Adjusting my data analysis strategy

I have been reviewing and rethinking my data analysis approach. I have been coding in NVivo directly to the audio track. This has been revealing in terms of coding and memo writing but is extremely time consuming. After thinking through the process from my original strategy of using Convergent Interviewing and keeping short notes rather than transcribing the whole interview, I realised that I need to revisit this and code against my typed notes rather than the whole audio track.

According to Dick the original Convergent Interviewing process relied on note taking without transcription where the notes are linked to the under pinning theoretical framework.

I am now going to:

  1. code in NVivo against the notes I took during and after the interviews
  2. review the contract summary forms to determine themes
  3. query the codes and memos from the text coding and memo writing
  4. combine with coding from the interview recordings

This will return me to my original plan and speed up the data analysis process.

 

Data analysis – is hard

I’ve had to stop writing my thesis for the time being, I’ve come to the end of the first draft of the literature review but I have been told by my supervisor to concentrate on the data analysis otherwise I’m going to run out of time. I was going to start with In Vivo coding but this felt too loose and unstructured. I prefer to use more structured methods. So, I’ve gone back to basics and reviewed some of the literature on qualitative data analysis.

I’ve been reading The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Jonny Saldana and Qualitative Data Analysis by Miles and Huberman and have decided to avoid In Vivo coding and start again by creating a conceptual framework based on research questions, hypothesis, problem areas, and / or key variables that the researcher brings to the study

I’m going to create a set of codes based on:

Bogden and Biklen’s (1992) coding accounting scheme.

  1. Settings/Context: general information on surroundings that allows you to put the study in a larger context.
  2. Definition of the situation: how people understand, define, or perceive the setting or the topics on which the study bears.
  3. Perspectives: ways of thinking about their setting shared by informants (“how things are done here”).
  4. Ways of thinking about people and objects: understandings of each other, of outsiders, of objects in their world (more detailed than above).
  5. Process: regularly occurring kinds of behaviour.
  6. Activities: regularly occurring kinds of behaviour.
  7. Events: specific activities, especially ones occurring infrequently.
  8. Strategies: ways of accomplishing things; people’s tactics, methods, techniques for meeting their needs.
  9. Relationships and social structure: unofficially defined patterns such as cliques, coalitions, romances, friendships and betrayals.
  10. Methods: problems, joys, dilemmas of the research process – often in relation to comments by observers.

Libraries and customer service

It has become clear after extensively reviewing the literature on customer services in the Higher Education sector that student services have been slow to the party when it comes to changing processes and services to reflect changing student expectations.

I have found that the university library sector has been ahead of the game for years and there is a significant amount of published research, case studies and articles outlining what has been achieved over the past twenty to twenty five years.

Libraries have really followed on from IT Help Desk systems where staff in organizations became connected to networked Help systems. These allowed staff to place a ‘ticket’ that specified an issue or system failure. The response would likely be someone visiting the staff or a fix via network tools.

Over time the IT Help Desk was reconfigured into a Service Desk where service staff were able to provide more customer focused services not just system fixes. Service Desk staff were eventually able to provide training and other support.

These Service Desk and Help Desk systems have now been introduced into university student service desks and allow students to access 24 hour self service and receive streamlined services.

The issue for where I am carrying out my research project is the SID system (Student Information Desk) combined with a new physical student HUB has significantly changed the working practices of the Faculty support teams. The main impact has been a reduction in student foot-fall and fewer students coming in person.

This has had considerable impact on the Faculty teams in terms of how they now perceive their roles, the SID system has in fact imposed an alternative identity on teams and individuals. The system has demanded that the staff undertake additional training and changes to work process flows. Students are now more likely to go to the student HUB and issues are posted on the SID system where Faculty interventions are needed.

The system has changed the relationship between the staff and students and what were front line staff have now become back-office staff. These issues have generated a mass of data for my research project.

Reflections on the interviews

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.

