Research Methods for Interior Design

Applying Interiority

Dana E. Vaux, David Wang, Dana E. Vaux, David Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429639418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Interior design has shifted significantly in the past fifty years from a focus on home decoration within family and consumer sciences to a focus on the impact of health and safety within the interior environment. This shift has called for a deeper focus in evidence-based research for interior design education and practice.

Research Methods for Interior Design provides a broad range of qualitative and quantitative examples, each highlighted as a case of interior design research. Each chapter is supplemented with an in-depth introduction, additional questions, suggested exercises, and additional research references. The book's subtitle, Applying Interiority, identifies one reason why the field of interior design is expanding, namely, all people wish to achieve a subjective sense of well-being within built environments, even when those environments are not defined by walls. The chapters of this book exemplify different ways to comprehend interiority through clearly defined research methodologies.

This book is a significant resource for interior design students, educators, and researchers in providing them with an expanded vision of what interior design research can encompass.

Chapter 1

Focus Groups

Editors’ Introduction by Dana E. Vaux and David Wang

In this chapter, Tasoulla Hadjiyanni seeks to understand the subjective outlooks of residents of three different cultural groups (Native Americans, African Americans and Somalis) as they live in their distinctive neighborhoods in the city of Minneapolis. Her primary research method is the use of focus groups. Interviews in focus groups allow design researchers to understand and gather data from the perspectives of the people they are designing for. Interviews provide the researcher with an opportunity to ask open-ended questions that may lead to information not related to the original question. Interviews allow the researcher to observe non-verbal cues, such as body language and tone of voice. However, a focus group interview is not simply a conversation or discussion. As a research method, a qualitative interview follows a specific, pre-developed plan for asking questions and recording answers.¹ Figure 1.1 “on page 12” shows Hadjiyanni’s interview guide, which she developed prior to conducting her focus groups.

An interview can be with an individual or with a group of individuals. They can be informal or formal relative to the specific protocol of predetermined steps and questions, and the role of the researcher. John Creswell classifies interviews into four types: face-to-face, by telephone, by email, (these three types solicit individual answers to questions), and focus groups in which the researcher interviews participants in a group.² Each type of interview emphasizes a variety of techniques.

The research conducted in this chapter utilized focus groups to understand how individuals feel about their neighborhood in relationship to health. As an interview technique for gathering research data, the term “focus groups” evolved from a specific interview procedure developed by sociologists to inhibit the use of leading questions by interviewers/researchers. Merton, Kendall and Fiske further developed the semi-structured, qualitative process of focused interviews for social science research.³ They also made a clear distinction between focused interviews, which they developed for the purpose of scientific inquiry, and focus groups, developed primarily for market research to understand public opinion of products, services and advertising methods.⁴ They conducted the interviews primarily with groups; thus, the term “focus groups” eventually became associated with semi-directed group interviews conducted for research purposes based on the process they outline. This is apparent in the strong similarity between current focus group practices and Merton et al.’s original description.⁵ While Merton intended to differentiate the term “focus interview” from the term “focus group,” over time the two became synonymous and the term “focus group” became the widely accepted phrase.

Ideally, a focus group is 8–12 individuals and encompasses multiple groups for generalizability (three sessions is a good number). Krueger and King provide a list of characteristics to avoid in focus groups that include groups with erratic attendance—too many or too few people—groups with open invitations for the general public and groups that are perceived as threatening by participants.⁶ If the group is too small, one voice may dominate; if the group is too large, this may also limit responses as some participants may be reluctant to speak out in a larger group. In a study on Facebook use among Mexican American adolescents, Rueda, Lindsay and Williams note that homogeneity across focus groups is preferable when the intention is to provide minority voices the opportunity to dialogue about sensitive topics among others of perceived similarity. We see the same method used in this chapter with the similar ethnicity among participants in each respective neighborhood.⁷ Interview questions asked in focus groups need to be consistent across groups, and have consistent attendees. Also, demographics should be similarly maintained across groups (i.e., groups that are all one gender vs. mixed gender). The responses, which are considered “raw data,” are sorted into themes that are then connected to established research findings or models to further define the research question. Are the findings similar or not? Do they further the model or provide evidence against it? Why and how?

