice on each of these issues as summarized in Figure 4.6 on designing focus group interviews. If you are planning to include focus groups in your research, read his book.

Focus group interviewing relies heavily on facilitation or moderator skills. As in individual interviews, the researcher designs questions aimed at getting words to fly. Unlike in one-on-one interviews, however, discussion does not rely on turn taking between interviewer and participant. Instead, it depends on interaction within the group, stimulated by the researcher’s questions. The researcher becomes the moderator or discussion facilitator, who helps the group set up ground rules at the beginning (only one person talking at a time, allowing others to have their say, etc.) and then may have to only pose or redirect a question from time to time, keeping track of the clock so that the various items are addressed. As in individual interviews, the focus group facilitator often begins the session with an experiential question that each participant answers in turn, providing some baseline data and serving to get everyone comfortable in talking. Sometimes, at the end, each person is again asked to speak, summarizing his or her position on the topic. Morgan (1997) provides a good list of techniques for moderating groups with varying levels of facilitator involvement. He notes that if your focus group comprises teachers or organizational personnel who are used to managing groups, then, with a little instruction, they will run the groups for you.

Although focus group talk may excite you with its liveliness, recording the discussions can be challenging. Except in sessions where participants run discussions themselves, trying to both moderate and note discussion is difficult. Recording the discussion is generally necessary (perhaps with two recorders in different locations to pick up soft voices as well as to have one recorder act as backup). It helps to bring along someone to assist with notation, that is, someone who can jot down who is speaking along with several spoken words so that the recording can be deciphered more easily.

Internet technology has simplified recording issues for researchers who conduct real-time focus groups online. In real-time online discussion groups, all participants are online at the same time. The researcher poses a question, and participants type responses that are transmitted to the whole group. People can reply to any message at any time. Advantages include having a recorded script of the discussion, with each respondent identified, and the ability to have a virtual meeting space in which geographically separated people can participate. These virtual gatherings are inexpensive and tend to be easier to schedule than face-to-face focus groups. Disadvantages include the inability to easily facilitate discussions because they move rapidly, with people responding simultaneously to different messages. And sometimes, the person who types the fastest dominates the discussion or determines the direction it takes (Mann & Stewart, 2000).

Virtual reality sites are another possibility for online focus groups and address some of the disadvantages of chat groups. Participants log onto a virtual world, choose an avatar, and sometimes upload photos. A room with a large seminar table and chairs (or campfire with logs) could be the setting. As participants join the virtual world, their avatars appear, and the real-time discussions can begin.

Non-real-time focus groups can be conducted also. This process is more like email; questions go out to all participants, and each responds to the group when convenient within a set time period. Advantages include the ability to include people from diverse time zones; to generate long, reflective comments; and to involve a large number of people (Mann & Stewart, 2000). A disadvantage is that you tend to lose the interactive group nature, the strength of most focus group research. Setting up a blog can also serve as a kind of non-real-time focus group (Runte, 2008). Alternatively, preestablished blogs can be a source of varying perspectives on a topic. For example, a nurse pursuing research on issues in elder care found a wealth of material at a New York Times blog site called “The New Old Age.”

In summary, focus group interviewing can be an efficient use of time that allows simultaneous access to the perspectives of a number of people on a topic. It can be useful also as a way to interact with research participants and receive their guidance. In addition, focus group research can have emancipatory qualities if the topic is such that the discussion gives voice to silenced experiences or augments personal reflection, growth, and knowledge development.

Focus group research is not without drawbacks. In particular, ethical problems related to confidentiality can arise, and the researcher may therefore decide to not bring up certain topics. With focus groups, the researcher should expect to not get as in-depth information from any one person as with individual interviews, although multiple sessions with the same group can create deep reflections and sharing. And although the discussion may generate new ideas as people explore their experiences and perspectives, it may also silence some people whose ideas are quite different from those of the majority of the group. Contrarily, some might pose a more extreme perspective than they would ordinarily simply to counterbalance an opposing viewpoint. Finally, setting up the focus group event takes work, and moderating the discussion can be exhausting as one tries to balance allowing the discussion to flow and guiding its direction.

A Critique of the Conventional Interview

A group of students, several other faculty, and I had just entered a Warli village in India, where we were going to stay several days. The Warli, like other indigenous- groups in India, have been struggling for land rights in the forested hill areas where they have traditionally lived. Our group of thirty-four dropped sleeping bags and packs in the community building, a large wattle-and-daub structure with an earth floor covered by a veneer of cow dung that binds the dirt and keeps down the dust. After being fed a meal of rice, dhal, and greens, our translator-guides said that the village women would meet with the female students inside the room where we had put our belongings and that the village men would meet with the male students outside under a tree.

As part of an international education program focusing on culture, ecology, and justice, we were living and studying in five different countries over an eight-month period. In addition to other assignments, each student was responsible for doing comparative research on a topic of his or her choice, such as women’s roles in agriculture or causes and impacts of migration. The students, therefore, were not at a loss for questions when the opportunity presented itself. Although not always adept in forming good questions that elicited on-target answers, the students were beginning to feel uneasy about a larger issue. How were the questions setting the stage for a specific type of interaction, more or less controlled by ourselves, the outsiders? How were our questions limiting what we were learning? What would happen if we had no questions, no agenda?

