Interviews in Qualitative Research

Nigel King, Christine Horrocks, Joanna Brooks

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781473987685
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Recherche scientifique et méthodologie

This dynamic user-focused book will help you to get the data you want from your interviews. It provides practical guidance regarding technique, gives top-tips from real world case studies and shares achievable checklists and interview plans.

Whether you are doing interviews in your own research or just using other researchers' data, this book will tell you everything you need to know about designing, planning, conducting and analyzing quality interviews. It explains how to:

-Construct ethical research designs

-Record and manage your data

-Transcribe your notes

-Analyse your findings

-Disseminate your conclusions

Written using clear, jargon-free terminology and with coverage of practical, theoretical and philosophical issues all grounded in examples from real interviews, this is the ideal guide for new and experienced researchers alike.

Nigel King is Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Huddersfield.

Christine Horrocks isProfessor of Applied Social Psychology and Head of the Department of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Joanna Brooks isLecturer in the Manchester Centre for Health Psychology at the University of Manchester.

1 Introduction

Defining the qualitative research interview

Turn on your television and flick through the channels; there is a good chance you will see someone being interviewed. It may be a politician facing a grilling from a tough political journalist, a celebrity answering flattering questions about her latest film, book or exercise DVD, a football manager explaining how his team let a two goal lead slip. Perhaps it is a fictionalised representation of a canny detective extracting the truth from her prime suspect, or a psychiatrist diagnosing the nature of a patient’s neurosis. And interviewing may well have impinged directly on your own life, be it in the form of a job interview, or someone with a clipboard questioning you on the street about your preferences for cosmetic products. It is no exaggeration to state that interviews have become a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary life, to such an extent that Gubrium and Holstein (2002) famously claimed we are members of an ‘interview society’.

This book is about a particular form of the phenomenon: the qualitative research interview. Undoubtedly interviewing is the most commonly used method of data collection in qualitative research, and this familiarity has advantages for us as researchers. As the first author has stated elsewhere (King, 2004a), when you tell a potential participant that you want to interview them, they will usually have a pretty good idea of the kind of encounter they are agreeing to. However, this familiarity also carries risks. The qualitative research interview differs in important ways from other forms to which people (including inexperienced researchers) will be more accustomed. Failure to recognise the special requirements of a qualitative research interview can result in the elicitation of data that have serious limitations for a study: for example, the interview may be shallow and superficial if the interviewer is too deferential to the interviewee, or the participant may clam up if she feels the interviewer is too aggressive. In this book we will spell out in considerable detail the distinctive characteristics of qualitative research interviews, also drawing attention to important variations within the method. To start you thinking about this, consider the comparison between qualitative research interviews and three other types of interview, shown in Table 1.1.

Of course, we have had to generalise in this table about qualitative research interviews (and indeed the other forms) but it does help to highlight key features of the method. We would suggest that the following are defining characteristics of the generic qualitative interview:

• It is flexible and open-ended in style
• It tends to focus on people’s actual experiences more than general beliefs and opinions
• The relationship between interviewer and interviewee is crucial to the method

How these characteristics translate into interview practice will vary across different types of qualitative study, as will their relative importance. We will discuss such differences in more detail in the rest of this book.

Aims and structure of this book

In this book we aim to provide you with comprehensive coverage of what you need to know to conduct a research study using qualitative interviews. Our emphasis is strongly practical; we will take you through the processes of designing and carrying out qualitative interview research in detail, using numerous examples based on our own and others’ projects. At the same time, we firmly believe that even the most applied research needs to have a clear theoretical and philosophical grounding, and we will cover these aspects of qualitative interviewing too. Each chapter ends with an annotated list of recommended reading. In terms of discipline our focus is broad, drawing on literature from across the social sciences in such diverse topic areas as health, education, criminal justice, sport science, business and management, and others. As to level, we see this book as being particularly useful for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students who may be carrying out substantial research projects utilising qualitative interviews. We also believe it should be helpful for more experienced researchers who are relatively new to qualitative interviewing, or who need updating in specific areas – for instance, the possibilities offered by online interviewing (see Chapter 7).

Table 1.1

We have structured the book to take you sequentially through all steps involved in carrying out a qualitative interview study. The chapters are, though, relatively self-contained allowing you to dip in to areas that especially interest you. Chapter 2 introduces the philosophical issues which should inform your choice of approach, to ensure you have a firm foundation for the methodological decisions you make in the course of developing a project. This is followed in Chapter 3 by a consideration of ethical issues that need to inform all aspects of interview-based research. From here, the next two chapters move on to the practicalities of designing and carrying out a qualitative interview study. Our goal is to be as specific and concrete as possible in the advice we give, rather than staying at the level of general principles. We have done this by using real-world examples and also by considering in some depth aspects of the research process that are often addressed sketchily (if at all) in methodological textbooks. These include such things as the pros and cons of different ways of contacting potential participants, the choice and effective use of recording equipment, and issues around your self-presentation in varying interview settings.

The following three chapters address variations from the conventional format of the individual face-to-face interview. In Chapter 6 we look at the challenges involved in group interviews, concentrating mainly on focus groups, but also highlighting other less well-known forms. In Chapter 7 we consider the use of ‘remote’ interview techniques in qualitative research – telephone and online interviewing. The former are quite widely used and yet have received very little attention in the methodological literature. The latter has become an extensive area of activity that no examination of qualitative methods can afford to ignore. It includes both synchronous (‘real time’, such as Instant Messaging) and asynchronous (e.g. e-mail) forms and can be either one-to-one or group in design. Chapter 8 examines another area of growing interest across many disciplines; the use of visual methods within qualitative interviewing.

