Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences [5 ed.] 0807761486, 9780807761489, 9780807761878

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: How I Came to Interviewing
Chapter 1. Why Interview?
The Purpose of Interviewing
Interviewing: “The” Method or “A” Method?
Why Not Interview?
Conclusion
Chapter 2. A Structure for In-Depth, Phenomenological Interviewing
What Makes Interviewing Phenomenological and Why Does It Matter?
Phenomenological Theme One: The Temporal and Transitory Nature of Human Experience
Phenomenological Theme Two: Whose Understanding Is It? Subjective Understanding
Phenomenological Theme Three: Lived Experience as the Foundation of “Phenomena”
Phenomenological Theme Four: The Emphasis on Meaning and Meaning in Context
How Do These Phenomenological Themes Matter?
The Three-Interview Series
Respect the Structure
Alternatives to the Structure and Process
Length of Interviews
Spacing of Interviews
Whose Meaning Is It? Validity and Reliability
Experience the Process Yourself
Chapter 3. Proposing Research: From Mind to Paper to Action
Research Proposals as Rites of Passage
Commitment
From Thought to Language
What Is to Be Done?
Questions to Structure the Proposal
Rationale
Working with the Material
Piloting Your Work
Conclusion
Chapter 4. Establishing Access to, Making Contact with, and Selecting Participants
The Perils of Easy Access
Access Through Formal Gatekeepers
Informal Gatekeepers
Accessing Children
Access and Hierarchy
Making Contact
Make a Contact Visit in Person
Building the Participant Pool
Some Logistical Considerations
Selecting Participants
Snares to Avoid in the Selection Process
How Many Participants Are Enough?
Chapter 5. The Path to Institutional Review Boards and Informed Consent
The Belmont Report
The Establishment of Local Institutional Review Boards
The Informed Consent Document
Seven Key Sections of an Informed Consent Document
1. What, How Long, How, to What End, and for Whom?
2. Risks, Discomforts, and Vulnerability
3. The Rights of the Participant
4. Possible Benefits
5. Confidentiality of Records
6. Dissemination
7. Contact Information and Copies of the Document
Special Conditions for Children
Informed Consent When Using Technology to Interview
Informed Consent When Interviewing Abroad
The Complexities of Affirming the IRB Review Process and Informed Consent
Chapter 6. Technique Isn’t Everything, But It Is a Lot
Listen More, Talk Less
Follow Up on What the Participant Says
Listen More, Talk Less, and Ask Real Questions
Follow Up, but Don’t Interrupt
Two Favorite Approaches
Ask Participants to Reconstruct, Not to Remember
Keep Participants Focused and Ask for Concrete Details
Do Not Take the Ebbs and Flows of Interviewing Too Personally
Limit Your Own Interaction
Explore Laughter
Follow Your Hunches
Use an Interview Guide Cautiously
Tolerate Silence
Conclusion
Chapter 7. Interviewing as a Relationship
Interviewing as an “I–Thou” Relationship
Rapport
Social Group Identities and the Interviewing Relationship
Distinguish Among Private, Personal, and Public Experiences
Avoid a Therapeutic Relationship
Reciprocity
Equity
Interviewing Online or by Telephone, and the Relationship Between Participant and Interviewer
Chapter 8. Analyzing, Interpreting, and Sharing Interview Material
Managing the Data
Keeping Interviewing and Analysis Separate: What to Do Between Interviews
Recording Interviews
Transcribing Interviews
Studying, Reducing, and Analyzing the Text
Sharing Interview Data: Profiles and Themes
Making and Analyzing Thematic Connections
Interpreting the Material
Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS)
Cautions Regarding CAQDAS
Chapter 9. The Ethics of Doing Good Work
Doing Good Work
The Reciprocity Implicit in Treating Participants with Dignity
Conclusion
Appendix: Two Profiles
Nanda: A Cambodian Survivor of the Pol Pot Era
Betty: A Long-Time Day Care Provider
References
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Interviewing as Qualitative Research A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences Fifth Edition Irving Seidman

Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027 Copyright © 2019 Teachers College, Columbia University All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher. For reprint permission and other subsidiary rights requests, please contact Teachers College Press, Rights Dept.: [email protected]. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Seidman, Irving, 1937- author. Title: Interviewing as qualitative research : a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences / Irving Seidman. Description: Fifth edition. | New York, NY : Teachers College Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019006661 (print) | LCCN 2019015522 (ebook) | ISBN 9780807777855 (ebook) | ISBN 9780807761489 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780807761878 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences—Research--Methodology. | Education—Research—Methodology. Classification: LCC H61.28 (ebook) | LCC H61.28 .S45 2019 (print) | DDC 300.72/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006661 ISBN 978-0-8077-6148-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-8077-6187-8 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-8077-7785-5 (ebook) Printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: How I Came to Interviewing

1

1. Why Interview? The Purpose of Interviewing Interviewing: “The” Method or “A” Method? Why Not Interview? Conclusion

7 9 9 11 13

2. A Structure for In-Depth, Phenomenological Interviewing What Makes Interviewing Phenomenological and Why Does It Matter? Phenomenological Theme One: The Temporal and Transitory Nature of Human Experience Phenomenological Theme Two: Whose Understanding Is It? Subjective Understanding Phenomenological Theme Three: Lived Experience as the Foundation of “Phenomena” Phenomenological Theme Four: The Emphasis on Meaning and Meaning in Context How Do These Phenomenological Themes Matter? The Three-Interview Series Respect the Structure Alternatives to the Structure and Process Length of Interviews

14

iii

16 16 17 18 19 20 21 24 25 26

iv

Contents

Spacing of Interviews Whose Meaning Is It? Validity and Reliability

27 27

Experience the Process Yourself

32

3. Proposing Research: From Mind to Paper to Action

33

Research Proposals as Rites of Passage

33

Commitment From Thought to Language What Is to Be Done?

34 35 35

Questions to Structure the Proposal

36

Rationale Working with the Material Piloting Your Work Conclusion

40 41 43 43

4. Establishing Access to, Making Contact with, and Selecting Participants The Perils of Easy Access Access Through Formal Gatekeepers Informal Gatekeepers Accessing Children Access and Hierarchy Making Contact Make a Contact Visit in Person Building the Participant Pool Some Logistical Considerations Selecting Participants Snares to Avoid in the Selection Process How Many Participants Are Enough?

5. The Path to Institutional Review Boards and Informed Consent

45 45 48 49 50 52 52 53 54 55 56 59 60

62

The Belmont Report The Establishment of Local Institutional Review Boards

62 63

The Informed Consent Document

65

Contents

Seven Key Sections of an Informed Consent Document 1. What, How Long, How, to What End, and for Whom?

v

66 67

2. Risks, Discomforts, and Vulnerability

68

3. The Rights of the Participant 4. Possible Benefits 5. Confidentiality of Records

68 73 73

6. Dissemination

76

7. Contact Information and Copies of the Document Special Conditions for Children Informed Consent When Using Technology to Interview

77 78 79

Informed Consent When Interviewing Abroad

80

The Complexities of Affirming the IRB Review Process and Informed Consent

82

6. Technique Isn’t Everything, But It Is a Lot Listen More, Talk Less Follow Up on What the Participant Says Listen More, Talk Less, and Ask Real Questions Follow Up, but Don’t Interrupt Two Favorite Approaches Ask Participants to Reconstruct, Not to Remember Keep Participants Focused and Ask for Concrete Details Do Not Take the Ebbs and Flows of Interviewing Too Personally Limit Your Own Interaction Explore Laughter Follow Your Hunches Use an Interview Guide Cautiously Tolerate Silence Conclusion

85 85 88 91 92 93 94 95 95 96 96 97 98 99 100

7. Interviewing as a Relationship Interviewing as an “I–Thou” Relationship Rapport Social Group Identities and the Interviewing Relationship

101 101 102 104

vi

Contents

Distinguish Among Private, Personal, and Public Experiences Avoid a Therapeutic Relationship

113 114

Reciprocity

116

Equity Interviewing Online or by Telephone, and the Relationship Between Participant and Interviewer

116 118

8. Analyzing, Interpreting, and Sharing Interview Material Managing the Data Keeping Interviewing and Analysis Separate: What to Do Between Interviews Recording Interviews Transcribing Interviews Studying, Reducing, and Analyzing the Text Sharing Interview Data: Profiles and Themes Making and Analyzing Thematic Connections Interpreting the Material Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) Cautions Regarding CAQDAS

121 121

9. The Ethics of Doing Good Work Doing Good Work The Reciprocity Implicit in Treating Participants with Dignity Conclusion

147 147 150 151

Appendix: Two Profiles Nanda: A Cambodian Survivor of the Pol Pot Era Betty: A Long-Time Day Care Provider

