I asked the interviewee that I used last week if I could re-interview her as part of the Convergent Interviewing process. The reply I got was interesting, basically along the lines of “you interviewed me last week why do it again?”
This got me thinking about the difficulties of interviewing and why people volunteer to be interviewed. The question is, why do people agree to take part in interviews or, what’s in it for them?
A number of points and questions arose from this thought:
- Getting interviewee participants is not easy. There has to be a benefit to the interviewee otherwise why would they agree to participate?
- What is the incentive for the interviewee participant? I think there is a very narrow and short lived engagement process that occurs in the mind of a potential participant. Possibly the potential participant’s initial thought is based on a feeling that someone is interested in what they have got to say about something – although I’m not sure what this says about randomly selected participants. Why the hell would a randomly selected person want to participate in an data collection exercise? Surely there’s even less motivation for them to participate?
- I can see how purposeful selection could lead to greater engagement but again there has to be some kind of incentive for the participant but I’m assuming if someone is told that they have been selected on the basis of their expertise then they might be more forthcoming.
- The potential difficulties of getting interview participants and getting people to agree to more than one or two interviews is potentially a difficulty if the researcher is undertaking Convergent Interviewing or just wanting to go back to speak to people again. There are also issues around timing, availability, getting a room and also if you are going back multiple times to people issues around confidentiality might come up because of something as simple as people going off for meetings.
- When planning interviews and selecting participants I think depending on the number of people you need to interview it would be good to have more people to interview than absolutely necessary in order to keep numbers up in case some participants decide not to turn up or walk out during an interview.
- In some ways small numbers of participants might be easier to manage than large numbers because you can build a closer relationship with potential interviewees and they might be more likely to make a commitment and a contribution.
- I think there is a possibility that the feelings of the interviewer could have an effect on the interviewee. For example today I had a second interview scheduled with my participant from last week but I was feeling tired and did not really want to proceed. I needed to drive up some energy in order to make the interview happen again. As it turned out I did do the interview but it was not as effective as the one I did last week possibly because I was not in the mood but I also detected that the participant was also not in the mood. This could be a significant downside to interviewing – how does the interviewer keep their feelings and physical demeanor neutral so that they do not ‘contaminate’ the interviewee and influence the energy and motivation of the participant?
- After completing the two interviews I realized the importance of having sound questions. I found that especially in the second interview I realized that the question I asked was not specific enough but I did not want to ask a leading question either.
A lot of the literature around interviewing is based on getting a valid statistical sample and the methods that can be used to make interviewing more effective but there is not much (in the books I’ve looked at) on why people actually volunteer to be interviewed and why they don’t. I think purposeful selection of participants for interviewing might be the way forward – where this is a choice – because I think choosing people might be more effective than the random sample because of the issues around massaging ego’s on one side and people not wanting to be involved on the other.
I think I have gathered a reasonable amount of data that is interesting in terms of the research questions that I have used but I think if this was my full scale research project I would need to do a lot more work around question design and thinking more specifically what I want out of the interview. Reading the literature prior to the interviews has helped my thinking in terms of the domain of interest and contextualized in terms of what my participant has said and the restructuring process that is currently going on.