Interviews Flashcards
What are interviews used in?
Jobs Entertainment Legal Journalism Academic research - most widely used method of data collection
What are all interviews for?
Disclosure
What is disclosure?
This is making the ppt feel like they can say things that they wouldn’t usually say
Why interviews?
Depends what you are interested in:
nomothetic - measuring attitudes in populations, discovering general laws
idiographic - exploring cases, studying particular facts or processes
What do you need for nomothetic vs ideographic approaches?
nomothetic - tendencies of populations, large numbers required, quantitative
idiographic - case study, small numbers needed, qualitative analysis
How can interviews be used in a nomoethetic project?
As part of piloting - discover issues to ask about and wording to use in questionnaires and experiments. Large number of interviewees can indicate commonalities
What are the types of interviews?
Structured - the same for everyone, in written form
Semi-structured - set of themes and basic ideas for everyone, allowing for prompts and follow ups, more flexible
Unstructured - general themes, issues you want to discuss, less comparable across cases
What is firstly important for an interview?
Introduction / explanation - reminder what it is about, set the agenda, tell them practical info such as the time, and reassure them of confidentiality
How do the questions need to be set out?
From general to more specific questions - funnelling - give ppl space to raise topics, helps gather detail and checking responses.
Then follow with more narrow items
Techniques from open to closed questions - invite people to talk
How can you aid people to add more to there answer?
Follow ups and prompts
Reflexion - so you say this.. invites more elaboration or disclosure and is a change to check what the person is saying
Helps elaboration
How can you encourage disclosure?
Expres ignorance - if you act like you know loads, then they won’t want to talk. Encourages the interviewee to state the obvious and give voice to unstated assumption
Ask for concrete examples
What are some do nots?
Double barrelled questions - don’t know what they are responding too
Introduce assumptions - make them think they should answer a particular way
Complex or jargon words - think about population
Include double negatives - this is ambiguous, don’t know what the answer means
How do ensure it is clear what you are asking?
Piloting - helps to identify problems within wording - try the schedule out on other people first before running it properly
What is the most important thing about the wordings of interviews?
Disclosure
What is the most important thing to ensure during an interview?
Rapport - an informal conversation like relationship to enhance disclosure - like a normal convo with turn taking but agenda is still there, still has the roles of both people
How to ensure rapport?
Relaxed
Atmosphere of openness
Trust - that you won’t say anything
especially important for sensitive topics - people need to trust you won’t go and tell what you have said to others
What is there a balance between?
Giving space - the opportunity, time to bring up interesting material that you may not have anticipated versus retaining control of the agenda - if you only have 45 mins booked, you need to ensure you can ask all your questions and not let the person go on an tangent
social skills required: judgement in recognising when they’re straying or saying something important, tact in keeping them on topic
How will you record the interview?
Taking notes in the session - don’t give person full attention, distracting for patient
notes from memory - won’t be accurate
recording device - and microphones
video - capture non verbal communication
What do you do before any analysis?
Transcription: aim is for verbatim - used what they actually said
decide what to transcribe: meanings, words
Does transcribing take long?
1 hour of talking takes 6 hours of transcription - basic transcription
need to decide where to put fullstops, utterances etc - all dependent on your research question
What do you do with this transcript?
Code it
selective - select extract from data that is relevant to question
complete - line by line coding
How do you know what to code?
Depends on your research question - what you are interested in
How much material goes into a coded chunk?
It will vary but meaning may be lost if the coded chunk is too small - a single word shouldn’t be used
What method of analysis will you use?
Choice between
top down - a priori categories - content analysis - already know what you’re interested in and look for that, make them code for that
bottom up - thematic analysis - keep close to the data and notice features without preconception - code from what you have
or both - open minded but know what they want to see
How are interviews analysed?
Qualitatively - interested in the types of things that people say rather than how strongly they endorse them
but it is possible to do quantitative data on interview data - e.g. if you have 100 interviewees - you can count the coded chunks, do some statistics but if you have 5, you can’t do stats
What is the problem of having loads of interview data?
You can count and code your data - create operational definitions of what you are interested in, but as you code, you may have to simplify or reduce complex utterances that would be there if the raw data was there
Why do interviews?
Carry out interviews because they want to analyse the data qualitatively
exploration of a topic
giving research participants voice
interest in and respect for own language, concepts
interested in subjective experiences
What are interviews high in?
Validity - authenticity
because have the flexibility to probe answers to find what each personn really thinks or feels, probe behaviour
questionnaires allow you to measure how many people feel x, but not explore what this means
What are interviews low in?
Reliability - not standardised - makes comparing across cases difficult, if you want to say something about how your interviewees responded to the same questionnaire, needs to be structured
What do interviews overly rely on?
Self report for behaviours - can’t observe to see if they did it, how do you know something is true in practise, need observations and behavioural measures
true for questionnaires as well
may be interested in feelings anyway
can’t always do observations - mass emergencies
What are the practical limits?
Time consuming per ppt compared to questionnaires - usually rationalise for a case study design (student projects only involve 5 interviewees)
What are interviewer effects?
Features of the interviewee: gender, ethnicity, appearance
Actions of them: responses to what they say
nods to the right answer etc
inhibiting or encouraging some answers
How can you minimise interviewer effects?
Matching of the interviewers and interviewees - e.g. genders
Actions - training the interviewers to be consistent
What are similar in interviews?
They all have a similar context and genre - the form of interaction will impact the interviewee - interview is a representative of some social category
Why should interaction be focused on?
Presentation of analysis shouldn’t be separate from their interactive context because otherwise we can’t see what the interviewer has asked - interview is a social relationship, what they say might differ from real life - not natural
Beyond interviews
Discourse analysis - recording of natural conversations and then analyse them
What are the advantages?
Can be used in other research designs:
Focus groups - add group dynamics to the interview context, interaction is not noise, it is data
Participant observation - framework for carrying out interviews
Piloting - for survey questionnaire studies, can ask people what to include in a questionnaire