Starting to draft my thesis

It’s time to start drafting my thesis. I have decided to start with the literature review and to focus on developing a review of the history of change theories  in organisations. The reason for this is that my research is focused on the process of change and the impact of change on the identity of teams. It is important to understand where and why change theories came about and how these relate to the research component of the project. Also Actor-Network Theory is centred on change in terms of networks and their associations and how these come into being, stabilise, become durable or destabilise and fall apart.

The main aspect of the project is centred on the restructuring of the faculty administration teams and this is based in some core change theory.

Reflections on Convergent Interviewing

Using convergent interviewing was an interesting experience. I had not used the technique before except as part of a short pilot of the project. The technique was selected because it was determined to be sympathetic to the principle of Actor-Network Theory whereby the researcher should have no a priori views of the situation in question, the technique starts with one very open ended question with following questions being directly derived from the answers that the participants provide. There is very little in the way of interviention on the part of the researcher.

The other reason is the technique was sympathetic to the organisation that the research was carried out in. Staff were selected on the basis of their role with subsequent participants selected by other participants which was seen as a democratic way of selecting participants.

The process as described by Dick recommends that Convergent Interviewing is carried out by two viewers, one who asks the question and the other takes notes. Obviously I was not able to work in collaboration so had to ask the question and take notes myself.

Dick also recommends taking hand written notes and no more than a side of paper. Subsequent researchers have used voice recording though and to be thorough I decide do to use voice recording and then transcribe the interviews. I did take notes during the interviews.

At the beginning of the interview process I found it quite difficult to decide when to change the initial question because it seemed to generate a lot of interesting data.

It was pretty difficult to decide when to change the question but I managed to do so. After this is was easier to decide when to change the question. Basically, I changed the question whenever there was a significant change in the type of role a participant was in.

Participants found Convergent Interviewing interesting. Most people we a little confused by there being only one main question and were skeptical when I told them that they should speak of up to an hour without any other major questions or prompts.

What was interesting was that once the participants got going they all found it easy to keep talking without the need for further questions and only minimal prompts.

For the interviews I had typed and printed the main question on a piece of paper and included four or five issues that the participant might  want to talk about although they did not have to and some didn’t.

For the majority of participants I found that I did not need to provide any prompts because after some initial thoughts people found it easy to talk about their job role and the history of the organisation as far as they knew it.

I asked each participant whether they agreed to have the interview recorded and they all did.

After each interview I reviewed my notes and the questions and made some decisions about the next question. I asked each participant to recommend the next participant, so the process was built around snowballing in terms of participant selection.

The main issue with Convergent Interviewing seems to be the amount of time that it takes to analyse the data and the open ended nature of the questions can lead to a lot of divergent data.

I would like to use the technique again and with more inteviewers, as described by Dick. The technique seems to be often used where there is feeling that something interesting is happening but there is no clarity. The process can be used to clarify issues and help focus attention on critical issues for later follow up.

 

Additional interview

After completing the interviews I decided to review the outputs to date and decided that it is necessary to add an additional interview but with much more detailed questions. The reason for this is that there is a need for some more in depth data regarding the use of the SID system by a key user and manager of the system.

I decided to ask the assistant Registry manager a series of carefully refined questions. The questions stemmed directly from previous participant answers and followed the Convergent Interviewing practice of reviewing the output of a series of questions and answers and then generating additional questions.

From the first question set I drafted a further five questions each with a few supplemental questions. The final question set contained 29 questions so the process moved from being semi-structured to structured.

The aim of the final question set was to allow for the participant to provide some very specific answers regarding the system in use.

 

 

Last interview

I carried out my last interview on the 3 July. The interviewee was the Academic Services manager who talked about the SID system and the new student HUB that will be opening in September.

The interview was interesting because it was a summary of the situation now and acts as an end point to the start of the interview process that looked back to times before the current organisation structure, over a period of about thirteen years.

The early interviews described long periods of pre-tchnology use where staff self identified as ‘paper pushers’ up to the present day where staff now self identify as having expertise and knowledge that is valuable to academic staff and students.

The next steps will be to tie all the interview strands together and create a chronology of actions or a set of chronotopes.

