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Chapter 5- InterviewsAdditional Materials: Click on the links below to access material relevant to your study of Chapter 5:
Exercise: Generating Your Own Data: You could generate interview data on the same broad topics as were suggested for the exercises in the previous Chapter. Obviously the research questions would have to be modified slightly in order to make them amenable to being studied using interviews, but you could carry out interviews on the following: .Interview Topic 1: How do you think that gender affects your experiences at work? OR Interview Topic 2: What are your views and experiences of making choices when shopping for family food for and with your children? OR Interview Topic 3: How important do you think it is for us, as a society, to address climate change as an issue? These topics have been chosen so that you should be able to practise on friends – perhaps even fellow students, if you are using this textbook in the context of a taught methods course. N.B. The coding exercise at the end of Chapter 11 relates to focus group transcripts, but should your interest be in interviews, in particular, you might wish to record and transcribe your interview and use this to develop a coding frame and gain some hands-on experience of coding, once you have read the guidance provided in Chapter 11. Should you be engaging in these exercises in conjunction with a taught course, you could, together with fellow students, generate a small dataset that would yield a number of transcripts on the same topic. This would effectively allow you to engage in a mini-project, using your individual transcripts comparatively and perhaps exchanging these as you work to refine your coding frame (see Chapter 11). First you need to develop an interview schedule, listing either broad topic areas or more detailed questions you wish to ask. Although you will not be able to directly observe behaviour you could ask interviewees to reflect on similar experiences to those which the focus of this earlier observational fieldwork. So, for example, when addressing Interview Topic 1 you might decide to ask interviewees to think about meetings they’ve attended and whether the gender of those attending made a difference to the content and outcome of discussions – both in general and in relation to their own contributions or decisions which affect them directly. This is quite a mouthful and I’m not suggesting that you ask such a question in a breathless rush. You might want to think, though, about formulating a series of questions and suitable prompts to ensure that this ground is covered. Other questions might relate to perceptions about the influence of gender on promotion prospects – in the individual’s current workplace and possibly, also, in relation to previous jobs or potential future posts. Click on the links below to view some questions you might like to use for each interview topic: Interview Topic 1: How do you think that gender affects your experiences at work?What’s the gender balance in your workplace?
How do you think gender influences:
Interview Topic 2: What are your views and experiences of making choices when shopping for family food for and with your children?An interview schedule for Interview Topic 2 might begin with a few questions designed to collect demographic details, including the number, ages and gender of any children (unless, of course, you already know this. However, even if you do know about someone’s family composition getting them to think about this at the outset may help sensitize them to the sorts of comparisons you will be asking them to think about.) Next you would probably want to ask about who does most of the family food shopping; when; and whether this is in the company of the child/ren or not. Further suggested questions are: Do you ever feel under pressure to buy particular items of food? If so, where does this pressure come from? Prompt:
What sorts of items are usually involved? Are there any items of food that never seem to give rise to arguments or negotiation? What is it about such pressure that makes it difficult? Concerns about:
What sorts of arguments do your children put forward when trying to persuade you to buy items? Do you think that your children understand your concerns? Do you discuss these issues with other parents? Do you think other parents think the same way about these issues as you do? Why/why not? Do you think that things have changed since you were a child yourself? It is unlikely that you will have to use all of these prompts (or, indeed questions) since this is likely to be a topic that generates lively responses. As with the observational fieldwork exercise, however, you may wish to add some further questions suggested by reading other research reports. Interview Topic 3: How important do you think it is for us, as a society, to address climate change as an issue?In relation to developing an interview schedule for Research Topic 3, you might consider using some or all of the following questions – possibly in pilot interviews, as you seek to refine your research question and schedule. In comparison to the other interview schedules presented here, this resembles more closely a questionnaire format. If you had selected people on the basis of known views or stances on climate change, however, you could be a little less ‘cagey’ about how you pose questions. Therefore, this schedule is likely to be most useful in the initial phase of your research, as you firm up your ideas and questions. Do you think that climate change gets enough attention, or does it get too much attention? Why do you say that? Have you personally been involved in any campaigning or do you know anyone who has? Is climate change something you regularly think about? Do your friends and family share your views about climate change? Is this something you talk about with them? Are there situations where /people with whom you’d avoid raising this topic? Have you changed your own behaviour at all in response to the threat of climate change? In what way? Why/why not? What makes it difficult to do this? Do you think that enough is being done to address the issue of climate change? By individuals? By organizations/workplaces? By local/national government? What do you think about how climate change is presented by the media? Can you think of particularly good examples? Can you think of particularly bad examples? (Here you might want to consider using stimulus materials – with selection depending on your research focus.) As climate change is a topic that may evoke extreme reactions from interviews, you will probably have to think on your feet in terms of adapting these questions – even allowing for the fact that they have been worded in order to appear relatively neutral. In contrast to one-to-one interviews, focus groups afford the researcher greater licence in terms of ‘feeling the way around sensitive issues’ and letting research participants raise some of the more difficult issues thereby stimulating debate, without the researcher appearing to steer the discussion. This point is further developed in Chapter 6.
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