Convergent interviewing thoughts on the process

After completing the assignment on using Convergent Interviewing (CI) and really reading thoroughly the papers and guidance in the literature (especially the one’s by Dick, 1998) I feel that CI is definitely a method that is worth further consideration for my thesis. What I like most about it are the issues of higher validity and reliability, the focus on taking small amounts of notes rather than making full transcripts and the fact that it can be implemented as a project in its own right.

The project aspect is quite interesting in terms of getting the Reference Group together which for me is similar to having a Project Board as part of a PRINCE2 or similar project process. Organizing the Reference Group will I think be an interesting – in terms of challenging – process. I am assuming that the Reference Group would be composed mainly of departmental managers or team leaders as they would be people who would have the ability or authority to make decisions and suggestions about who should be included in the interviewing rounds.

The other interesting or challenging issue would be deciding on whether to use (at least) one other interviewer. On large projects CI tends to make use of more than one interviewer and in some of the papers I’ve looked at up to  six. Although there is always the option of carrying out all the interviews myself the big advantage is using one other interviewer would enhance the reliability of the research by allowing cross referencing and reducing bias.

Having another interviewer would add an interesting dynamic to the process of the research project. How to recruit someone to work with is an interesting problem. One thought would be to get the help of a Masters student who might be working on a similar project and to use them as a research assistant. There are possible opportunities for this in the social sciences department. This  would add an interesting additional challenge to the ethical approval process.

With CI the use of two interviewers lends reliability and reduces bias through running interviews in parallel and then immediately after the interviews have finished the interviewers immediately compare notes and decide what the key issues or themes are. From these the next round of interviews are developed.

Sharing ideas and experiences I believe is a good way of building a creative dynamic throughout the interview process. The biggest issue that I found with doing just two interviews was typing up the transcripts from the voice recording. The first interview I did was 37 minutes long and took about 2 – 3 hours to transcribe. The second was only 15 minutes long but took about an hour to transcribe. The interesting thing about transcribing that I found was making sure that I did not add or remove any words. I think dealing with interviewing 20 or 30 people would require a serious amount of organization of the material and careful planning prior to starting the work. As already stated CI technically does not make use of long transcriptions of the interviews. In fact according to Dick voice recorders are not recommended. Dick recommends only brief note taking or using mnemonics to identify themes and issues during the interview and having only a page of notes at most.

To me this implies that there is a need for quite a disciplined approach to the process. The key issue for CI is ensuring that the initial interview question is further extended and more focused in order to gather information on more specific issues. For the assignment I only focused on one of the three theories that I am aiming to use in my full research project. These are, Sensemaking, Institutional Theory and Organizational Justice. For the assignment I only referred to Organizational Justice but after the interviews I carried out I believe that all three theories are relevant to the thesis at least as drivers into a direction for the project. CI is normally or often used in areas where there is little existing theory or where an area is under researched.

For the research project I believe that CI has the potential to lead to new theory development or an extension of an existing theory.