153 153 160

References

164

Index

182

About the Author

196

122 123 124 125 127 133 136 138 140

Preface

I have worked with many graduate students who have deep and passionate interests they wish to pursue in their dissertations. Often, however, they are stymied by the lack of an appropriate and feasible methodology. They are, in Sartre’s (1968) terms, “in search of a method.” This book is intended for doctoral and master’s candidates who are engaged in that search and who think that in-depth interviewing might be appropriate for them and their research topic. It will also serve more experienced researchers who are interested in qualitative research and may be turning to the possibilities of interviewing for the first time. Finally, the book is geared to faculty members in search of a supplementary text on in-depth interviewing that connects method and technique with broader issues of qualitative research. For both individual and classroom use, the book provides a step-by-step introduction to the research process using in-depth interviewing and places those steps within the context of significant issues in qualitative research. The text presents a phenomenological approach to in-depth interviewing. The Introduction outlines my path to interviewing research. Chapter 1 discusses a rationale for using interviewing as a research method and the potential of narratives as ways of knowing and understanding. In this 5th edition, in Chapter 2, I clarify the meaning of the central concept of “lived experience,” and offer the possibility of alternatives to the threeinterview structure. Chapter 3 explores issues that may make proposalwriting daunting and discusses meaningful but simple questions that can guide the researcher through the process. Chapter 4 stresses pitfalls and snares to avoid in the process, and discusses issues in establishing access to, making contact with, and selecting participants. I have added a special section on the complexities of gaining access to children for interviewing. Responding to the increasing concern about ethical issues in interviewing research, I have invited Julie Simpson, PhD, Director of Research Integrity Services at the University of New Hampshire, who has lent indirect support to earlier editions of this book, to review and supplement the text in Chapter 5. In addition, she has added new sections on informed consent for children and informed consent when interviewing vii

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Preface

via technology and interviewing abroad. Our intent is to offer support to readers as they seek IRB approval of their research. Chapter 6 discusses specific interviewing skills and techniques and links them to important issues in interviewing and qualitative research. The chapter stresses how to listen as well as how to ask questions. Chapter 7 explores interviewing as a relationship. It places that relationship within the context of major contemporary social issues that are often embedded in the interaction between interviewers and participants. In this edition, I call attention to expanding notions of gender and to the feminist concept of “intersectionality” as it may relate to “matching” interviewers and participants. The chapter also faces squarely the potential for confusing in-depth interviewing research with therapy, cautions readers about the complexities of rapport, and stresses equity as the necessary element in interviewing relationships. Chapter 8 discusses how to manage, work with, and share the data generated by in-depth interviewing. It guides the reader through a step-by-step process of working with the extensive material that interviewers gather. The chapter presents two potential analytic processes: one leading to identifying themes that emerge from the interviewing material, and the other leading to developing narrative profiles of participants’ experiences and the meaning they make of those experiences. Both are ways of sharing and discussing results of interviewing with a wider audience. For this 5th edition, I have reviewed the pros and cons of Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (CAQDAS) and, based on a key interview discussed in Chapter 8, reassessed my sense of what CAQDAS software may offer. Chapter 9 examines the relationship between the work of interviewing and the ethics of interviewing beyond informed consent. The Appendix presents two narrative profiles. These examples reveal the potential of interviewing both to tap the depth of life-and-death experiences and to explore the complexities and significances of everyday experience. While introducing a phenomenological approach to in-depth interviewing, the text does not claim it is the only or best way to interview. Whether or not a reader is attracted to the phenomenological approach to interviewing, the book presents and discusses important principles and methods that can be adapted to a range of interviewing approaches. It will be useful to any researchers considering interviewing as their method of inquiry. Throughout the text I have provided examples from interviews done by colleagues, graduate students with whom I worked, and from my own research that illustrate the issues under discussion. I try to maintain a balance between sharing my experience with in-depth interviewing, so that

Preface

ix

readers can use what they may, and giving enough explicit guidance so that readers can successfully conceptualize and carry out a research project supported by the methods and processes the book describes. In addition, I describe a practice project that individuals, entire classes, or workshops can use to gain concrete experience with the method in a short amount of time. I also guide readers to ways to study, reflect upon, and assess their own interviewing practice. My goal has been to write a text clear and practical enough to provide useful guidance about in-depth interviewing as a research method. At the same time my objective has been to connect that method to broader issues in qualitative research. To that end, I have updated citations and selectively refer readers to additional readings and online resources that will support their research efforts. My hope is that the presentation of real-life examples, the emphasis on the principles underlying the processes and practices described here, and the integration of broader issues in qualitative research will make the book useful to a wide range of researchers in education and the social sciences. My further hope is that this book will guide interviewing researchers to a method that engages their minds, touches their hearts, and supports their doing good work.

Acknowledgments

Julie Simpson, PhD, Director of Research Integrity Services at the University of New Hampshire, worked closely with me preparing this 5th edition. Most important, she carefully reviewed Chapter 5 and contributed three new sections to it. The book and I benefited from her knowledge and commitment to excellence. I had the pleasure of interviewing Assistant Professor Andrew D. Coppens, who teaches qualitative research at the University of New Hampshire, concerning his experience with Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (CAQDAS). His thoughtful, balanced views contributed to my reassessing the place of CAQDAS in interviewing research. I am grateful to him for his contribution to this new edition. My thanks to the W. E. B. Du Bois Library of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and especially to Lisa Di Valentino of the Reference Department and to the Interlibrary Loan Department for their outstanding support of my research for this edition. The New England Educational Research Organization (NEERO) has been unfailing in its support of my work over the years, for which I am deeply grateful—special thanks to Charles DePascale, Mary Grassetti, and Andrea Martone. Also, my appreciation to Assistant Professor Angela Kohnen and Professor Nancy Fichtman Dana of the College of Education, University of Florida, and Professor Emeritus Wendy Saul of the University of Missouri–St. Louis, who invited me to offer workshops at their campuses, which tested my thinking for this new edition. John Booss, Tom Clark, Peter Elkind, Austra Gaige, Robert Maloy, and Maynard Seider have consistently encouraged my writing over the years. Peter Sterling’s talks with me about science and writing have been a gift. That these individuals are also my friends makes their thoughtfulness even more appreciated. Patrick Sullivan did early work with me that led to the 1st edition of this book. I am especially grateful for his support at that time in my career. Iris Broudy lent her alert editorial eye, thoughtful intelligence, and meticulous sense of excellence to preparing the manuscript for submission to TCP and strengthened this edition significantly. Rachel Gunther’s work with Youth on Board offered a special perspective on the importance xi

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Acknowledgments

of youths’ voices being heard. Mark Tetreault responded to every computer problem no matter when I called. Professor George Forman gave me an important perspective on early childhood education research in the United States. My son, Ethan Seidman, always made time to respond to my queries and my writing. My daughter, Rachel F. Seidman, guided me to the literature on intersectionality, and her thoughtfulness shaped my developing an understanding of that concept. They both in their own work recognize and value stories as a way of knowing. I had the benefit of three anonymous reviewers whose feedback on my proposal for this new edition was enormously useful. Over the years of the five editions of this book, I have been honored by the support of Teachers College Press and its executive acquisition editor, Brian Ellerbeck; managing production editor, Karl Nyberg; marketing manager, Nancy Power; and retired director, Carole Saltz. Thanks also to TCP’s publicist and social media manager, Joy Mizan, for her assistance. My gratitude to Drs. Jonathan E. Gage, Daniel P. Schwartz, and Robert Weitzman for their care. It is to my wife, Linda, our daughter, Rachel, and our son, Ethan, the sources of so much that is meaningful in my life, that I dedicate this 5th edition.

Introduction

How I Came to Interviewing

In my study at home, I have a picture of my grandfather, whom I never met, on the bookshelf. He was born sometime around 1870 and he died in the early 1940s. In the sepia photograph that I have, he is a bearded man with sad eyes, wearing a worn jacket over a sweater and tie. His eyes look out at me no matter where I am in the room. Whenever I asked my father about his father, he said his father was a religious man. “What did he do?” I would ask, and my father would say, “He studied.” I never got very much of his story. I know only that he was a religious man, that he studied, that he didn’t do much else, that his family was poor, and that he died of a heart attack trying to escape the Germans early in World War II. My father was an immigrant from Russia. He came to this country with my mother in 1922. While I was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, and upon visits to my family home later, I asked my father about his experiences in Russia (my mother, also from Russia, died in 1963): What was it like to live there? How did he come to leave? I asked him about his family, about what it was like to be a child in Russia. His reply, almost invariably, was, “We were poor. Everyone was poor. There was nothing there. America is wonderful. Why do you want to know about Russia?” My father died in 1989. Some years after his death, I spent time reading about life in Russia and asking cousins if they had any stories about my parents that their parents may have told them. I did learn more, for which I was grateful. But still there are many gaps in what I know of my parents’ lives before they came to the United States. After graduating from college, I earned an M.A.T. degree and taught English for 4½ years in every grade from 7 through 12. Perhaps it was as a teacher of English that I first came to see stories and the details of people’s lives as a way of knowing and understanding. To suggest that stories are a way to knowledge and understanding may not seem scholarly. When I was earning my doctorate in education in 1967, the faculty in my graduate program in teacher education seemed almost totally committed to building knowledge in education through experimentation. My graduate experience was governed by a sense that 1