 

 

Considering Actor-Network Theory

I am using Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as the lens through which to analyse my findings. ANT can be highly confusing. Reading ANT texts can be extremely obscure and contradictory. ANT can be thought of as a theory, a methodology or  a philosophical / sociological / ontological perspective.

One of the most often asked questions about ANT is how is ANT applied in practice? Actor-Network Theory has several definitions and each definition seems to have its adherents. ANT is highly adaptable to different disciplines, after starting as a method developed for Science Studies, to allow the researcher to investigate how science is done and how scientific innovatons develop but has since been used as a method and theory in subjects as diverse as, information technology studies, archaeology, marine archaeology, paeolentology, architecture, medicine.

Continuing with the interviews

I have been working on completing the research interviews. My supervisor is concerned that I do not carry on interviewing too many people due to the time that it will take to do the analaysis. The problem is the more people I interview the more interesting the project becomes and the more I want to carry on with the interviews.

In some respects this issue is at the core of the research process, how much data is enough. With the interviews I am getting to the point where saturation has been reached.

In order to provide as comprehensive overview as possible I am planning to carry out a couple of observations of meetings and some observations of staff using the SID system. I have also managed to gather a large number of documents that describe the SID development process, implementation and a series of emails regarding the use of the system by staff.

Towards the end of the interview process

I have to date interviewed 12 participants. I have decided to carry out five more interviews. These will be:

  1. The Director of Student Services
  2. The Registrar
  3. A user from the Distance Learning team
  4. A project manager who carried out a quantitative survey gathering data and feedback on the SID system post implementation
  5. The Director of the School

Completing these interviews will combined with the already completed interviews, provide me with a good cross section of staff and a rich base of data covering organizational and technological change.

So far I have carried out some initial data analysis using In Vivo and Descriptive coding. I will be revisiting all the coding again. I have been reading Johnny Saldana’s book The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers and Kathy Charmaz book Constructing Grounded Theory.

I have so far found the coding process very difficult. The volume of data can be overwhelming but the main problems I’m facing are thinking through the codes so that they make sense in terms of the research questions, having the confidence to code and to know that the coding is adequate.

In Vivo coding seems time consuming and using the words of the participants sometimes feels as though the coding is insubstantial, the descriptive coding also seems too abstract and not representative of what is being said or analytical enough.

Dealing with the number of codes used feels overwhelming and difficult to organise. I have been using post-it notes for the descriptive coding so far to avoid leaping to the use of computer data analysis first off Once I have had a couple of rounds of hand coding I will look at the data using NVivo.

Hopefully the NVivo coding after hand coding will be faster and will get to a set of conclusions quickly.

 

 

 

The fourth interview

The fourth interview was with a person was quite different from the three earlier ones. The main difference was the three earlier interviews were with managers the fourth was with a team member who had quite a different perspective on the question.

The interviewee was much more focused on operational issues and talked about team structure issues. The issue of staff changes was raised and how these have had an impact on the team and its work. The participant mentioned that over the years the institution has discussed many organizational level changes but many have not been implemented and many others have been only partially implemented.

On one occasion a merger between two teams was stopped due to teams objecting to job changes and the need to develop common practices. This resulted in some conflicts developing due to a lack of openness to new ways of working.

Over time jobs have changed though mainly due to the impact of new technologies being introduced. Technologies that have reduced the need to handle paper. The technologies have increased the skill level of the team and this has in turn built the confidence level of team members who now have more time to provide better customer support.

The use of the student information desk (networked communication system) was raised and the difficulty of building a supportive network of users and how difficult it is to get user buy in. It is felt by the participant that the SID system creates an impersonal service – unlike direct email communication – even though the SID system is seen as a better system than email.

I found that this interview worked well probably because I’ve done a few now and am getting more confident about the process. The data collected is becoming very relevant to the project and ties in very well with relevant theories.

The first interview

I finally managed to carry out my first interview. After about two months of trying to get people to engage with the project I decided to change my research design slightly. Originally I had planned to set up a Convergent Interview reference group but it was not possible to gather the group together. The people selected were interested but did not have the time to come together as a group due to work loads.

