Category: EDG 7931 Interviewing Theory & Practice

Who am I as a researcher?

My answer to this question is just as fluid as my researcher identity is. I say “it depends” because I discovered that each new interview project added something new to my understanding of why I want to do research. The phenomenological interview project sent me to the philosophers’ corner as I wrestled with my epistemological beliefs and the construct of motherhood; the ethnographic interview made me aware of my membership in a world that is greater than my cozy little oyster shell. The feminist interview caused me to interrogate my womanhood just as I learned more about the woman I interviewed; the oral history project took me back to my Soviet roots and reminded me that history is subjective. I once again concluded that research questions are everywhere and that as long as I remain curious, I will never want for interesting topics to study.

What are my assumptions concerning knowledge production?
My entire life I thought that knowledge is something that is. Like the knowledge of “good and evil” in the first chapter of the Bible, it exists independent of us humans. I imagined that research is just one of the ways to tap into it, which is why methodology is so important: the more sound the research design, the more knowledge you get.  In the past few weeks, I realized that knowledge may actually be something that we humans create, so I busied myself with figuring out how method fits in this epistemological view. Interviews helped me understand how subjective the term “quality” can be, and that I need to view such subjectivity as an asset rather than a limitation. I concluded that rigor is more important than any attempt at validity, so if I create knowledge, I better make sure I did my absolute best–no shortcuts, no compromise.

How do I ask interview questions?

By listening to my recordings, I found that my questions need a lot of practice: I mumble, ask convoluted questions, and even talk to myself now and then. However, I must consider how this blends in with my subjectivity as a researcher: I am still learning, and I wonder if my lack of experience actually helps establish rapport with participants.
When roles are reversed, I always find myself most frank in conversations with peers, not officials; I am also more open to being vulnerable if my conversation partner is not afraid of being vulnerable as well. Therefore, by coming across as naturally imperfect interviewer, I may be inviting a more genuine exchange.

What are the implications of my interview practice for the data generated?

I need to prepare better. I need to experiment more. This semester, the majority of my participants were family and friends, and our learning environment was low risk and fun. However, as I look ahead to my future research ideas, I realize that my experiences will eventually include uncomfortable silences, lack of connection with the interviewee, misunderstandings, cultural mismatches, emotionally sensitive topics, and other unpredictable elements discussed by Roulston in chapter 9. I believe that more experience may translate into more rich data, but I think the trick will be in designing studies that utilize my strengths and allow room for error.

What are the implications of my theoretical assumptions concerning research for how data might be analyzed, interpreted and represented?

I am still trying to learn the answer to this question. My goal is to become familiar with as many theoretical angles as I can because I believe that for the purpose of analysis, theoretical assumptions are tools; therefore, the bigger my toolbox, the more I can do with my data, the more rigorous my research process.

As I reflect on the past few weeks, I am grateful for this opportunity to think, learn, and grow in this semester. Thank you.

 

References

Tong, A., & Dew, M. A. (2016). Qualitative research in transplantation: Ensuring relevance and rigor. Transplantation, (4), 710.

Location: participants live in Russia, Khabarovsk. Connected via Skype (recorded by Zoom).
Participants: my mother (77 years old) and my dad (75 years old)

Wow, this was almost impromptu. I had to seize the moment: yesterday I spoke with my parents on Skype and asked them if they would be interested in telling me about some of their memories from the Soviet era. They asked me bluntly: “like what?” and I blurted out “The day Stalin died” because this was the first thing that popped into my head that I knew will not be too touchy. The current political relationship between the U.S. and Russia has left a sticky, smelly, uncomfortable divide in our recent conversations, and I often feel caught in between my husband’s feelings about Russia’s behavior in the international arena and my parents’ comments. Truly, we live in entirely different worlds, and I am unwilling to take sides. Why do I have to take sides anyway? And yet, somehow, I get emotionally involved against my will. To my parents, I am an “American;” to my husband, I am “Russian…”

My parents wanted to start the conversation immediately, and I was afraid that if I wait until mid-June, they will lose interest, or that their account will be recalled and processed through the lens of modern times, so I decided to do this project sooner. We agreed to Skype the next morning (their night).

…So Stalin it is–back in my day, he was a god turned villain, and I know that the controversy over his role in my parents’ lives (and in my childhood) is actually a  point of convergence, not divide. At the very least, it is ambiguous and therefore, does not immediately throw red flags for heated debates. I Skyped in the next day, and they had an entire day to think about our conversation.