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Interviewing as Qualitative Research, Fifth Edition

research in education could be as scientific as it was in the natural and physical sciences. Experimentalism informed by behaviorism dominated my graduate experience in research. I was uncomfortable applying behavioristic assumptions and experimentalism to research with people. But I was in my first year of doctoral study and did not know what to do with my discomfort. Only of late have I come to appreciate a suggestion my doctoral advisor and mentor, Professor Alfred Grommon, made to me: that I do a biography of one of the early presidents of the National Council of Teachers of English for my dissertation. At that time, I considered his suggestion well-intended but somehow not connected to my interests. Now I realize that he may have been offering me a way out of the Procrustean bed of behaviorism and experimentalism that pervaded my graduate experience. Despite my aversions, I did an experimental dissertation. I designed a study of the effects on students’ achievement motivation of teachers’ comments on their writing. I had different treatment groups; I established independent variables and dependent variables; I enlisted a group of English teachers in the field to carry out “the treatments” that I had designed on “the subjects.” Nathan Gage’s (1963) Handbook of Research on Teaching had recently been published. In some respects it was treated as a bible in our graduate program. I remember reading and rereading, and developing mnemonic codes to help me remember the threats to validity and reliability described and analyzed in Campbell and Stanley’s (1963) chapter on “Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Design for Research in Teaching.” While at the time I chafed at the heavy emphasis on experimentalism, I now respect how committed my graduate institution was to research in education. Despite my resistance to the approach then, I now realize how valuable and important it was for me to confront the assumptions of positivism and behaviorism that seemed to me to dominate the institution. In my thinking about both teaching and research, my professional career has been shaped by that confrontation. There were also, at the time, professors who provided an alternative point of view. They helped open my mind to exploring new intellectual paths, especially the impact of social and cultural forces on individual experience in education. In the end, my graduate school communicated a sense of imperative about research in education that has had a long-lasting effect on me for which I am grateful. As I continued my career in education after I earned my doctorate in 1967, I took a position that left me confused about research. I joined the English Department of the University of Washington as one of three faculty members in English education. I had surprisingly little contact with the

Introduction: How I Came to Interviewing

3

College of Education as I began to face the pressures of publishing in my field. On some levels, I was estranged from my own dissertation because I had not really believed in its methodology, so I did not then and never have sought to publish an article based on it. That first and formative year, I did do some writing, but no research. I often wonder how I would have figured out my relationship to research if I had stayed at the University of Washington. Given my experimental experience, my discomfort with it, and my position as a teacher educator in a strong, conservative English department where the notion of research was that of literary scholarship, my research options at that time were not clear to me. I stayed at the University of Washington only a year. I had a good position in an exceptionally strong department in a public university that was the pride of the Northwest; but I left in 1968 to become the assistant dean of the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under the leadership of Dwight Allen. This is not the place to dwell at length on that part of the story (Frenzy at UMass, 1970; Resnik, 1972). It looms larger in my mind, I am sure, than in most others’. Suffice it to say that our goal reflected the times and our sense of them. Our objective was to reform professional education and to have our School of Education play a role in making society more equitable. I will always respect the idealism of those goals. In our inexperience and naiveté, we made many mistakes along the way—in and among some significant accomplishments. As the times changed, and our mistakes accumulated, a new administration was called for. I was a faculty member again after 6 intense years as an administrator. Although I learned much about higher education during my tenure as an administrator, I gained little new experience in doing research. After my administrative years, I was fortunate enough to take a sabbatical in London with my family. I had the chance to do reading that would allow me to return responsibly to my teaching. In addition to reading works on the teaching of English, which I had been away from for 7 years, I read Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolution and thought about my experience with science and research as a graduate student. I read that book just in time. When I got back to the States, references to “governing paradigms” in journal articles abounded. Upon my return, I co-taught a course with Robert Woodbury on Leadership in Higher Education. A new faculty member by the name of David Schuman had joined our school in the area of higher education. Of the many constitutive events that led me to interviewing as a research methodology, meeting and working with Schuman was the most significant. Because I had rejected the approach to research I had learned in graduate school and had not learned a new approach in my short time

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at Washington, or in the 6 years I was an administrator, I was, paradoxically, a relatively experienced faculty member searching for a research methodology. Schuman was beginning to write a book based on interviewing research that he had done with Kenneth Dolbeare. Schuman’s book Policy Analysis, Education, and Everyday Life did not come out until 1982, but in the meantime, he generously shared with my colleague Patrick Sullivan and me his methodological approach, which he called “phenomenological interviewing.” He also directed me to some of the readings he had done in coming to the type of interviewing research he and Dolbeare had done. I remember in particular his suggesting to me that I read William James’s (1947) Essays in Radical Empiricism and In a Pluralistic Universe, Sartre’s (1968) Search for a Method, Matson’s (1966) The Broken Image, and, most directly relevant, Alfred Schutz’s (1967) The Phenomenology of the Social World. I was ready for what Schuman was generously willing to share. I remember the feeling that I would like to do interviewing as a research method. I remember thinking, as I listened to Schuman, what a good way it was to learn about people and schools, and I began to build in my mind upon what he was saying. Additionally, I had had experience with psychotherapy. Through that process, I learned to appreciate even further the importance of language and stories in a person’s life as ways toward knowing and understanding. That personal experience made me even more ready to consider interviewing as a research method. Sullivan and I were co-teaching a course for community college teachers on critical issues in community college teaching. Sullivan, with his colleague, Judithe Speidel, had earlier done a documentary film on the Shakers (The Shaker Legacy, 1976), and we decided now to make a film on teaching in community colleges based on the interviewing method we had learned from Schuman. We received a grant from the Exxon Corporation to support our interviewing 25 community college teachers on how they came to teaching, what it was like for them, and what it meant to them. The film was produced in 1982, and we then received a second grant from the National Institute of Education (NIE) to expand our interviewing to community college faculty in California and New York. The work continued to be a deeply satisfying way to do research. I loved interviewing people about their work as faculty members and learning about community college education through the experience of those who taught there. We interviewed a total of 76 community college faculty and, through the efforts of Mary Bray Schatzkamer, 24 students to try to gain an understanding of what it was like to work and teach in a community college. That interviewing led to a draft of a manuscript called “What We Have

Introduction: How I Came to Interviewing

5

Learned About In-Depth Interviewing” that was published as Chapter 14 of our Final Report to NIE (Seidman, Sullivan, & Schatzkamer, 1983) and a book on community college teaching called In the Words of the Faculty (Seidman, 1985). While doing our research on community college faculty, Sullivan and I began to co-teach a graduate seminar, In-Depth Interviewing and Issues in Qualitative Research. Interviewing the community college teachers was the first research I had done that was neither literary nor experimental. I had finally found a way to do “empirical” work that was emotionally and intellectually satisfying. In spite of problems and complications everywhere in the research process, from conceiving the idea and contacting participants to writing up the results of 3 years of interviewing, this kind of work was and continues to be deeply satisfying for me. It is hard and sometimes draining, but I have never lost the feeling that it is a privilege to gather the stories of people through interviewing and to come to understand their experiences through their stories. Sharing those stories through developing profiles of the people I had interviewed in their own words and making thematic connections among their experiences proved to be a fruitful way of working with the material and of writing about what I had learned. A good deal of what follows is an attempt to share the roots of the intellectual and emotional pleasure I have gained from interviewing as a research method in education.

Chapter 1

Why Interview? I interview because I am interested in other people’s stories. Most simply put, stories are a way of knowing. The root of the word story is the Greek word histor, which means one who is “wise” and “learned” (Watkins, 1985, p. 74). Telling stories is essentially a meaning-making process. Every whole story, Aristotle tells us, has a beginning, a middle, and an end (Butcher, 1902). In order to give the details of their experience a beginning, middle, and end, people must reflect on their experience. It is this process of selecting constitutive details of experience, reflecting on them, giving them order, and thereby making sense of them that makes telling stories a meaning-making experience. (See Schutz, 1967, p. 12 and p. 50, for aspects of the relationship between reflection and meaning-making.) Every word that people use in telling their stories is a microcosm of their consciousness (Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 236–237). Individuals’ consciousness gives access to the most complicated social and educational issues, because social and educational issues are abstractions based on the concrete experience of people. W. E. B. Du Bois knew this when he wrote, “I seem to see a way of elucidating the inner meaning of life and significance of that race problem by explaining it in terms of the one human life that I know best” (Wideman, 1990, p. xiv). Although anthropologists have long been interested in people’s stories as a way of understanding their culture, such an approach to research in education has not been widely accepted. For many years those who were trying to make education a respected academic discipline in universities argued that education could be a science (Bailyn, 1963). They urged their colleagues to adapt research models patterned after those in the natural and physical sciences. In the 1970s a reaction to the dominance of experimental, quantitative, and behaviorist research in education began to develop (Gage, 1989). The critique had its own energy and was also a reflection of the era’s more general resistance to received authority (Gitlin, 1987, esp. ch. 4). Researchers in education split into two, almost warring, camps: quantitative and qualitative. It is interesting to note that the debate between the two camps got especially fierce and the polemics more extreme when the economics of 7