The slight change I made was to interview the people who had agreed to be on the reference panel. I reasoned that as they were interested in being on the reference panel they would be interested in being interviewed. I was correct. I now have three interview participants and have completed two interviews and have a third lined up for Friday this week.

The first interview went very well. The participant was asked to answer one question and a few supplemental questions. I typed the questions and printed them on a landscape piece of paper and left it on the table so that the interviewee could keep the question in mind so that they stayed focused.

I was slightly concerned that my interviewee would not remember to come or would just not bother. The participant was about five minutes late but did arrive. I was both happy and disappointed. I asked the participant to sign the release form and then started the interview.

I explained the purpose of the research and then asked the participant to read the question. The participant spent nearly 50 minutes talking about his team. The answers given aligned really well with the three theories underpinning the research. Completing the interview I realised that the readings I have been doing for the literature review made complete sense. I now believe the project will actually provide some interesting insights into teams, technology and identity.

Permission to proceed

Yesterday I met with one of the managers I want to be part of my reference group. I explained the project to him and what I wanted him to help me with – allowing me to interview some of his staff and recommending some people in his team for me to interview.

I started off by saying that I had been given ethical permission by the organization and from the institution where I am registered for the award.

I was not sure at the start of my introduction whether he would be sympathetic to my request to help me but as I went on he said the project sounded interesting and he would be happy to provide some names of staff for me to interview. I said that I needed to keep the project narrow in scope and that I had identified four teams including his as the population to study but he said that he thought that the Finance manager would also be interested in the project and would probably be willing to include her staff as well.

I will contact her shortly and see if this is a possibility although I don’t want the project to get too unmanageable and of course time is tight.

I’m going to get back to the other managers I spoke to about a month ago on Monday next week to see if they will give me some staff names so I can get started.

Access to Data

Now that I’ve been granted ethical approval to start the research project I’m beginning to find that the process of collecting data for the project is a lot more difficult than I imagined.

The main issue I’ve realised is that I might be interested in my project and the theories and reading journal papers but there’s no reason why anyone else should or will be. Getting people to agree to be interviewed is not easy. People know that they do not have to be involved that they are giving their time and information for free. Why should they do this?

I have sent a PowerPoint presentation and the participant information sheet and email to three managers who I would like to be part of my Convergent Interview Reference Panel.

The email I sent to the managers asks if I can attend a team meeting so that I can explain to their staff what I would like to do and that all data will be anonymised. I have been told that some people have concerns about me doing this project at a time when there is a lot of change in the organization and a high degree of uncertainty.

If I don’t get a reply I will have to reconsider my strategy, maybe by sending an email to individuals requesting that they attend an interview.

Thinking about Quantitative Research

I have started working on my next assignment  for the quantitative research methods module. I’m using an online Likert scale questionnaire to collect the data. The population from whom the sample is being selected consists of 180 staff. The sample will be randomly selected and will consist of a 10% sample.

The each member of the population will be randomly allocated by a computer macro a number between 1 and 180. The selection of the sample will be made from another macro that will generate 18 random numbers between 1 and 180. The output numbers will be matched to the main population list.

People selected will be sent an email by email mail merge. The email will contain a link to the online survey. The aim is to gather a minimum of 9 – 10 responses for the analysis part of the assignment.

The main challenges at the present time (AKA the beginning) are:

  1. Making sure the computer macro’s work and generate the random numbers.
  2. That the selection of staff from the randomly generated list are available to complete the survey.
  3. That enough people will respond to the request to complete the survey.
  4. That I am clear in my own head what the outcome of the survey is going to be.
  5. I am looking at Factor analysis as a possible analysis technique – (Field, 2013).

I am planning on getting the survey completed and out to recipients the week beginning 17th March.

 

Field. A, (2013) Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics, Sage, Los Angeles, USA. 

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.

Thoughts on why anyone would want to be interviewed, or not…

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:

  1. Getting interviewee participants is not easy. There has to be a benefit to the interviewee otherwise why would they agree to participate?
  2. 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?
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7.  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?
  8. 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.