My preparation was limited to quickly choosing the topic and recalling why the death of Stalin came up. Three years ago I took my kids to visit my parents, and my mom accompanied us to a local history museum. There, in the halls dedicated to the WWII era, I remember having a conversation with the curator about the day Stalin died. The curator was my mom’s age, and what I did not expect was that she reflected on the event with sadness. My mom jumped into our conversation, and I realized how complex Soviet people’s relationship with their leadership had been. So I have been itching to ask my parents more about their experiences, and I invited both of them to participate in my interview.

I tried to begin the recording with a formal statement about why I am recording our conversation and how I plan to use it, but I struggled with words–my Russian is getting rusty. They laughed, and I wondered if I can learn much about interviewing from talking to my parents. But the topic was simply too interesting to abandon. Although the conversation itself was fascinating, the purpose of this post to reflect on the process, and with this in mind, here is what stood out to me:

Things that did not work for me:

1. Interviewing via Skype or Zoom inevitably leads to technical issues.
   Specifically, I could not figure out how to record our conversation using Skype app on my tablet, so I opened Zoom, sent the invite to my parents, but that was not good either because (a) my mom could not get Zoom going on the account of being unfamiliar with the application and installation process or even IP conflicts and (b) I still could not figure how to record it on my tablet. So I ended up speaking to them via Skype on my tablet and recording our conversation by Zoom on my laptop. This actually ended up being a blessing in disguise because I ended up being the focal point of the recording, and I was later able to see my body language and facial expressions.
2. Speaking via Skype produced a lag. My father would complain that my lips are moving, but there was no sound. In other words, our “real” time was not that real because what I saw and heard was possibly perceived differently by them. In other words, while I was concentrating on our conversation, they were potentially concentrating on our Internet connection, and thank God I was speaking with my parents because we had no problem asking to repeat the bits either of us could not hear or understand. Had this interview been with a less familiar person, I would be worried about the dynamic–the interviewee being too shy to ask, or me not wanting to interrupt an account in hope to make sense of the misunderstood pieces in the recording, later.
3. I should have prepared more concrete questions to serve as guides. The conversation ended up being amazing, but I recall at least three different times when I could have taken a new direction. For example, when I asked them to tell me about the day Stalin died, my mother had an almost mocking facial expression when she talked about her grief. She was 12, and her mood was “I am not going to button my coat because it does not matter if I get sick–Stalin is dead!” I asked whether her grimace was a gesture of disapproval of her then-disposition or whether it was because she was uncomfortable discussing her feelings. I could definitely see myself straying into a topic “Soviet identity,” for example, had I not been resolute to keep questioning her about the events. Similarly, with my dad, I asked him about newspapers and media as the main mode of news dissemination, and I almost got sidetracked into discussing propaganda and trust. I suppose this would work for exploratory interviews, but in this particular case lack of preparation caused a distraction.

Things that worked:

1. Interviewing two people at the same time worked well–I felt that they led the conversation, bracketed each other’s accounts, and added extra dimensions to my data through disagreements. I do not think this would work well for most interviews, especially if two people are not familiar with each other. Oral history was a perfect genre for this particular dynamic, and I feel that it was a good conversation for all of us.
2. Familiarity with each other put us all at ease, and I feel it elicited frank and sincere responses.
3. I thought my eye contact, body language, and energy were good, although I can see how this might be debatable if I interviewed a person from another culture.
4. I loved the experience!

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.

 

This week I tried interviewing Gretchen over Zoom. Completely forgot to push the “record” button!!!!!!!! So frustrated and upset with myself! Thank God it was just a training interview and I did not need to transcribe it for a real research. Lesson learned.

I have known Gretchen for a few months, and our interview indeed resembled a “friendly conversation” (Roulston, p. 14). What I struggled with was the “ongoing analysis of data” that I was supposed to use to guide the interview in the direction of my interests–the ethnographic exploration of a life with autistic children. As a mother of a child with special needs, I am very interested in how different or similar my life is compared to the other parents’. I am not that naive to think that our experiences are exactly alike, but I still wanted to see if there are some points in common.