Next we move on to address the important topic of reflexivity (Chapter 9). We combine an examination of the theory and philosophy underlying the concept with pragmatic suggestions for how to incorporate a reflexive approach into your own work. Considerations of reflexivity do not only apply to research design and data collection, they also must be borne in mind in relation to what you do with your data. While this book does not seek to be a comprehensive text on qualitative data analysis, we have in Chapter 10 provided a thorough introduction to the principles and practice of thematic analysis, particularly for those relatively new to the field. We also briefly cover some of the main variants to this style of analysis and provide pointers to further information on different analytic approaches.

Chapters 11, 12 and 13 differ from earlier ones as each focuses on a particular philosophical and methodological tradition in some depth, and considers the place of interviewing within them: Chapter 11 covers phenomenology, Chapter 12 discourse analysis and Chapter 13 narrative. If you are new to these traditions, we would suggest you read earlier chapters first. This should allow you to get a good grasp of some of the generic principles and practices in qualitative interviewing before getting to grips with how these apply and might be adapted when taking a specific theoretical approach. At the heart of each of these chapters is an examination of what it means to use a phenomenological, discursive or narrative interview method, but we also introduce the philosophical and theoretical backgrounds to each, and give an overview of some of the main ways of analysing interview data from these perspectives.

Over many years of conducting qualitative interviews in varied styles and settings, it has been our experience that it is a challenging but ultimately very rewarding way of doing research. Through close and sustained engagement with participants, not only can you gain insight into the topics you are studying, you can also learn about yourself. We hope this book helps you make the most of this endeavour.

Recommended Reading

Gubrium J.F. and Holstein J.A. (2001) From the individual interview to the interview society, in J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein (eds) Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

A critical examination of the rise of the interview in contemporary society. Gubrium and Holstein argue that the interview not only enables us to inquire about our social world, it is actually a significant constituent of the kind of society we live in.

2 Philosophical Assumptions

Qualitative interviewing has become a prominent research method in the social sciences. Face-to-face conversation is an everyday occurrence, and this has probably resulted in an assumption that interviewing is a preferred option because the researcher feels most at ease with this technique. In well-executed research preferences are not the issue, rather the focus is on justification: to what extent can the methodology and methods adopted be justified in relation to the purpose of or rationale for the research? This question brings to the fore a host of issues that need to be carefully worked through, examining our philosophical assumptions about what we can (and cannot) know and associated theoretical perspective(s). With this in mind, this chapter will explore the epistemological and ontological thinking behind qualitative research and qualitative interviewing. We will concentrate on the following philosophical issues as they have direct relevance for qualitative interviewing:

• methodology and methods
• different approaches to research
• theoretical groundwork and making connections
• developing a rationale
• epistemology, ontology and qualitative interviewing

Methodology and methods

Having supervised numerous undergraduate and postgraduate student research projects, we can say with confidence that the distinction between methodology and methods is almost always something that causes confusion. The two are not the same. Methods are easily explained; they are the techniques or procedures we use to collect and analyse data. In qualitative research interviewing is one of the most frequently used methods when generating data. Other methods could include observation, diaries, the generation of visual images or other forms of text. In this book we cover the use of qualitative interviewing as a ‘method’ – a means of collecting and analysing data. Having said this, we will also aim to make evident how methods are informed by methodology. Methodology, as the word suggests, relates to a process where the design of the research and choice of particular methods (and the justification of these in relation to the research project) are made evident. As such methodology requires more from the researcher than just preference or intuitive appeal to justify the choice of particular techniques of data collection and analysis. It becomes necessary to outline the philosophical and theoretical positions informing the research process. Thus there is a requirement to outline assumptions embedded in the methodology adopted. Often you will find methodology explained as an ‘approach’ or ‘perspective’ that has within it implicit and explicit expectations about how research is undertaken.

Different approaches to research

It is common to refer to qualitative and quantitative ‘paradigms’ in research (e.g. Holliday, 2002), suggesting that they represent very different ways of thinking about the world. As you will see, this is at best an over-simplification with regard to qualitative research, as it encompasses many different ways of understanding the world and what we can know about it. Portraying qualitative and quantitative research as being in opposition to one another is also perhaps not very helpful or indeed accurate – as the rise in the use of mixed methods (including both qualitative and quantitative elements) clearly shows (Shaw and Frost, 2015). However, there are certainly some broad ways in which most qualitative research differs from quantitative work. In this section we will introduce some essential terms you will need to understand, at least at a basic level, to make and justify choices about how you engage with qualitative interview-based research. In a subsequent section, we will introduce four different approaches to qualitative research and their underlying philosophical assumptions. We recognise that thinking through and explaining your philosophical position can be a challenging aspect of the research process, but it is a crucial one. Remember, though, that you are not expected to become a professional philosopher of social science! You just have to develop a good enough understanding to make and communicate sound and defensible decisions about how you design and execute your research.

Epistemology

A concise definition of epistemology is the philosophical theory of knowledge. Of major importance is the issue of what counts as knowledge, and social scientists are often preoccupied with attempting to formulate sufficient criteria for evaluating knowledge statements – what it is we can claim to know. Unfortunately, differences between qualitative and quantitative research often become drawn as fervently oppositional rather than merely rooted in different ...