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higher education took a downturn in the mid-1970s and early 1980s (Gage, 1989). But the political battles were informed by real epistemological differences. The underlying assumptions about the nature of reality, the relationship of the knower and the known, the possibility of objectivity, and the possibility of generalization inherent in each approach are different and to a considerable degree contradictory. To begin to understand these basic differences in assumptions, I urge you to read James (1947), Lincoln and Guba (1985, ch. 1), Mannheim (1975), and Polanyi (1958). For those interested in interviewing as a method of research, perhaps the most telling argument between the two camps centers on the significance of language to inquiry with human beings. Bertaux (1981) has argued that those who urge educational researchers to imitate the natural sciences seem to ignore one basic difference between the subjects of inquiry in the natural sciences and those in the social sciences: The subjects of inquiry in the social sciences can talk and think. Unlike a planet, or a chemical, or a lever, “If given a chance to talk freely, people appear to know a lot about what is going on” (p. 39). At the very heart of what it means to be human is the ability of people to symbolize their experience through language. To understand human behavior means to understand the use of language (Heron, 1981). Heron points out that the original and archetypal paradigm of human inquiry is two persons talking and asking questions of each other. He says: The use of language, itself, . . . contains within it the paradigm of cooperative inquiry; and since language is the primary tool whose use enables human construing and intending to occur, it is difficult to see how there can be any more fundamental mode of inquiry for human beings into the human condition. (p. 26)

Interviewing, then, is a basic mode of inquiry. Recounting narratives of experience has been the major way throughout recorded history that humans have made sense of their experience. To those who would ask, however, “Is telling stories science?” Peter Reason (1981) would respond, The best stories are those which stir people’s minds, hearts, and souls and by so doing give them new insights into themselves, their problems and their human condition. The challenge is to develop a human science that can more fully serve this aim. The question, then, is not “Is story telling science?” but “Can science learn to tell good stories?” (p. 50)

(See Charmaz, Ch. 3 in Denzin & Giardina, 2016, for a thoughtful article on the role of stories in qualitative research.)

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THE PURPOSE OF INTERVIEWING The purpose of in-depth interviewing is not to test hypotheses, and not to “evaluate” as the term is normally used. (See Patton, 2015, for his thoughtful bringing together of the worlds of qualitative inquiry and evaluation methods.) At the root of in-depth interviewing is an interest in understanding the lived experience of other people and the meaning they make of that experience. (For a deeply thoughtful elaboration of a phenomenological approach to research, see Van Manen, 1990 and 2016, from whom the notion of exploring “lived” experience mentioned throughout this text is taken.) Being interested in others is the key to some of the basic assumptions underlying interviewing technique. It requires that we interviewers keep our egos in check. It requires that we realize we are not the center of the world. It demands that our actions as interviewers indicate that others’ stories are important. At the heart of interviewing research is an interest in other individuals’ stories because they are of worth. That is why people whom we interview are hard to code with numbers, and why finding pseudonyms for participants1 is a complex and sensitive task. (See Kvale, 1996, pp. 259–260, for a discussion of the dangers of the careless use of pseudonyms.) Their stories defy the anonymity of a number and almost that of a pseudonym. To hold the conviction that we know enough already and don’t need to know others’ stories is not only anti-intellectual; it also leaves us, at one extreme, prone to violence to others (Todorov, 1984).

INTERVIEWING: “THE” METHOD OR “A” METHOD? The primary way a researcher can investigate an educational organization, institution, or process is through the experience of the individual people, the “others” who make up the organization or carry out the process. Social abstractions like “education” are best understood through the experiences of the individuals whose work and lives are the stuff upon which the abstractions are built (Ferrarotti, 1981). So much research is done on schooling in the United States; yet so little of it is based on studies involving the perspective of the students, teachers, administrators, counselors, special subject teachers, nurses, psychologists, cafeteria workers, secretaries, school crossing guards, bus drivers, parents, and school committee members, whose individual and collective experience constitutes schooling.

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A researcher can approach the experience of people in contemporary organizations through examining personal and institutional documents, through observation, through exploring history, through experimentation, through questionnaires and surveys, and through a review of existing literature. If the researcher’s goal, however, is to understand the meaning people involved in education, or any social institution, make of their experience, then interviewing provides a necessary, if not always completely sufficient, avenue of inquiry. An educational researcher might suggest that the other avenues of inquiry listed above offer access to people’s experience and the meaning they make of it as effectively as and at less cost than does interviewing. I would not argue that there is one right way, or that one way is better than another. Howard Becker, Blanche Geer, and Martin Trow carried on an argument in 1957 that still gains attention in the literature because, among other reasons, Becker and Geer seemed to be arguing that participant observation was the single and best way to gather data about people in society. Trow took exception and argued back that for some purposes interviewing is far superior (Becker & Geer, 1957; Trow, 1957). The adequacy of a research method depends on the purpose of the research and the questions being asked (Locke, Spirduso, & Silverman, 2014). If a researcher is asking a question such as, “How do people behave in this classroom?,” then participant observation might be the best method of inquiry. If the researcher is asking, “How does the placement of students in a level of the tracking system correlate with social class and race?,” then a survey may be the best approach. If the researcher is wondering whether a new curriculum affects students’ achievements on standardized tests, then a quasi-experimental, controlled study might be most effective. Research interests don’t always or often come out so neatly. In many cases, research interests have many levels, and as a result multiple methods may be appropriate. If the researcher is interested, however, in what it is like for students to be in the classroom, or patients to be in the hospital, what their experience is, and what meaning they make out of that experience—if the interest is in what Schutz (1967) calls their “subjective understanding”—then it seems to me that interviewing, in most cases, may be the best avenue of inquiry. I say “in most cases,” because below a certain age, a phenomenological approach may not work. Children need appropriate comprehension and communication skills if they are to reconstruct experience, reflect on that experience, and adequately articulate their reflections. While children within certain age groups differ widely in their verbal competency, and a search of Google Scholar will reveal a number of interview studies of very young children using a phenomenological approach, I think a guideline,

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with exceptions for individual differences, is to work with children at least 10 years old.

WHY NOT INTERVIEW? Interviewing research takes a great deal of time and, sometimes, money. Researchers have to conceptualize a project, establish access to and make contact with participants, interview them, transcribe the data, and then work with the material and share what they have learned. Any method of inquiry worth anything takes time, thoughtfulness, energy, and money. But interviewing is especially labor-intensive. If researchers do not have the money or the support to hire help to transcribe recordings, it is their labor that is at stake. (See Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, pp. 131–136, for an approach that might cut the cost of transcription.) Interviewing requires that researchers establish access to, and make contact with, potential participants whom they have never met. If they are unduly shy or hate to make phone calls, the process of getting started can be daunting. On the other hand, overcoming shyness, taking the initiative, establishing contact, and scheduling and completing the first set of interviews can be a very satisfying accomplishment. My sense is that graduate programs today in general, and the one in which I taught in particular, are much more individualized and less monolithic than I thought them to be when I was a doctoral candidate. Students have a choice of the type of research methodology they wish to pursue. But in some graduate programs there may be a cost for that freedom: Those interested in qualitative research may not be required to learn the tenets of what is called “quantitative” research. As a result, some students tend not to understand the history of the method they are using or the critique of positivism and experimentalism out of which some approaches to qualitative research in education grew. (For those interested in learning that critique as an underpinning for their work, as a start see Johnson, 1975; Lincoln & Guba, 1985.) Graduate candidates must understand the so-called paradigm wars (Gage, 1989) that took place in the 1970s and 1980s and are still being waged today (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018, pp. 2–66; National Research Council, 2002). By not being aware of the history of the battle and the fields upon which it has been fought, students may not understand their own position in it and the potential implications for their career as it continues. If doctoral candidates choose to use interviewing as a research methodology for their dissertation or other early research, they should know that their choice to do qualitative research has not been the

