Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond

From Research Design to Analysis and Publication

Anne Galletta

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814733417
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond offers an in-depth and captivating step-by-step guide to the use of semi-structured interviews in qualitative research. By tracing the life of an actual research project–an exploration of a school district's effort over 40 years to address racial equality–as a consistent example threaded across the volume, Anne Galletta shows in concrete terms how readers can approach the planning and execution of their own new research endeavor, and illuminates unexpected real-life challenges they may confront and how to address them. The volume offers a close look at the inductive nature of qualitative research, the use of researcher reflexivity, and the systematic and iterative steps involved in data collection, analysis, and interpretation. It offers guidance on how to develop an interview protocol, including the arrangement of questions and ways to evoke analytically rich data. Particularly useful for those who may be familiar with qualitative research but have not yet conducted a qualitative study, Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond will serve both undergraduate and graduate students as well as more advanced scholars seeking to incorporate this key methodological approach into their repertoire.

SECTION II

The Semi-Structured Interview

Collecting and Analyzing Qualitative Data

3

Conducting the Interview

The Role of Reciprocity and Reflexivity

To do this type of research [the researcher] must pay the price of intense awareness of self and others and must constantly attempt to define relationships which are ordinarily taken for granted.

—Dollard (1949, p. 20)

Central to this chapter is an exploration of the ways in which you might conduct a semi-structured interview in a manner that is productive for both you and the participant. A common thread across qualitative research and its diversity of interpretive paradigms is attention to the role of the researcher. This is particularly true when the semi-structured interview is used as a data-collection method. Here, it is fundamental to reflect and act upon the nature of the exchange between the researcher and participant. You may prompt the participant, rephrase questions, and make changes according to the interview situation. In this manner, the idea of researcher as instrument is a frequent point of emphasis evident in qualitative research.

This chapter offers a closer look at the way in which the semi-structured interview provides space for reciprocity between you and the participant and for reflexivity in terms of dilemmas encountered within the research project. These dilemmas are methodological, theoretical, and inevitably deeply ethical as you reflect back and recalibrate elements of the data collection and analysis. This chapter explores closely the nature of interviewing, in general, as an interaction between two individuals, with the benefits and drawbacks inherent in this method.

By discussing a number of interview excerpts and vignettes from the desegregation study, I underscore here the unpredictability even within a well-planned protocol. The chapter consists of two sections: the first focuses on efforts to achieve reciprocity with your participants and the second focuses on the need for reflexivity to assess the particular methodological and ethical snags that frequently emerge as you proceed with your qualitative research. These processes play a role across many interpretive traditions within qualitative research. The theorizing as to research purpose and the means through which reciprocity and reflexivity might be achieved reflect the particular orientation of these traditions. The focus on reciprocity and reflexivity provides an important backdrop for anticipating a discussion of data analysis and interpretation.

Approximating Reciprocity: Engaging Participants in Clarification, Meaning Making, and Critical Reflection

Key to effective interviewing is the researcher’s attention to the participant’s narrative as it is unfolding. Well-informed judgments on the part of the researcher are important as to when and when not to interrupt the participant as he or she responds to a question. Guiding the participant within open-ended questions takes some anticipation of possible routes he or she may travel in responding, and you must ascertain what further inquiry is appropriate and often necessary. It also takes some spontaneity and guesswork, as you come upon junctures in the interview that potentially offer a deeper understanding of the participant’s narrative.

In this way, your role is to keep one eye on where you are and the other on where you’re headed. Contributing to your interviewing skills and decision making is the depth at which you have explored the phenomenon of study, particularly through your ongoing immersion in data collection and analysis. As thematic patterns emerge and are explored and labeled as codes, you will become more attentive to further evidence of these patterns in future interviews. However, this strategy should be kept in check. It is important not to overload an interview with excessive attention to your search for converging and diverging thematic trends in the data. This approach has the potential to dull your sensitivity to what is said and not said during the interview. It also may slant your questioning in pursuit of confirming evidence. In general, then, it is best to focus the interview on the task at hand: eliciting from the participant the meaning he or she gives to the focus of study and capturing that meaning as accurately as possible.

As there is some degree of risk in the decisions you make over the course of an interview, you will need to revisit decisions and reflect back on the consequences of those decisions. Qualitative research therefore involves reflexivity. This reflexivity is intimately bound up in all phases of the research, often contributing in substantial ways to the resulting conceptual framework.

Carrying out your interview relies on two orienting tasks: the first is to listen closely to the participant for points in need of clarification and further generation of meaning; the second is to locate and place on hold points in the interview to which you may return later for elaboration or on which you may invite the participant to critically reflect. These processes reflect the reciprocity you as a researcher offer the participant during the interview.

In discussing researcher-participant reciprocity, this chapter draws on the work of the feminist theorist Patti Lather (1986). Lather refers to reciprocity as the “give and take, a mutual negotiation of meaning and power” (p. 267). This give and take occurs in communicative space, which is the space of engagement between the researcher and participant. It also occurs in conceptual space, which is the space of engagement between data and theory. Both incite a dialectic between contrasting ideas, alternating explanations, and multiple angles of vision. At the heart of this dialectic is the notion of reciprocity—creating an exchange between the empirical data as it is collected and analyzed and the theory embedded in one’s questions, framework, and design. Sometimes that means a conceptual tussle during one’s analysis; other times it means an interviewing process that not only documents and records but also interacts and engages with participants, who bring to the interview experience and knowledge. Because participant experience and knowledge are shaped by a set of conditions, possibilities, and constraints, your interview may involve some form of analytical interruptions for the purpose of working out the tensions between the theoretical and empirical.

