Making Contact in Interview Research

1. MAKING CONTACT Do it yourself. Try not to rely on third parties to make contact with your potential participants. No matter how expedient it seems to have someone else who knows potential participants explain your project to them, try to avoid doing so. Building the interviewing relationship begins the moment the potential participant

Building the Participant Pool in Interview Research

Another primary purpose of the contact visit is to assess the appro­priateness of a participant for the study. The major criterion for appro­priateness is whether the subject of the researcher’s study is central to the participant’s experience. For example, a doctoral candidate wanting to study the way process writing affects an English teacher’s experience

Some Logistical Considerations in Interview Research

The experience of scheduling a contact visit often reflects what trying to schedule the actual interview with the participant will be like. If one is a reasonable process, the other is likely to be so too. If scheduling one contact visit is unduly frustrating, the interviewer may do well to take that into account

Selecting Participants for Interview Research

1. SELECTING PARTICIPANTS Either during the contact process or shortly thereafter the researcher takes the crucial step of selecting the people he or she will interview. The purpose of an in-depth interview study is to understand the experience of those who are interviewed, not to predict or to control that experience. (See Van Manen,

The Belmont Report

Faced with the fact that the disregard for human welfare in research occurred not just abroad but also at home, various departments of the U.S. government issued federal guidelines concerning the protection of the rights of human subjects during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. (See Anderson, 1996; Applebaum, Lidz, & Meisel, 1987; Faden &

The Establishment of Local Institutional Review Boards

With the Belmont Report providing guidance, the federal government began the process of harmonizing the regulations that had been issued by various agencies into what is called the common rule, now adhered to by many federal agencies. The common rule refers to the regulations pre­sented in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 45, Part

The Informed Consent Form

While there may be some variance in what a local IRB will ask re­searchers to submit for review, the issue of an informed consent form is almost always pivotal (Ritchie, 2003, p. 217). New interviewers tend to be hesitant about informed consent. They have no doubt of their own good intentions and worry that

Eight Major Parts of Informed Consent

A consent form adapted to in-depth interviewing should cover eight major parts: An invitation to participate in what, to what end, how, how long, and for whom?The first part of an informed consent form should state explicitly that the potential participant is being invited to take part in a research study. This introduction would

The Complexities of Affirming the IRB Review Process and Informed Consent

When guidelines for seeking informed consent were first issued by federal agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, some researchers felt that the costs of the new procedures outweighed the benefits. Experienced social scientists questioned the emphasis on written informed consent especially for participant observation studies that may be fluid, unfixed, and there­fore difficult ones

Interview Techniques Isn’t Everything, But It Is a Lot

1. LISTEN MORE, TALK LESS Listening is the most important skill in interviewing. The hardest work for many interviewers is to keep quiet and to listen actively. Many books about interviewing concentrate on the types of questions that in­terviewers ask, but I want to start this chapter by talking about the type of listening

Interviewing as an “I-Thou” Relationship

In a section of his book that is elegant even in translation, Schutz (1967) explains that one person’s intersubjective understanding of another depends upon creating an “I-Thou” relationship, a concept bearing both similarities to and significant differences from the philosopher Martin Buber’s use of the phrase. “Thou” is someone close to the interviewer, still

Interview Rapport

That balancing act is central to developing an appropriate rapport with the participant. I have never been completely comfortable with the common assumption that the more rapport the interviewer can establish with the participant, the better. Rapport implies getting along with each other, a harmony with, a conformity to, an affinity for one another.

Social Group Identities and the Interviewing Relationship

Issues of equity in an interviewing relationship are affected by the social identities that participants and interviewers bring to the interview. Our social identities are affected by our experience with issues of class, race, ethnicity, and gender, and those social forces interact with the sense of power in our lives (Kanter, 1977). The interviewing

Distinguish Among Private, Personal, and Public Experiences

Interviewing relationships are also shaped by what the interviewer and participant deem are appropriate subjects to explore in the interview. In considering what is appropriate, interviewers may find it useful to dis­tinguish among public, personal, and private aspects of a participant’s life (Shils, 1959). The public aspect is what participants do, for example, at

Avoid a Therapeutic Relationship

At the same time, interviewers must avoid changing the interview­ing relationship into a therapeutic one. Many see a similarity between the type of open-ended, relatively nondirective interviewing that I have been discussing in this book and the type of exploration that takes place in psychotherapy. It is essential that research interviewers not see them­selves

Reciprocity in Interview Research :

The issue of reciprocity in the interviewing relationship can be trou­bling. The more the interviewing relationship is charged with issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, the more complicated the problem of reciprocity can be. Patai (1987) in her study of Brazilian women, most of whom were poor, agonized over what could be perceived

Equity in Interview Research

Interviewers and participants are never equal. We can strive to reduce hierarchical arrangements, but usually the participant and the interviewer want and get different things out of the interview. Despite different pur­poses, researchers can still strive for equity in the process. By equity I mean a balance between means and ends, between what is

Managing the Interview Data

To work with the material that interviewing generates, the researcher first has to make it accessible by organizing it. Keeping track of partici­pants through the participant information forms, making sure the written consent forms are copied and filed in a safe place, labeling audiotapes of interviews accurately, managing the extensive files that develop in

Keeping Interviewing and Analysis Separate: What to Do Between Interviews

It is difficult to separate the processes of gathering and analyzing data. Even before the actual interviews begin, the researcher may an­ticipate results on the basis of his or her reading and preparation for the study. Once the interviews commence, the researcher cannot help but work with the material as it comes in. During

1 Comments

Tape-Recording Interviews

I have no doubt that in-depth interviews should be tape-recorded; however, the literature reflects varying opinions on this point (Bogdan & Taylor, 1975; Briggs, 1986; Hyman et al., 1954; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Patton, 1989; Weiss, 1994). I believe that to work most reliably with the words of participants, the researcher has to transform