Electronic Resources for Research Methods

Research methods

Qualitative Research - Interviewing

• Arksey, Hilary (1996)  Collecting data through joint interviews. Social Research Update, Issue 15.

  "Joint interviewing involves one researcher talking to two people together, for the purposes of collecting information about how the pair perceive the same event.
  While recent qualitative research methods textbooks discuss interviewing at some length, joint interviewing is seldom mentioned. This neglect is surprising since it is a method adopted in studies dating back to the 1970s... Drawing on research texts and documented empirical studies, this Update examines joint interviewing and comments on implications of the technique in terms of the research, the researched and the researchers."

• Anon (n.d.) A dramaturgical look at interviewing. Retrieved 2nd August, 2008 from spaces.isu.edu.tw/upload/18518/9602/RESEACHPAPER/article2(4A).ppt  (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5ZnmUVnVw)

  A PowerPoint presentation. This is not a very detailed set of slides and the dramaturgical perspective is not fully developed, but some points are useful.

• Botsko, Christopher & Kennedy, John M. (1995)  Exploring the past using survey research: procedures and problems. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, Center for Survey Research [Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Ft Lauderdale, FL, May, 1995]

  "Two issues will be discussed in this paper — qualitative telephone interviewing and sampling minority populations. These issues came together when the Indiana University Center for Survey Research conducted a survey for the Indiana University Center on History-Making in America. The study was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The survey had two goals: (1) to achieve a better understanding of how Americans understand and use the past in their everyday lives, and (2) to help humanities professionals understand how ordinary citizens think about history..."

• Case, D'Arcy Davis (1990) Semi-structured interviews, in: The community's toolbox: the idea, methods and tools for participatory assessment, monitoring and evaluation in community forestry. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization.

  "Semi-structured interviews are conducted with a fairly open framework which allow for focused, conversational, two-way communication. They can be used both to give and receive information.
  
  Unlike the questionnaire framework, where detailed questions are formulating ahead of time, semi structured interviewing starts with more general questions or topics. Relevant topics (such as cookstoves) are initially identified and the possible relationship between these topics and the issues such as availability, expense, effectiveness become the basis for more specific questions which do not need to be prepared in advance.
  
  Not all questions are designed and phrased ahead of time. The majority of questions are created during the interview, allowing both the interviewer and the person being interviewed the flexibility to probe for details or discuss issues.
  
  Semi-structured interviewing is guided only in the sense that some form of interview guide, such as the matrix described below is prepared beforehand, and provides a framework for the interview."

• Caunce, Stephen (2005).  Recording oral history. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 2nd August, 2008 from http://bit.ly/4iHBg9 (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5ZngXYFTD

  A brief introduction to getting started in data collecting for oral history

• East Midlands Oral History Archive. (n.d.). How do I transcribe oral history recordings? Leicester: University of Leicester, Centre for Urban History.

  Intended for oral historians, but the information applies generally:
  
  "To make your recordings as useful as possible you will need to summarise and, possibly, transcribe them. Summaries are brief lists, in order, of the topics discussed and stories told. A quick guide to the interview, they also help you review interviewing techniques, and highlight gaps and vague responses. If you’re planning to use the interviews as written speech you’ll need to transcribe them, either in full or as extracts (the summary will help you decide which portions of the interview to use)."

• Sainsbury, Roy, Ditch, John & Hutton, Sandra (1993) Computer assisted personal interviewing.   Social Research Update, No. 3

  "CAPI, or Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing, is a simple idea. Instead of collecting data on paper questionnaires, interviewers use portable computers to enter data directly via a keyboard. Computer-assisted interviewing has been used in the past for, for example, telephone surveys but it is only in the last five years or so that it has been used for face-to-face interviews. "

• Suler, John (n.d.) Using interviews in research  Lawrenceville, NJ: Rider University, Department of Psychology.

  "Interviews provide in-depth information about a particular research issue or question. Because the information is not quantifiable (i.e., not amenable to statistical analysis), the interview often is described as a qualitative research method. Whereas quantitative research methods (e.g., the experiment) gather a small amount of information from many subjects, interviews gather a broad range of information from a few subjects.
  When we analyze the results from an interview we use the "hermeneutic method." We look at how all the statements made by the interviewee are inter-related. What are the contradictions and consistencies? What is the "big picture" of what the interviewee is trying to say - and how does every individual statement from the interviewee relate to this big picture? The interview is a "holistic" research method: all the bits of data from the interviewee provide you this "big picture" that transcends any one single bit of data."

• Wood, Larry E. (n.d)  Ethnographic interviewing for client-centered design. 

  "In an effort to involve clients earlier and more intensely in interaactive system design, a variety of methods from the fields of ethnography and cognitive anthropology have been applied to the problem.... More recently, Hughes, et al. ...have observed that "ethnography has a role to play in various phases of system design and makes different contributions to them." Whereas the issues addressed by those authors are of a general nature, the work reported here focuses specifically on the ethnographic interview and its potential role in the design process. The techniques described are adaptations of those developed by me and my colleagues previously for use in knowledge elicitation for knowledge-based (expert) systems...."

• Wood, Larry E. (n.d)  Semi-structured interviewing for user-centered design. interactions, 4(2), 48-61. [Subscription to ACM Digital Library needed.]

  "A critical aspect of user-centered design is for designers of computer support applications to gain a thorough understanding of potential users' work (including it's surrounding context) which an intended application will support. This obviously involves observing potential users and talking to them about their work. The ultimate goal is to produce a descriptive model of current work practice that can be used to guide further design activities (e.g., how the worker will become more productive through introduction of a new or improved computer support application). In order to make that process more efficient, I have developed semi-structured interviewing techniques which I describe here. The techniques are adaptations of methods used by ethnographers... and those used by cognitive scientists... and are based on previous work by me and my colleagues on knowledge elicitation for knowledge-based (expert) systems...."

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