Convergent interviewing as a process is very effective for getting participants to provide a lot of detailed information in a reasonably short period of time. In my experience the participants found the process interesting because the majority of them thought that they would be asked a series of structured questions and when I told them that I only had one main question they found this slightly perplexing.

For the majority of cases the participants did not find it difficult staying on  topic or talking for long periods of time without prompting. There was no issue with any participant about the recording of the interviews. Everyone was happy to sign off on the confidentiality form.

All of the interviews lasted a minimum of 50 minutes and it would have been possible to have continued with the interviews for longer in some cases.

The interviews needed a lot of pre-planning, listening to the last recording, designing the next question, preparing the location, contacting the next candidate to confirm that they are happy to participate. I arranged for each participant to select the location, the date and time.

The snowballing technique worked well. Every participant was able to provide the details of someone who would be useful for me to speak to next or at some point in future. I also put together a list of possible participants.

At the start of the process I intended sticking as closely as possible to the way that Dick had described but I found out quite quickly that I had to compromise the approach. I had intended putting together a reference group, as described by Dick and did recruit a small representative group who agreed to work with me. Very quickly I encountered a problem, the reference group could not agree when to meet as a group mainly due to time constraints and work responsibilities.

Eventually I realised that I needed to get on with the interviews as time was running out. I spoke to each of the people in the representative group and asked them to recommend a group of participants individually rather than meeting as a group. In the end the compromise worked well.

As the interview process has carried on I have not referred to the reference group. I have interviewed three members of the reference group because they line manage several of the subsequent interviewees.

The main thing that has worked is the open-ended unstructured interview and the note taking during the interviews. I have not compromised the process that much only in so far as it makes practical sense. So far the experience of convergent interviewing has confirmed to me the usefulness of semi-or unstructured questions for eliciting answers that are broad based but also contain enough specificity to get enough data to make the outputs useful.