The introductions to the chapters in this book will typically include some prompts for readers to note as they read. So, as you read this chapter:

1. Note how focus groups can provide rich, in-depth information that is not available through a survey.⁸ A survey might be useful for gathering demographic information of focus group participants prior to the first meeting. In this way, it can generate both qualitative and quantitative data and provide prompts to the researcher for open-ended questions during a focus group.
2. Note also how a focus group setting itself can create a synergism among study participants as members of the group engage in an interplay of agreement and disagreement through conversation. However, the synergism can also result in wayward conversation that has nothing to do with the research questions. Therefore, it is important to manage focus groups without stifling the conversation and direction.
3. The researcher must come to a focus group well prepared. On the one hand, she must know what she is looking for when writing her questions. On the other hand, she must be careful not to prod her respondents to give answers that might not be their own “natural” views. In this chapter, note what preparation Hadjiyanni made prior to conducting her focus groups. She had a well-defined research topic: how residents in three culturally distinct neighborhoods feel about their locales in issues related to health. She also knew specific details about each neighborhood: its location, the quality of the location, population and demographic information, each neighborhood’s history and so on. She then came to each focus group with what Ziesel calls an interview guide.⁹ This is the preplanned set of questions, but preplanned in a way that would allow open-ended conversation between researcher and respondents. Hadjiyanni’s interview guide for the Somali neighborhood is shown in Figure 1.1. Note how the research guide is written in a conversational manner.

Figure 1.1 Hadjiyanni’s interview guide for the Somali community. (This is a template guide for all three communities.)

Interiority

A common theme throughout this book is that “interior design” is not limited to physically enclosed spaces at the scale of individual buildings. This book’s Introduction explained how subjective experiences of “feeling inside” can take place at any scale, and we use the technical term interiority to denote this reality. As you read:

1. Consider how this chapter examines interiority at a neighborhood scale, and how this expands interior design’s disciplinary reach beyond physical interiors.
2. Note how experiences of interiority can be either positive or negative. So, consider the ways an individual’s internal sense of well-being relates to environmental arrangements in the neighborhoods in Hadjiyanni’s study, either in a positive or negative sense.
3. Consider how traditional cultural ties inform cross-generationally with respect to positive or negative feelings of interiority.

The Interview Guide Hadjianni used for this research for the Somali community, which is the same for the other two communities is in Figure 1.1 above.

* * * *

Interiority at the Scale of Neighborhoods: Exploring the Health Experiences of Three Cultural Groups

Tasoulla Hadjiyanni

One challenge that has long limited the scholarship of interior design is the notion that interiors are defined by walls, physical boundaries that delineate a here and there, an inside and an outside, a mine and yours. In contrast, Petra Perolini¹⁰ moves interior design inquiry beyond the material and the visible and encompasses instead the immaterial and the invisible. This expansion of interior design Perolini terms interiority and defines it as “a process within a person that reflects an individual’s unique awareness of the world and a psychological relationship to the world that is meaningful….”¹¹ Such a conception of interiority allows this present chapter to assess residents’ sense of well-being and belonging (or not) at the level of neighborhood scales, and still keep it within an expanded domain of interior design. At the neighborhood scale, often borders and barriers are invisible, and yet they can construct and produce difference and inequality. This chapter asks questions such as: How is Perolini’s “awareness of the world” shaped at neighborhood scales? What role does spatiality play? And, what are the implications of this understanding for interior design scholars and practitioners?

If we maintain the conception of interiors as a space bounded by walls versus what lies outside those walls, studies at the neighborhood level (for example, relative to health, the concern of this chapter) might seem too far-fetched for interior design scholarship. Indeed, how groups of diverse cultural backgrounds interact with public space has long been the focus of fields such as urban design and policy, anthropology, sociology and geography.¹² As a result, the emphasis has been on what typically would be called “outside,” such as streets and parks, corner coffee shops and sidewalks. Explorations of this nature leave much to be understood about the relationship of inside/outside, that gray area where boundaries blend and dissipate as the private and public realms fuse into one another in human experience. Interior design scholarship can bring added value to this line of research. Reframing current discourses around neighborhoods and health from the perspective of interiority expands the types of questions that can be asked and allows for new methodologies that focus on unearthing the multiple ways by which inside/outside relationships are formed, enriching in the process conceptions of what constitutes interiors and why.

Exacerbating the disconnect between inside/outside is the fact that current studies of neighborhoods and health are primarily quantitative in nature, which does not allow for the nuances behind the multiplicity of factors that make up neighborhoods and notions of health to emerge. The focus is typically on isolating and testing for particular factors, such as walkability and accessibility, green spaces, crime ...