So  I wanted to learn about Gretchen’s daily life as a mother of two special needs children, and I asked her questions like “what is your typical day like?” and “What places do you frequent with the boys and why?” However, I got sidetracked into creating a sort of a timeline with her: when she became a mother and what were the circumstances. Roulston did mention that “time” is an important piece of ethnographic work; yet, once we started discussing how places she lived and visited made an impact on her journey to the “now,” I became fascinated with her experiences and life choices and before long, my interview became more phenomenological in nature than ethnographic. I think that in a real scenario I would not be so concerned with the genre because I was getting some amazing, rich data, but I still should have stayed more focused on the task at hand. Also, I was very aware of how my interview is getting away from me because I had to mind the fact that I am doing an assignment, and not just simply exploring or even chatting with a peer. Come to think of it, I really WAS chatting with her, but I cannot say I am feeling guilty because, in the end, I learned a great deal about Gretchen, and therefore, reached my ultimate goal.

…I think I would have done better if I actually asked her to tell me about a specific event or two instead of learning about many events that make up her life. Or maybe not… I am not sure.

Pleasant surprise: my interview unexpectedly (or maybe Gretchen did this on purpose, but did not tell me) gained ethnographic value when we started talking about her house. She actually gave me a quick visual tour of her room; therefore, telecommuting worked out even better than speaking face to face.  Had it not been for Zoom, I would not have thought to ask her to describe her environment, but it is such an important portion of my interest in the bio-ecology of autistic children! I did not even realize this until now! I also never thought about this particular advantage of Zoom, and I am taking a mental note of Zoom’s usefulness for ethnography, and feeling super lucky because I  got a taste of what video-elicitation technique can do.

Lastly, there is one thought that feels uncomfortable, but this is precisely why I must discuss it further: earlier this week, I made a comment in our online exchange that Gretchen should do an autoethnography because she expressed some uncertainty about her current direction in research. I sounded cocky when I said I should “totally interview you,” therefore, implying that my interview would somehow have a therapeutic value, or bring clarity. I was very assuming, and therefore, exceeded my ethical boundaries and even undermined my own agency as a researcher. To mind comes a quote I read in Munby’s article:

“What discussions of trustworthiness, credibility, reliability, validity seem to lack is the sense that research has a purpose. (not the “Statement of Purpose”) …I am interested in what we think research that we do is for: What is the point?”  (p.155)

My mistake became clear when I realized how little control I have (or even want to have–she is empowered!) over our conversation.

For this interview, I reached out to my daughter’s therapist. I chose her for this topic because she mentioned in our conversations before that she “hates teachers.” She was expressing her frustration about a certain incident, of course, but I sensed she formed some strong opinions about education, or at least, our local school district. Moreover, I knew it would be a good conversation because J is articulate and skilled in delivering points and yet gentle in argument.

We met in my living room, and I videotaped our interview via Zoom software for a chance to review and reflect on it at a later date. The interview lasted 1 hr 2 minutes, and could have gone further had I not stopped it out of respect for my participant’s time.

The topic of our interview was “Education” and more specifically, “Special  Education.” I started by quoting her earlier comment about teachers to elicit strong emotional response and to set the tone for our conversation.

I learned quite a bit about her dispositions on the topic. It seems to me, however, that her opinions are weighted heavily by her professional experiences of working with troubled teenagers and their families, as well as her personal childhood experiences and experiences as a single mother raising children in Hernando county. This was the only time I openly challenged her.

I also pointed out an incosistency in her logic when in the beginning she explained that many problems in education today are due to litigation-happy culture, but later she praised a local magnet school for modeling our culture through its micro-society program complete with banks, law enforcement, and even a judicial system and court. I brought attention to this point of view by recalling the former statement imediately after the latter and asked for a clarification.

I think there were some points in my interview with J where I could have collected more rich information  had I formed a more clear research question before hand. This is where I think I have done poorly, and it was probably because I felt overly confident about my topic. I wanted to know what curriculum ideology or educational philosophy she supports because this is something I have been pondering for a while as a parent and as an educator. So I wanted her to tell me what the purpose of education is in her opinion. Why do we put children in school? I left the question intentionally vague to provoke some questions, but it did, but not to the degree I expected. I think I should have been more assertive.
I knew I was going to have a semi-structured interview, but I should have done some reflexive writing prior to the interview to give my thoughts a better direction and to add conviction. Maybe I also should have read some literature about social workers’ or therapists’ dispositions in education context.

What went well
Well, I was not nervous. This was my first interview with a person who is not a family member or a very close friend. Last time I attempted this task as an undergraduate, I could barely put two words together.
I think my questions elicited some good responses, and I made some discoveries on the topic of social inequality and parental involvement in education. Did OK overall, but definitely need improvement.

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:

1. Next time, I would not interview her for longer than 30 minutes; maybe plan for several shorter sessions instead.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.