We proceeded with our questions. After a while, the students gave the floor to Jo, whose research project focused on reproductive health. She asked, “What kinds of problems do women have during childbearing?” Our interpreter, who had worked as an advocate and activist among the villagers, suggested that she change the question so it asked each woman to state how many children she had borne and, of those, how many were living. One by one the women answered, “I have born seven children, three are living.” “Five, two are alive.” “Nine, four are still with me.” These simple answers by each woman, often holding a child in her lap in our circle on the dirt floor, were stunning in revealing the complexity of the women’s physical and emotional lives, and in contrasting their lives to our own. Previously formulated questions disappeared as students urgently wanted to know more of these women’s lives: Why had their children died? What happens when a child dies? What role do husbands play in child rearing? What are the daily tasks required of the woman? Now that so many men have to migrate to other areas to earn cash, how has that necessity affected the women’s lives? The women smiled over our questions and always politely answered. When one laughed as she said, “Well, I’m glad the men are gone often—they aren’t here to beat us as much,” we were again bewildered, not only by her statement but that she had laughed as she said it. We didn’t know how to begin to interpret. We had little context for understanding.

Equally, they wanted to know about us and seemed amazed with our answers when they turned our question around and asked us—at least twenty women of childbearing age—how many children we have had and how many had died. None of us had children. They then wanted to know how many of us were married, since we were all beyond the age at which they marry (generally by age thirteen). None of us were married. They wanted to know what kinds of crops we raised. None of us were from farm families, although some of us liked to garden and grew a few summer vegetables when we were in one place long enough. They asked questions of us that we hadn’t considered asking of them: What songs did we sing in the evenings? What dances did we dance together? The only dance we could come up with that we all knew was the hokey-pokey. As the exchange continued, we, the outsiders, despite our vast economic privileges, began to feel bankrupt in cultural practices and community connections. I do not know what the Warli women thought of us overall, but some expressed sincere sympathy for me, a woman with graying hair, who had neither husband nor children.

That researchers would even consider asking strangers questions about their lives is a practice developed over the last century, a practice reflecting, in part, the democratization of knowledge or the belief that everyone has a perspective to contribute. According to Gubrium and Holstein (2002a), the acceptance and growth of interview research is part of modernization. Those of us from westernized countries are used to surveys and interviews as a way of gathering information. We fill them out or take the time to answer questions without giving it much thought. Interviewing is not only an accepted research method in Western cultures, but also a main source of entertainment, whether listening to Terry Gross on public radio or watching Oprah Winfrey on television.

In order for this democratization of knowledge to occur, another change took place first: the individualization of the self. “The notion of the bounded, unique self, more or less integrated as the center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, is a very recent version of the subject” (Gubrium & Holstein, 2002a, p. 6). In many societies, a collective self made up of family or community or tribe is the seat of authority, not the individual. The collective self is a concept that’s difficult to grasp for those raised in individual-focused societies.

The interview process, despite being the mainstay data-gathering technique in qualitative research and despite its role in documenting the voices of many perspectives, can also be seen as having its roots in a kind of colonizing approach to research. Typically, the researcher is “in control,” developing the questions and thereby determining the direction of the interaction. Typically, the interviewer tries to remain open and to not influence what the respondent will say through body language or verbally. The respondent can thereby be viewed as a receptacle of knowledge that the researcher exploits. And the researcher, although managing the interaction, is also somewhat passive in that, other than the questions, he or she contributes little to what is being said.

As poststructuralist scholars challenge conventional research practices, the interview process is under scrutiny. How can we co-construct interviews? How do we learn from each other and create a dynamic in which we co-construct knowledge? Do different situations call for different kinds of interview practices? When? How do we decide?

Bringing these “considerations” up here is not meant to imply that you should disregard this chapter with advice steeped in the interpretive research paradigm. All disciplines go through “moments” (Lincoln & Denzin, 2000)—and sometimes fads—in which scholars embrace new ideas, reassemble them, incorporate some aspects, discard others. Qualitative research is not a static procedure, and those who practice it hope it never becomes so. Current challenges make the process personally interesting and morally vital as we struggle to determine the kind of researcher we each want to be and how our choices reflect, challenge, and contribute to the world in which we live.

Through these considerations, I also want to remind you that what we come to know, whether “gathered” or “co-constructed,” is always partial, always fragmented. I mentioned that while we were inside the community center with the Warli women, the male students and faculty were outside with the Warli men. While our group of women grew increasingly depressed with what we were learning, the male students were feeling elated. They and the Warli men had discussed intensely the struggles for community and for communal autonomy. They had shared philosophical perspectives and found common ground in their needs for connection, friendship, and brotherhood. In the same village, on the same evening, we regrouped from our conversations with two very different understandings of Warli life.

Qualitative research provides many opportunities to engage feelings within both researcher and research participants. The feelings in question are those that are involved in research relationships (the matters of rapport, trust, and friendship) and those that are involved in reactions to and reflections on the research topic and process (the matters of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and reflexivity). All of these are issues discussed in the next chapter.