I had a nearly perfect candidate for this interview: an old acquaintance who is a recently divorced mother of two children running a small business. We both looked forward to this interview: I because I find this woman’s life interesting and in some ways, even look up to her. She because she says she likes to talk about herself, and in the light of the recent divorce, she finds reaching out to friends particularly therapeutic.
Problem: she could not make it, so we ended up talking on the phone. In a way, her schedule change ended up being a blessing in disguise because I unexpectedly received a chance to explore yet another mode of interviewing. Now that I look back on my experience, I think this was my least favorite and most difficult interview because (1) I have trouble hearing over the phone, (2) I could not record our conversation, and (3) I could not see her facial expressions. On the bright side, I think we managed to establish the level of sincerity (or intimacy as Roulston puts it), and I think I overall was successful at reaching my objectives to create spaces for her to ask me questions and to “provide opportunities for her to steer the conversation towards topics of interest to her” (p. 27). In short, phone interviews are a desperate, yet still a viable option.
How I provided spaces for her to ask me questions.
The choice of the participant was my best trick: my friend is a good listener and a very social person by nature! Still, I had to work a little bit at getting her to switch focus from her to me. I admitted to her early on in our conversation that I went through a divorce once. This acted as both a question seed and a way to establish an empathetic connection. I wanted to know how she manages the business as a woman and shared some of my experiences trying to gain the business of male clients (almost every male client I attempted to win ended up being a waste of time). I also shared my opinion that with male clients it is almost always the issue of power: who gets to make creative decisions, who has priority in what a finished project should look like, and so forth. As the result, my interviewee asked me some questions, just as I intended, but I think I let my interview slip because she used her questions to provide me with some advice instead of connecting deeper as I had hoped. That’s OK. Perhaps, I came across as self-deprecating? I will need to think about this one some more.
Providing opportunities for her to steer the conversation.
I think this was the easiest task because she was working out her emotional wounds in the aftermath of her divorce–she was very interested in my opinion about who gets the biggest blame, she or her ex-husband. She did it very tastefully, though, and was very aware that these questions aren’t quite fair, so she quickly changed direction to tell me what it was like to live in the same house under the same roof a few months prior to the split.
Now that I think about it, this sounds almost like a conversation created to fulfill emotional needs of a friend, but to me, having the researcher’s agenda in the back of my head, it was much more. I got some important insight into reasoning and logic of a recently divorced woman. It sounded like she was going through some well-defined stages in her transition from a married woman to a single mother. This was valuable to me as a researcher and had I been interested in this topic, I would immediately conduct a literature review to see how my observations echo other researchers’ reports.
Lessons learned:
Do not schedule anything too close to the deadline! Common sense, but here I was, pacing the floor with a phone in my head instead of recording a face to face interview.
Be prepared to record anything, even a phone conversation–I would like to play around with some options about recording a phone interview. I need to study my phone!
I need to pay attention to how I try to relate–it seems that I make myself sound needier than I am.
Overall, I think it was a good learning experience.