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dominant one in the history of educational research. Although qualitative research has gained ground in the last 30 years, professional organizations, some journals in education, and personnel committees on which senior faculty tend to sit, are often dominated by those who have a predilection for quantitative research. Furthermore, the federal government issued an additional challenge to qualitative researchers when it enacted legislation that guides federal funding agencies to award grants to researchers whose methodologies adhere to “scientific” standards. (See the definition of scientific in section 102.18 of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002.) In some arenas, doctoral candidates choosing to do qualitative rather than quantitative research may have to fight a stiffer battle to establish themselves as credible. They may also have to be comfortable with being outside the center of the conventional educational establishments. They will have to learn to search out funding agencies, journals, and publishers open to qualitative approaches. (For a discussion of some of these issues, see Mishler, 1986, esp. pp. 141–143; Wolcott, 1994, pp. 417–422.) One way to bridge the divide between quantitative and qualitative research is to encourage graduate candidates to take a “mixed methods” approach to their research (Brannen, 2017). Although the choice of a research method ideally is determined by what one is trying to learn, those coming into the field of educational research must know that some researchers and scholars see the choice as a political and moral one (see Bertaux, 1981; Fay, 1987; Gage, 1989; Lather, 1986a, 1986b; Popkewitz, 1984). Those who espouse qualitative research often claim the high moral road (see Brinkmann, 2012, especially pp. 59–60). Among other criticism, they decry the way quantitative research turns human beings into numbers. But there are equally serious moral issues involved in qualitative research. As I read Todorov’s (1984) The Conquest of America, I began to think of interviewing as a process that turns others into subjects so that their words can be appropriated for the benefit of the researcher. Daphne Patai (1987) raises a similar issue when she points out that the Brazilian women she interviewed seemed to enjoy the activity, but she was deeply troubled by the possibility that she was exploiting them for her scholarship. Interviewing as exploitation is a serious concern and provides a contradiction and a tension within my work that I have not fully resolved. Part of the issue is, as Patai recognizes, an economic one. Steps can be taken to assure that participants receive an equitable share of whatever financial profits ensue from their participation in research. But, at a deeper level, there is a more basic question of research for whom, by whom, and to what end. Research is often done by people in relative

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positions of power in the guise of reform. All too often the only interests served are those of the researcher’s personal advancement. It is a constant struggle to make the research process equitable, especially in the United States, where a good deal of our social structure is inequitable.

CONCLUSION So why choose interviewing? Perhaps constitutive events in your life, as in mine, have added up to your being interested in interviewing as a method. It is a powerful way to gain insight into educational and other important social issues through understanding the experience of the individuals whose lives reflect those issues. As a method of inquiry, interviewing is most consistent with people’s ability to make meaning through language. It affirms the importance of the individual without denigrating the possibility of community and collaboration. Finally, it is deeply satisfying to researchers who are interested in others’ stories.

NOTE 1. The word a researcher chooses to refer to the person being interviewed often communicates important information about the researchers’ purpose in interviewing and their view of the relationship. In the literature about interviewing, a wide range of terms is used. Interviewee or respondent (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Richardson, Dohrenwend, & Klein, 1965) casts the participant in a passive role and the process of interviewing as one of giving answers to questions. Some writers refer to the person being interviewed as the subject (Patai, 1987). On one hand, this term can be seen as positive; it changes the person being interviewed from object to subject. On the other hand, the term subject implies that the interviewing relationship is hierarchical and that the person being interviewed can be subjugated. Alternatively, anthropologists tend to use the term informant (Ellen, 1984), because the people they interview inform them about a culture. Researchers pursuing cooperative inquiry and action research may consider all involved in the research as co-researchers (Reason, 1994). The use of this term has significant implications for how you design research, and gather and interpret data. In searching for the term we wanted to use, my colleagues and I focused on the fact that in-depth interviewing encourages people to reconstruct their experience actively within the context of their lives. To reflect that active stance, we chose the word participants to refer to the people we interview. That word seems to capture both the sense of active involvement that occurs in an in-depth interview and the sense of equity that we try to build in our interviewing relationships.

Chapter 2

A Structure for In-Depth, Phenomenological Interviewing The word interviewing covers a wide range of practices. There are tightly structured, survey interviews with preset, standardized, normally closed questions. At the other end of the continuum are open-ended, apparently unstructured, anthropological interviews that might be seen almost, according to Spradley (1979), as friendly conversations. (For a description of the wide range of approaches to interviewing, see Bertaux, 1981; Briggs, 1986, p. 20; Ellen, 1984, p. 231; Kvale, 1996; Lincoln & Guba, 1985, pp. 268–269; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, pp. 109–117; Mishler, 1986, pp. 14–15; Richardson et al., 1965, pp. 36–40; Rubin & Rubin, 1995; Spradley, 1979, pp. 57–58.) This book, however, is about what I and my colleagues have come to call in-depth, phenomenologically based interviewing. The method combines life-history interviewing (see Bertaux, 1981) and focused, in-depth interviewing informed by assumptions drawn from phenomenology. (For a history of qualitative interviewing, see Brinkmann, 2013, pp. 6–13.) In this approach interviewers use, primarily, but not exclusively, open-ended questions. Their major task is to build upon and explore their participants’ responses to those questions. The goal is to have the participants reconstruct their experience within the topic under study. The range of topics adaptable to this interviewing approach is wide, covering almost any issue involving the experience of contemporary people. In past years, doctoral students and experienced researchers with whom I have worked or had contact have explored the following subjects for their dissertations and further publications: • Eleventh-grade students as writers (Cleary, 1985, 1988, 1991) • Student teaching in urban schools (Compagnone, 1995) • English teachers’ experiences in their first year of teaching (Cook, 2004, 2009) • Becoming an early childhood teacher (Dana & Yendol-Hoppey, 2005)

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• Relationship between theoretical orientation to reading and reading practices (Elliott-Johns, 2004; received the Canadian Association for Teacher Education’s Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2005) • The experience of mainland Chinese women in American graduate programs (Frank, 2000) • The experience of students whose first language is not English in mainstream English classrooms (Gabriel, 1997) • The experience of planning social studies instruction in a Hispanic-serving school (Gonzalez, 2012) • Black jazz musicians who become teachers in colleges and universities (Hardin, 1987) • The lived experiences of practitioner scholars (see Hooser, 2015, winner of the AERA Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2016; Studies across disciplines, Doctoral education across the disciplines Special Interest Group) • African American performing artists who teach at traditionally White colleges (Jenoure, 1995) • The experience of girl child soldiers (Keairns, 2002) • The experience of teaching science through journalistic writing (Kohnen, 2012) • Advising in a land grant university (Lynch, 1998) • Gender issues embedded in student teaching (Miller, 1993, 1997) • The literacy experience of vocational high school students (Nagle, 1995, 2001) • How to interest girls in STEM education (Nash, 2017) • The impact of tracking on student teachers (O’Donnell, 1990) • Women returning to community colleges (Schatzkamer, 1986) • The experience of young Black fathers in a fatherhood program (Whiting, 2004) • The work of physical education teacher educators (Williamson, 1988, 1990) • Lesbian physical education teachers (Woods, 1990) • ESL teachers (Young, 1990) In each of these pilot and dissertation studies, the interviewer explored complex issues in the subject area by examining the concrete experience of people in that area and the meaning their experience had for them.

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WHAT MAKES INTERVIEWING PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? Phenomenology is a complex philosophy with many facets. There is no single approach to interviewing research that could be called phenomenological (Heidegger, 2013). Different researchers studying phenomenology might develop a range of approaches to inquiry that they term phenomenological. Max van Manen’s Phenomenology of Practice (2016), the reference most helpful to me in developing my understanding of this philosophical approach, has an excellent discussion of major phenomenological traditions. For an example of an approach to research that is called phenomenological, yet is different from the one I describe in these pages, see Clark Moustakas’s Phenomenological Research Methods (1994). As I gained experience with the method we had adapted from David Schuman’s work (1982) (see Introduction), I wanted to understand better why he had described his work as “phenomenological.” From my reading of the works of Alfred Schutz (1967), Martin Heidegger (1962), Jean-Paul Sartre (1956), and Max Van Manen (1990, 2016), I identified four phenomenological themes that provided a rationale for the structure we adopted and the interview techniques we used. (For an extended discussion of the relationship between techniques of interviewing and the theory underlying one’s approach to interviewing, see Kvale, 1996, ch. 3.)

PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEME ONE: THE TEMPORAL AND TRANSITORY NATURE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE A phenomenological approach to interviewing focuses on the lived experiences of participants and the meaning they make of that experience. While focusing on human experience and its meaning, phenomenology stresses the transitory nature of human experience. Heidegger and Schutz emphasize that human lives are bound by time and that human experiences are fleeting. In human experience, the “will be” becomes the “is” and then the “was” in an instant. So what is most important to a phenomenological perspective is also inherently problematic. In his commentary on the Psalm of David, Number 39, Saint Augustine wrote compellingly about the problematic, transitory nature of human experience: These days have no true being; they are gone almost before they arrive; and when they come they cannot continue; they press upon one another, they follow the one the other, and cannot check themselves in their course. Of the

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past, nothing is called back again; what is yet to be expected is something which will pass away again; it is not yet possessed, whilst as yet it is not arrived; it cannot be kept when once it arrived. . . . For we can neither say that that is, which does not continue, nor that it is not when it is come and is passing. It is that absolute IS, that true IS, that IS in the strict sense of the word that I long for. . . . (quoted in Bloom, 2004, p. 280)

Though certainly not his purpose in this commentary on Psalm 39, Saint Augustine’s passionate quest for the “absolute is” clarifies for me an essential aspect of research with humans. The word research consists of the prefix “re” meaning again, and the root “search.” Research then may be seen as a matter of searching again for what Augustine calls the “absolute is” of an experience. The Latin word for the state-of-being verb is is esse. The English word “essence” also derives from the same Latin root, esse. In the process of asking participants to reconstruct and reflect on their experience, researchers using a phenomenological approach ask participants to search again for the essence of their lived experience, the real “is” for which Saint Augustine longed.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEME TWO: WHOSE UNDERSTANDING IS IT? SUBJECTIVE UNDERSTANDING But from whose point of view should we search for the true essence, the real “is” of another’s experience? For Schutz, a phenomenological view of such experience would be one in which we seek our participants’ point of view of their experience. Schutz calls that point of view the participants’ “subjective understanding.” Through observation we can observe others’ experience from our point of view. In interviewing guided by phenomenology, we strive to understand a person’s experience from their point of view (Schutz, 1967, p. 20). At the same time that we strive for subjective understanding of our participants, we must be modest about our expectations. Schutz says that it is never possible to understand another perfectly. To do so would mean that we had entered into the other’s stream of consciousness and experienced what that person had experienced. If we could do that, we would be that other person. The goal of researchers’ using a phenomenological approach to interviewing would be to come as close as possible to understanding the true “is” of our participants’ experience from their subjective point of view. Seeking our participants’ subjective reconstruction of their experience has

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significant implications for the interviewing technique interviewers might use in a phenomenological approach to interviewing. Chapter 6 discusses those techniques.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEME THREE: LIVED EXPERIENCE AS THE FOUNDATION OF “PHENOMENA” Schutz and Max Van Manen (1990) emphasize that a phenomenological approach focuses on the “lived experience” of human beings. What do they mean by “lived experience”? Schutz says that it is made up of the many constitutive elements that are part of our experience that flow together, undifferentiated while we are in the stream of action. It is only when we step out of the stream of flowing action and through reflection reconstruct the constitutive elements of lived experience that those constitutive elements become, in Schutz’s words, “phenomena.” Upon reflection, we see that phenomena can take on meaning for the participant and the interviewer (Schutz, 1967, ch. 2). Van Manen points out that the transitory nature of a participant’s lived experience provides a complication for the interviewer. Lived experience is what we experience as it happens, but normally we take very little notice of it while it occurs (van Manen, 2016, p. 42). But we get at what we experience after it happens through a reconstruction of that experience (van Manen, 1990, p. 38). Interviewers strive as best as possible to guide their participants to reconstitute their lived experience. We ask participants to reconstruct the details of their daily experience, especially in the area that is the subject of inquiry. Interviewers using a phenomenological approach are always trying to make the “was” come as close as possible to what was the “is.” Another complexity inherent in seeking the essence of the lived experience of participants is that our access to lived experience is primarily though language: the words we use to guide the participant and the words they use to respond. According to Van Manen (1990), “The aim of phenomenology is to transform lived experience into a textual expression of its essence” (p. 36). As researchers, we study that textual evidence as a way of getting at the essence of the experiences that are central to our study. That we get at “lived experience” primarily through language connects to some of the basic fundamentals of interviewing research. It helps explain the centrality of the transcript to the research process. It may help us think more thoughtfully about some of the issues involved in the use of Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software that I discuss

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in Chapter 8. Finally, the focus on lived experience accessed through language provides the rationale for taking seriously the words our participants use and following up on them when appropriate.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEME FOUR: THE EMPHASIS ON MEANING AND MEANING IN CONTEXT A phenomenological approach to interviewing emphasizes the importance of making meaning of experience. Van Manen (1990) writes that phenomenology, because it is the descriptive study of lived experience, is the attempt to enrich lived experience by mining its meaning. Meaning-making is a particularly human process, heavily reliant on language. A basic assumption in in-depth interviewing research is that the meaning people make of their experience affects the way they carry out that experience (Blumer, 1969, p. 2). Schutz argues that meaningfulness does not reside in the lived experience itself, but is the “act of attention” that brings experiences that would otherwise be simply lived through into our “intentional gaze” and opens the pathway to meaningfulness (Schutz, 1967, pp. 71–72). By asking participants to reconstruct their experience and then reflect on its meaning, interviewers encourage participants to engage in that “act of attention” that then allows them to consider the meaning of a lived experience. E. G. Mishler, in his important article “Meaning in Context: Is There Any Other Kind?” (1979) and in his book, Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative (1986), suggests, however, that the meaning of constitutive elements of lived experience cannot be understood in isolation. For a simple analogous example, the word their, if said outloud, cannot be understood in isolation and without context. A listener hearing the word their out of context would not know whether the speaker means their, there, or they’re. As in language, context is crucial to understanding the meaning of participants’ experience from their point of view. Schutz argues, for example, that if we were following a trail in a forest and we were to come upon a person chopping wood, we could not understand the meaning of the woodchopper’s behavior without knowing the context within which it occurs. Is he making a living chopping wood? Is he cutting wood to heat his cottage? Is he cutting wood to distract himself from other concerns or to work off anger? To understand the meaning of his work, we would need more contextual information (Schutz, 1967, pp. 23–24; for Schultz’s complete and detailed explication of this argument, see esp. chs. 1–3).

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If we were trying to understand the behavior of a principal in the hallway of a school, or a social worker with a client, or a 13-year-old girl child soldier (Keairns, 2002), we would not be able to do so fully if we did not understand how the particular experience being observed or reconstructed fits into the larger context of participants’ lives. To observe a principal, social worker, or child soldier provides access to their behavior. Interviewing allows us to put behavior in context and provides access to understanding their action. (Ian Dey, 1993, also stresses the significance of context in the interpretation of data in his useful book on qualitative data analysis.) The need for contextual understanding has implications both for interviewing technique and for the structure of the three interview series that I discuss later in this chapter and in Chapter 6.

HOW DO THESE PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEMES MATTER? These four phenomenological themes provide the rationale and the logic for the structure, technique, and approach to analyzing, interpreting, and sharing interview material that the rest of the book describes. They matter because understanding them and how they play out in the interview structure and techniques offers grounding and guidance for the interviewer. For example, because we seek to come as close as possible to a participant’s lived experience, as we select participants for our study, we choose to interview participants if at all possible who are currently engaged in those experiences that are relevant to the study. Because we are interested in understanding and presenting participants’ subjective experience, we are careful about the choice between using first-person and third-person voice when sharing their words. Because we understand that meaning is best achieved in context, we take the time to establish a contextual history for the participants’ current experience. These themes provide a considered basis for a response to the question, “What do you mean when you say you are using a phenomenological approach to interviewing?” Researchers may check themselves by asking, “Is how I am carrying out my interviewing research consistent with the underlying phenomenological principles?” Or researchers may ask themselves, “If what I am doing is not consistent with the underlying phenomenological rationale, do I have good reason for going in a different direction?” The philosophic underpinning for the approach to interviewing allows researchers to craft a coherent logic for how they carry out their research. As I discuss in Chapter 9, understanding the logic of what we do as researchers is a step to doing what we do well.

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THE THREE-INTERVIEW SERIES Perhaps most distinguishing of all its features, this model of in-depth, phenomenological interviewing involves conducting a series of three separate interviews with each participant. As indicated earlier, phenomenological theory leads to an emphasis on exploring the meaning of people’s experiences in the context of their lives. Without context there is little possibility of exploring the meaning of an experience (Patton, 2015, pp. 69–70; Schuman, 1982). Interviewers who propose to explore their topic by arranging a one-shot meeting with an “interviewee” whom they have never met may tread on thin contextual ice. (See Locke, Silverman, & Spirduso, 2004, pp. 209–226, for important insights on this issue in particular and qualitative research in general. Also see Mishler, 1986.) In a conversation with Patrick Sullivan and me in the late 1970s, Schuman suggested the three-interview series. It allows both the interviewer and participant to explore the participant’s experience, place it in context, and reflect on its meaning. Chapter 9 of his book, Policy Analysis, Education, and Everyday Life (Schuman, 1982), explicates the underlying theory that led Ken Dolbeare and Schuman to this approach to interviewing. The first interview establishes the context of the participants’ experience. The second allows participants to reconstruct the details of their experience within the context in which it occurs. And the third encourages the participants to reflect on the meaning their experience holds for them. Interview One: Focused Life History In the first interview, the interviewer’s task is to put participants’ experience into the context of their life history by asking them to tell as much as possible about themselves in light of the topic up to the present time. In our study of the experience of student teachers and mentors in a professional development school in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts (O’Donnell, Schneider, Seidman, & Tingitana, 1989), we asked our participants to tell us about their past lives, up until the time they became student teachers or mentors, going as far back as possible within 90 minutes. We ask them to reconstruct their early experiences in their families, in school, with friends, in their neighborhood, and at work. Because the topic of this interview study is their experience as student teachers or as mentors, we focus on the participants’ past experience in school and in any situations such as camp counseling, tutoring, or coaching they might have done before coming to the professional development school program. In asking them to put their student teaching or mentoring in the context of their life history, we avoid asking, “Why did you become a student