Reciprocity also is facilitated according to the structure of your interview. Some interviews are spaced out over the course of several sessions. This allows you time to concentrate fully on the various segments of your interview. It also creates space for you and your participant to think more deeply about responses to interview questions, to revisit points from a previous session, with ample time to construct meaning. Other interviews take place in one sitting but are structured to create openings for an unencumbered narrative on the part of the participant as well as more direct questions regarding the study focus.

In the following sections we will discuss several types of communicative and conceptual reciprocity, using three approaches: clarification, meaning generation, and critical reflection. This discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, because there are other forms of engagement between the participant and the researcher and/or between data and theory. The discussion weaves together general statements regarding each form of reciprocity with excerpts from interviews I conducted for the desegregation study.

Carrying Out the Interview and Approaching Reciprocity within the Desegregation Study: Participant Engagement in Clarification

In general, a frequent form of participant engagement in the semi-structured interview is intended to achieve clarification and understanding. This is crucial, as your understanding of the participant’s response may be inaccurate. Engaging for clarification ensures, as much as possible, accuracy in interpretation. It also gives space for further elaboration and depth in terms of the focus of the participant.

In the desegregation study, the first segment created space for an opening narrative. In this segment, as we have seen, I asked several broad questions that guided a student in telling me a story about his or her schooling experience, or that helped parents to talk about their children’s experience. This section of the interview required that I follow the narrative as it was presented and interrupt when necessary for clarity, additional information, and a layer of complexity that may have not been immediately accessible. Probing for clarification is instrumental in adding meaning and depth to the data.

In order to look more closely at asking for participant clarification, I highlight an example from an interview with a white parent in the desegregation study. As noted earlier, the interview protocol for the desegregation study began with a question or two about the background of the participants, and then I invited them to talk about the community and each phase of their schooling, from elementary to high school. In the transcription excerpt below, I had begun the interview with one of the standard opening questions on the protocol: “Could you tell me, were you born in Shaker Heights or did you move here at a certain point with your family?” As was typical for my interviews, one of the participants, Mary, narrated her experience for a considerable period of time. In my transcripts, there are five pages of transcription in which Mary provided me with information without any prompts. As Mary was headed in the direction I had sought, I refrained from interrupting, creating the space for as much detail and perspective as I could secure in this first segment of the interview.

As a result, early in the interview, I was already fairly well informed about Mary’s entrée into and early parenting years in the city. In this first segment of the interview I learned that Mary’s professional background is in education and that neither she nor her husband was born in Shaker Heights. They moved to a white middle-class neighborhood centrally located within Shaker Heights after her husband took a job in Cleveland in the late 1960s upon his completion of an advanced degree at an Ivy League institution. Mary had begun to tell me of her dissatisfaction with the traditional education her oldest child was getting in kindergarten in a district school located in their neighborhood. She then shifted into a new narrative on her involvement in the late 1960s with the district’s desegregation plan at the elementary school level. On the surface, her abrupt shift seemed like a digression but, as becomes evident in the transcript, her referencing the district’s desegregation plan of 1970 is actually quite connected to her story about her dissatisfaction with her daughter’s education. Furthermore, it responded directly to my research question on participants’ conceptualization of racial equality. In the transcription below, there are illustrations of my engaging Mary in clarification of her experience, seeking elaboration or further depth into her experience and views.

MARY: And I was not very happy with the experience she [the 5-year-old daughter] had because it was lots of coloring and pictures and that kind of thing and that’s not how she had been raised, so her pictures never got put up because she didn’t stay inside the lines.

ANNE: Oh, my God.

MARY: So she was feeling badly and I was applauding, saying “Well, great, you’re not to stay inside the lines,” but at that same time then—so this was now—’69 . . . you may want to correct me on the dates . . . The board of education came up with the desegregation plan, and the first plan was—that only African American children would be transferred from Moreland School to other schools.

ANNE: Right, the one-way busing.

MARY: Right, one-way busing, and—we were part of a group of citizens that went to the board of education and said, “Now, you know, this is not the way it should be . . . white people should also be involved in transferring their children . . .”

ANNE: [interrupting] Were you—

MARY: [continuing] “. . . to aid desegregation.”

ANNE: Were you a formal group, or was it just kind of—had it come out of the meeting in February when the superintendent first presented the plan, and then people began to formulate [a response]? Or did you know about the plan earlier? I mean, did people know about that plan?

MARY: I don’t remember those details, but it was a fairly formal group in that, you know, people who felt strongly about this met over a number of months.

ANNE: You did?

MARY: And then took a recommendation to the board of education or to the superintendent who was then Dr. Lawson, I believe.

ANNE: Right—that’s what I have, yeah.

MARY: And, um, so out of that input from citizens grew the Shaker Schools Plan.

ANNE: Uh-huh, and let me just backtrack on that one, um, I’m really interested in how people say, “This is not fair because the onus is on the black families.”

MARY: Um-hmm, um-hmm.

ANNE: You know, and—especially, um, if a group of white parents are saying that, um, they know what they may be encountering—in terms of their white friends . . .

MARY: Um-hmm, um-hmm.

ANNE: . . . who might be like “Geez, let’s just, let’s do what we have to do and be done with it and not, you know, try to complicate the matter further,” so I, I guess if—was it a hard time for [this group of white] people? You know, or was it just a, you know, did you strengthen each other as a group, um, or—

MARY: Oh, I would say definitely, and, I think as a mother, I was a little bit more apprehensive about it than my husband was, although I knew it was the right thing to do, and I think the other part of the equation is that we were not completely happy at our home sch...