 

 

Convergent interview number two

I am planning to carry out my second Convergent Interview on Monday 16th December with the person I interviewed this week. I’m aiming to review and draft the transcript of the interview from this week and then work out a new interview question. I will try to make sure that I am much better prepared for the next interview than the first one!

The first interview

I carried out my first convergent interview on Tuesday morning this week. It was an interesting experience. I decided to use an information and consent form and send these to my interviewee for information. I used the LSBU forms from the ethics site. In the information form I outlined what I would be doing and what the aims of the interview were. I booked a meeting room in the university in order to ensure privacy and confidentiality. There was no telephone or computer just a table and four chairs.

It was fortunate that I had produced and sent the information form. I arrived at the meeting room about 10 minutes prior to the interview. My interviewee arrived said hello and then left to get something. I suddenly realised that due to being tied up with something just prior to leaving to the meeting room I had forgotten my notes and the interview question. A great start. Fortunately I had my iPad with me and was able to access my DropBox account where I had stored my notes and the question.

When my interview subject returned I was ready to go. My participant said that she had read my pre-interview notes and the consent form and was happy to proceed. Although I had included in the consent form a line about being able to withdraw from the interview at any time I wanted to say this but I forgot to.

I did manage to go through my notes and explain what I was intending to do. I had remembered to change the batteries in my digital recorder and I had tested it the day before. I also decided to double check the recorder instructions to make sure I knew how to use the machine.

I read in a text that once the interview has started to not touch or check the recorder as this will avoid drawing the interviewees attention to the device and interrupt the flow of the interview. I did remember this on the day.

The interview was scheduled to last between 30 and 45 minutes because the interviewee had to leave for another meeting at 11:00. After I had explained what was going to happen I spent about 5 minutes chatting about the DBA and how this module was designed to get us to practice interviewing as part of an assignment. We chatted easily for a few minutes. The interview started properly at 10:15 , I started the recorder and asked the question. I was uncertain that asking a single question would result in enough of a response. The interesting thing is that the process of convergent interviewing focuses on individuals who are likely to be able to respond to a question due to their expertise or position or interest in the issue.

After asking the question the interviewee talked non-stop for about 20 minutes without any interruption. It was not necessary for me to prompt at all. I decided not to intervene at points where I thought the interviewee was starting to run out of things to say. These points tended to be where she slowed down her speaking or briefly stopped talking. I think there is a slight fear that stopping talking is a problem in these circumstances and there is a feeling that the interviewer needs to jump in and ask another question or prompt.

Leaving the person to just stop was interesting. The short silences were actually slight moments of thought and reflection and I strongly resisted the urge to ask something. My interviewee would then naturally re-start the answer sometimes in a new direction or just continuing from where she had stopped.

At one point I did ask a follow-up question mainly for clarification and this seemed effective. It was really just a small prompting question. I did this several times in the end in order to keep the answer on track. I felt that this was within the spirit of convergent interviewing because I had not planned any but the first main question the rest became just prompts.

After 37 minutes the time was 10:55 and I decided that the interview had reached a natural stop point. I was aware that my participant needed to be away by 11:00 so I stopped the process and thanked my interviewee for her time. I said that I would be reviewing the data over the weekend and would likely come back next week with another question stemming from this first one and the result of the interview. My participant said this would be OK.

I asked her how she felt doing an interview that had one primary question and she said she had actually enjoyed the experience and felt that the experience had been like a counselling session and she had managed to talk through a lot of issues that had been of concern to her. I said I felt that she could have gone on for another hour and she agreed also mentioned that she did not really need the prompting as it was easy to talk through the issue as there was so much to discuss.

I felt that after the initial uncertain start the interview continued and was carried out well. The single question and occasional prompt asked to a person who was deeply interested in the subject was effective and produced a significant amount of useful data. I will be transcribing the data over the weekend and will see if there is another question that can be used next week. My aim now is to have one more interview with the same participant to see if convergent and divergent data emerges.