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teacher (or mentor)?” Instead, we ask how they came to be participating in the program. By asking “how?” we hope to have them reconstruct and narrate a range of constitutive events in their past family, school, and work experience that provide a context for exploring their participation in the professional development school program in the context of their lives. (See Gergen, 2001, for an introduction to the power of narratives for self-definition.) Interview Two: The Details of Lived Experience The purpose of the second interview is to concentrate on the concrete details of the participants’ present lived experience in the topic area of the study. We ask them to reconstruct their lived experience in the area of inquiry. At a workshop I offered at the New England Educational Research Organization (NEERO), an intrepid participant asked what I meant by “lived” experience. “Isn’t all experience lived?” she asked. It was a good question, one that goes to the heart of a phenomenological approach to interviewing. In this approach, lived experiences are our actions, our observations, our seeing, feeling, hearing. They are the events of our day that we often take for granted and normally do not call to mind. In our study of student teachers and mentors in a clinical site, for example, we ask them what they actually do on the job. We might ask what it was like for them to get up in the morning and prepare to go to teach. What was it like for them to walk in the front door of the school, check in at the office, walk the halls to their classrooms? When we ask what their experience was like, we are asking them to reconstruct their thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions, most of which they take for granted during their experience of the day. We do not ask for opinions but rather the details of their experience, upon which their opinions may be built. In order to put their experience within the context of the social setting, we ask the student teachers, for example, to talk about the details of their relationships with their students, their mentors, the other faculty in the school, the administrators, the parents, and the wider community. In this second interview, we might ask them to reconstruct a day in their student teaching from the moment they woke up to the time they fell asleep. The same approach would apply to interviewing nurses about their experience during a day working with patients, doctors, and administrators in the hospital, or mail carriers’ experience on their route, or cashiers standing on their feet all day ringing up purchases. According to Freeman Dyson (2004), a famous mathematician named Littlewood, who was Dyson’s teacher at the University of Cambridge, estimated that during the time we are awake and actually engaged in our

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lives, we see and hear things at about a rate of one per second. So in an 8-hour day, we are involved in perhaps 30,000 events. In this second interview, then, our task is to strive, however incompletely, to reconstruct the myriad details of our participants’ experiences in the area we are studying. Lived experience is that yet-unreflected-upon experience that makes up their days. In a phenomenological approach to interviewing, lived experience, called to mind, becomes the base for the participants’ reflection on the search for meaning that takes place in interview three. Van Manen (2016) calls the process “discovering the extraordinary” in the reconstruction of the ordinary (p. 298). Interview Three: Reflection on the Meaning In the third interview, we ask participants to reflect on the meaning of the experience that we explored in interview two. So, for example, we would say to the student teachers in our study, “Thinking back to what you shared with us about your life history in interview one and your experience student teaching in interview two, what does your student teaching mean to you?” The question of meaning goes beyond expressions of satisfaction or disappointment about an experience, but that might be a starting point. The question of meaning is one of the most important questions we can ask of each other and of ourselves. It seems, and often is, laden with complexity. Exploring meaning requires a sense of attentiveness on the part of the interviewer to what the research participants presented in the early interviews. The interviewer’s task is to establish a sense of thoughtful, focused reflectiveness with the participant. The interviewer might take a broad stance and ask about the total experience. The interviewer might ask, “What did your student teaching mean to you in the context of where you have been and where you are headed?” Or the interviewer might ask participants to reflect on something they said earlier. For example, the interviewer might say, “In the second interview you mentioned that you were standing in front of your senior class and you flashed on the fact that you were only a few years older than your students. What did that mean to you?” Or the interviewer might recall that the participant had realized that the class was engaged with her in a serious discussion of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and ask, “What did that mean to you? How did that matter to you?” The interviewer encourages participants to step out of the stream of everyday occurrences, pause, and reflect on what their experiences meant to them. The fact that, ideally, in this approach to interviewing we space

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the interviews out over some time encourages the participants and the researchers to think about what had been shared in interviews one and two. Making sense or making meaning requires that the participants look at how the factors in their lives interacted to bring them, not necessarily in a straight line, to their present situation. It also requires that they look at their present experience in detail and within the context in which it occurs. The combination of exploring the past to clarify the events that led participants to where they are now, and describing the concrete details of their present experience, establishes conditions for reflecting upon what they are now doing in their lives. The third interview can be productive only if the foundation for it has been established in the first two. Even though it is in the third interview that we focus on the participants’ understanding of their experience, through all three interviews participants are making meaning. The very process of putting experience into language is a meaning-making process (Vygotsky, 1987). When we ask participants to reconstruct details of their experience, they are selecting events from their past and in so doing imparting meaning to them. When we ask participants to tell stories of their experience, they frame some aspect of it with a beginning, a middle, and an end and thereby make it meaningful, whether it is in interview one, two, or three. But in interview three, we focus on that question in the context of the two previous interviews and make that meaning-making the center of our attention.

RESPECT THE STRUCTURE We have found the three-interview structure to be useful and important. Each interview serves a purpose both by itself, within the series, and in connection to the underlying phenomenological assumption I identified earlier in this chapter. Sometimes, in the first interview, participants may start to tell an interesting story about their present work situation; but that is the focus of the second interview. It is tempting, because the information may be interesting, to pursue the participant’s lead and forsake the structure of the interview. To do so, however, can erode the focus of each interview and the interviewer’s sense of purpose. Each interview comprises a multitude of decisions that the interviewer must make. The openended, in-depth inquiry is best carried out in a structure that allows both the participant and the interviewer to maintain a sense of the focus of each interview in the series. The three-interview series allows for a sense of mutual engagement. The participants come to respect the effort the interviewers display by

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meeting with them three times. Furthermore, each interview provides a foundation of detail that helps illuminate the next. Taking advantage of the interactive and cumulative nature of the sequence of the interviews requires that interviewers adhere to the purpose of each. There is a logic to the interviews, and to lose control of their direction is to lose the power of that logic and the benefit from it. Therefore, in the process of conducting the three interviews, the interviewer must maintain a delicate balance between providing enough openness for the participants to tell their stories and enough focus to allow the interview structure to work. (See McCracken, 1988, p. 22, for further discussion of this delicate balance.)

ALTERNATIVES TO THE STRUCTURE AND PROCESS While there are definite advantages to doing three separate interviews, I recognize that life sometimes intervenes. In that event, a researcher may want to do one long interview or perhaps two interviews, combining one and two, or two and three. What is important is the goal of each of the three interviews, not necessarily the format for pursuing the goal. It is conceivable that interviewers would be able to gain in fewer sessions a sense of the participants’ life history, their reconstruction of their lived experience in the area of study, and their reflection on the meaning of that experience. Our research teams have tried variations in spacing, usually necessitated by the schedules of our participants. On occasion, when a participant missed an interview because of an unanticipated complication, we conducted interviews one and two during the same afternoon rather than spacing them a few days or a week apart. And sometimes participants have been unavailable for 2 or 3 weeks. Once, a participant was leaving for summer vacation the day after we contacted him. We conducted all three interviews on the same day with reasonable results. As yet there are no absolutes in the world of interviewing. Relatively little research has been done on the effects of following one procedure over others; most extant research has conceived of interviewing in a stimulus-response frame of reference, which is inadequate to the in-depth procedure (Brenner, Brown, & Canter, 1985; Hyman, Cobb, Feldman, Hart, & Stember, 1954; Kahn & Cannell, 1960; Mishler, 1986; Richardson et al., 1965). The governing principle in designing interviewing projects might well be to strive for a rational process that is both repeatable and documentable. Remember that it is not a perfect world. It is almost always better to conduct an interview under less than ideal conditions than not to conduct one at all.

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LENGTH OF INTERVIEWS To accomplish the purpose of each of the three interviews, we use a 90-minute format. People learning this method for the first time often react, “Oh, that is so long. How will we fill that amount of time? How will we get a participant to agree to be interviewed for that length of time?” An hour carries with it the consciousness of a standard unit of time that can have participants “watching the clock.” Two hours seems too long to sit at one time. Given that the purpose of this approach is to have the participants reconstruct their experience, put it in the context of their lives, and reflect on its meaning, anything shorter than 90 minutes for each interview seems too short. There is, however, nothing magical or absolute about this time frame. For younger participants, a shorter period is most likely appropriate. What is important is that the length of time be decided upon before the interview process begins. Doing so gives unity to each interview; the interview has at least a chronological beginning, middle, and end. Interviewers can learn to hone their skills if they work within a set amount of time and have to fit their technique to it. Furthermore, if interviewers are dealing with a considerable number of participants, they need to schedule their interviews so that they can finish one and go on to the next. As they begin to work with the vast amount of material that is generated in in-depth interviews, they will appreciate having allotted a limited amount of time to each. The participants have a stake in a set amount of time also. They must know how much time is being asked of them; they have to schedule their lives. Moreover, an open-ended time period can produce undue anxiety. Most participants with whom I have worked come very quickly to appreciate the 90-minute period. Rather than seeming too long, it’s long enough to make them feel they are being taken seriously. At times it is tempting to keep going at the end of the 90 minutes, because what is being discussed at that point is of considerable interest. Although one might gain new insights by continuing the interview beyond the allotted time, it is my experience that a situation of diminishing returns sets in. Extending the interview causes an unraveling of the interviewer’s purpose and of the participant’s confidence that the interviewer will do what was promised. A related phenomenon is that sometimes participants continue to talk after the interview is concluded and the recording device is turned off. It is tempting to continue, because the participants seem suddenly willing to discuss matters heretofore avoided. The problem is that such after-the-fact conversations are not recorded and are not normally covered in the written consent document (see Chapter 5). Although the material may seem

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interesting, it is ultimately difficult to use. (Many refer to the informed consent document as an informed consent form. The presentation of consent information, however, may take different forms, such as a letter or an email, so we use the term informed consent document to be more inclusive.)

