For this activity I interveiwed my fourteen year old daughter. She has autism, but is considered high-functioning and absolutely verbal.
The main goal for the interview was to complete my assignment for the class, of course, but I am also interested in conducting a study about how autistic children connect with their parents. This study, though still in its early planning stage, is in its essence about the experience of feeling connected to another person, and therefore, is phenomenological in nature. So I thought it would be good idea to do an interview as a pilot. However, to make this activity work for my class, I also planned to ask Becky about her feelings of frustration and joy as these two are most obvious emotions that I readily witness in our daily interactions.
The interview took place in my bedroom because this is where we had some heart-to-heart conversations in our past, and I figured it will be a good setting to induce a frank dialogue. I videotaped the interview via Zoom, and had a chance to view it later which turned out to be a great idea.
Overall, the interview was not very succesful because I was not able to elicit as much information as I had hoped. I started with probing whether she understands what it means to feel “connected” to another person. She was able to articulate a good definition of a human connection, and appeared to understand the difference between “getting along” with someone and feeling “close” to someone. She recalled several memories of events where she experienced a connection with her brothers (I asked her about those as warm-ups” and to see whether she connects with them differently than with me). Then I asked her about instances when she felt a special connection to me. I asked her several questions about each event focusing on what it felt like. I asked her about physical surroundings, the context behind each moment, what emotions she experienced, why these moments were special and tried to get her to use her (excellent) sensory memory of smells, colors, lighting, sounds, and other details. Her answers, however, were mostly laconic.
Despite my efforts to keep her engaged, she grew tired of our conversation after about 30 minutes, and I know she kept on going out of politeness for another 10-12 minutes because I could tell by her body language that she had enough. She finally said “Mom, don;t get mad at me, but how much longer do we have to do this?” Frankly, I was surprised that she lasted even this long because she typically does not stay focused on something unless it was her idea. I do not think it was a mistake to recruit her for this interview, but this illustrates Roulston’s advice that the participant should be “able to talk about the particular lived experience under examination” (Roulston 2013, p. 11).
In my case, I knew she was ABLE to talk about her experiences because we talk about her experiences often, but I think the trick is that interviews are not just conversations, they are EXAMINATIONS, and that means they must be more rigorous than regular talks.
On the other hand, I did not want the interview to turn into an interrogation because she would definitely pick up on this and probably resist it. So I maintained a friendly conversational tone, and echoed her memories as much as I could especially when I remembered the event she was describing.
Perhaps, the biggest deficit in my interview was a rather late discovery that Becky’s language in reference to emotions was limited. For example, “happy” was just that, “happy.” I tried to get her to use other words, and she did it a few times, but not enough to say “I collected rich data.”
….Now that I think about it, she previously commented after reading my autoethnography narratives that I am “very dramatic.” So perhaps, she deliberately avoided appearing “dramatic” as well.
So, here are some of my take-away thoughts:
- Next time, I would not interview her for longer than 30 minutes; maybe plan for several shorter sessions instead.
- Maybe I could get her to draw what she is talking about and get more details out of her through the description. This is not something I would do for this class, but it seems like an idea worth trying in the future.
- I have to keep in mind that many teenagers have very strong ideas about what is “cool” and what is not, so getting them to open up and to be frank may become a serious limitation.
- I think I may have had a well-formed idea about what I will hear, so when I did not hear exactly what I expected, I thought my interview did not go well. This is probably my toughest and most valuable lesson-be wary of making hypotheses in qualitative inquiry!
This was a great experience despite my feeling that I did not get as much out of her as I had hoped. Lessons learned, and I am eager for more! I like what I am getting out of this class.