Interviews

Question 1

What are interviews used in?

Answer 1

Jobs
Entertainment
Legal
Journalism
Academic research - most widely used method of data collection

Question 2

What are all interviews for?

Answer 2

Disclosure

Question 3

What is disclosure?

Answer 3

This is making the ppt feel like they can say things that they wouldn’t usually say

Question 4

Why interviews?

Answer 4

Depends what you are interested in:
nomothetic - measuring attitudes in populations, discovering general laws

idiographic - exploring cases, studying particular facts or processes

Question 5

What do you need for nomothetic vs ideographic approaches?

Answer 5

nomothetic - tendencies of populations, large numbers required, quantitative

idiographic - case study, small numbers needed, qualitative analysis

Question 6

How can interviews be used in a nomoethetic project?

Answer 6

As part of piloting - discover issues to ask about and wording to use in questionnaires and experiments. Large number of interviewees can indicate commonalities

Question 7

What are the types of interviews?

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What is firstly important for an interview?

Answer 8

Introduction / explanation - reminder what it is about, set the agenda, tell them practical info such as the time, and reassure them of confidentiality

Question 9

How do the questions need to be set out?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

How can you aid people to add more to there answer?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

How can you encourage disclosure?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

What are some do nots?

Answer 12

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

Question 13

How do ensure it is clear what you are asking?

Answer 13

Piloting - helps to identify problems within wording - try the schedule out on other people first before running it properly

Question 14

What is the most important thing about the wordings of interviews?

Answer 14

Disclosure

Question 15

What is the most important thing to ensure during an interview?

Answer 15

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

Question 16

How to ensure rapport?

Answer 16

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

Question 17

What is there a balance between?

Answer 17

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

Question 18

How will you record the interview?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What do you do before any analysis?

Answer 19

Transcription: aim is for verbatim - used what they actually said
decide what to transcribe: meanings, words

Question 20

Does transcribing take long?

Answer 20

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

Question 21

What do you do with this transcript?

Answer 21

Code it
selective - select extract from data that is relevant to question
complete - line by line coding

Question 22

How do you know what to code?

Answer 22

Depends on your research question - what you are interested in

Question 23

How much material goes into a coded chunk?

Answer 23

It will vary but meaning may be lost if the coded chunk is too small - a single word shouldn’t be used

Question 24

What method of analysis will you use?

Answer 24

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

Question 25

How are interviews analysed?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What is the problem of having loads of interview data?

Answer 26

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

Question 27

Why do interviews?

Answer 27

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

Question 28

What are interviews high in?

Answer 28

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

Question 29

What are interviews low in?

Answer 29

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

Question 30

What do interviews overly rely on?

Answer 30

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

Question 31

What are the practical limits?

Answer 31

Time consuming per ppt compared to questionnaires - usually rationalise for a case study design (student projects only involve 5 interviewees)

Question 32

What are interviewer effects?

Answer 32

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

Question 33

How can you minimise interviewer effects?

Answer 33

Matching of the interviewers and interviewees - e.g. genders

Actions - training the interviewers to be consistent

Question 34

What are similar in interviews?

Answer 34

They all have a similar context and genre - the form of interaction will impact the interviewee - interview is a representative of some social category

Question 35

Why should interaction be focused on?

Answer 35

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

Question 36

Beyond interviews

Answer 36

Discourse analysis - recording of natural conversations and then analyse them

Question 37

What are the advantages?

Answer 37

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