SPACING OF INTERVIEWS The three-interview structure works best, in my experience, when the researcher can space each interview from 3 days to a week apart. This allows time for the participant to mull over the preceding interview but not enough time to lose the connection between the two. In addition, the spacing allows interviewers to work with the participants over a 2- to 3-week period. This passage of time reduces the impact of possibly idiosyncratic interviews. That is, the participant might be having a terrible day, be sick, or be distracted in such a way as to affect the quality of a particular interview. In addition, the fact that interviewers come back to talk three times for 1½ hours positively affects the development of the relationship between the participants and the interviewers positively. The interviewers are asking a lot of the participants; but the interviewers reciprocate with their time and effort. With the contact visits, the telephone calls and letters to confirm schedules and appointments (see Chapter 4), and the three actual interviews, interviewers have an opportunity to establish a substantial relationship with participants over time.

WHOSE MEANING IS IT? VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY Whose meaning is it that an interview brings forth and that a researcher reports in a presentation, article, or book? That is not a simple question. Every aspect of the structure, process, and practice of interviewing can be directed toward the goal of minimizing the effect the interviewer and the interviewing situation have on how the participants reconstruct their experience. No matter how diligently we work to that effect, however, the fact is that interviewers are a part of the interviewing picture. They ask questions, respond to the participant, and at times even share their own experiences. Moreover, interviewers work with the material, select from it, interpret, describe, and analyze it. Though they may be disciplined and dedicated to keeping the interviews as the participants’ meaning-making process, interviewers are also a part of that process (Ferrarotti, 1981; Kvale, 1996; Mishler, 1986).

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The interaction between the data-gatherers and the participants is inherent in the nature of interviewing. It is inherent, as well, in other qualitative approaches, such as participant observation. And I believe it is also inherent in most experimental and quasi-experimental methodologies applied to human beings, despite the myriad and sophisticated measures developed to control for it (Campbell & Stanley, 1963). One major difference, however, between qualitative and quantitative approaches is that in in-depth interviewing we recognize and affirm the role of the instrument, the human interviewer. Rather than decrying the fact that the instrument used to gather data affects this process, we say the human interviewer can be a marvelously smart, adaptable, flexible instrument who can respond to situations with skill, tact, and understanding (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 107). Although the interviewer can strive to have the meaning being made in the interview as much a function of the participant’s reconstruction and reflection as possible, the interviewer must nevertheless recognize that the meaning is, to some degree, a function of the participant’s interaction with the interviewer. Only by recognizing that interaction and affirming its possibilities can interviewers use their skills (see Chapter 6) to minimize the distortion (see Patton, 2015, pp. 430, 471) that can occur because of their role in the interview. Is It Anybody’s Meaning? How do we know that what the participant is telling us is true? And if it is true for this participant, is it true for anyone else? And if another person were doing the interview, would we get a different meaning? Or if we were to do the interview at a different time of year, would the participant reconstruct the experience differently? Or if we had picked different participants to interview, would we get an entirely dissimilar and perhaps contradictory sense of the issue at hand? These are some of the questions underlying the issues of validity, reliability, and generalizability that researchers confront. Many qualitative researchers disagree with the epistemological assumptions underlying the notion of validity. They argue for a new vocabulary and rhetoric with which to discuss validity and reliability (Mishler, 1986, pp. 108–110). Lincoln and Guba (1985), for example, substitute the notion of “trustworthiness” for that of validity. In a careful exposition they argue that qualitative researchers must inform what they do by concepts of “credibility,” “transferability,” “dependability,” and “confirmability” (pp. 289–332).

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Others criticize the idea of objectivity that underlies notions of reliability and validity. Kvale (1996, pp. 241–244) and Brinkmann and Kvale (2014, p. 283) see the issue of validity as a question of the “quality of craftsmanship” of the researchers as they make defensible knowledge claims (pp. 241–244). Ferrarotti (1981) argues that the most profound knowledge can be gained only by the deepest intersubjectivity among researchers and that which they are researching. Such a discussion suggests that neither the vocabulary of “validity” nor “trustworthiness” is adequate. Yet, in-depth interviewers can respond to the question, “Are the participants’ comments valid?” The three-interview structure incorporates features that enhance the accomplishment of validity. It places participants’ comments in context. It encourages interviewing participants over the course of 1 to 3 weeks to account for idiosyncratic days and to check for the internal consistency of what they say. Furthermore, by interviewing a number of participants, we can connect their experiences and check the comments of one participant against those of others. Finally, the goal of the process is to understand how our participants understand and make meaning of their experience. If the interview structure works to allow them to make sense to themselves as well as to the interviewer, then it has gone a long way toward validity. (See Morse, 2018, for a thoughtful review of the issue of validity in qualitative research.) An Example of an Approach to Validity One participant in our Secondary Teacher Education Program was a woman who had taught in parochial schools for a number of years but was not certified. She had enrolled in our program to get certified at the high school level in social studies. She agreed to be interviewed about her experience in our clinical site teacher education program. The interviewer began her third interview with its basic question: “What does it mean to you to be a student teacher?” She responded: Well, I guess—well, . . . [small laugh]—it kinda—it really kind of means that I’ve finally gotten down to actually trying to—I guess what it means is—[it] is the final passage into making a commitment to this, the profession, to teaching as—as a profession. What am I going to do with my life because I have all—all this time, going up and down and in and out of teaching. Should I or shouldn’t I? I was kind of stuck in that space where people say, you know, “Oh, those who can’t, teach. Those who can, do.” Just the whole negative status that teaching and education have. So it’s kind of fraught with that. And really resisting the fact that I had to student teach. I mean, I

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can remember [that] holding me back, what, 10 years ago, thinking, “Oh, no, I will actually have to be a student teacher some day,” and remembered what student teachers were like in my high school, and thinking, “Oh, I’ll never humiliate myself that way.” [small laugh] And so I guess it was the final—[pause]—biting the bullet to . . . making a commitment. Is what she says valid? In the first interview she recounted how she had dropped out of college and taught in elementary grades in parochial schools because she needed money. In that interview she also talked about how she had dropped out of education courses because she didn’t think she was getting enough out of them; how she had switched to an academic field, but later realized that she really liked teaching. The material in her third interview is internally consistent with the material in her first, which took place 2 weeks earlier. Internal consistency over a time leads one to trust that she is not lying to the interviewer. Furthermore, there is enough in the syntax, the pauses, the groping for words, the self-effacing laughter, to make a reader believe that she is grappling seriously with the question of what student teaching means to her, and that what she is saying is true for her at the time she is saying it. Moreover, in reading the transcript, we see that the interviewer has kept quiet, not interrupted her, not tried to redirect her thinking while she was developing it, so her thoughts seem to be hers and not the interviewer’s. These are her words, and they reflect her understanding of her experience at the time of her interview. When I read this passage, I learned something both about this particular student and about an aspect of the student teaching experience that had not really been apparent to me. I began to think about aspects of the process we require prior to student teaching that enhance the need for students to make a commitment and about other aspects of our program that minimize that need. I began to wonder what the conditions are that encourage a person to make that commitment. Finally, what the participant said about the status of education as a career and how that related to her personal indecision is consistent with what we know the literature says about the teaching profession and with what other participants in our study have said. I can relate this individual passage to a broader discourse on the issue. The interview allowed me to get closer to understanding this student teacher’s experience than I would have been able to do by other methods such as questionnaires or observation. I cannot say that her understanding of student teaching as a commitment is valid for others, although passages in other interviews connect to what she has said. I can say that it seems

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valid for her at this point in her life. I cannot say that her understanding of the meaningfulness of student teaching as a commitment she had heretofore not been willing to make will not change. Unlike the laws of physics, the rules governing human life and social interaction are always changing—except that we die. There is no solid, unmovable platform upon which to base our understanding of human affairs. They are in constant flux. Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Polanyi, 1958) speaks at least as directly to human affairs as it does to the world of physics. The structure of the three interviews, the passage of time over which the interviews occur, the internal consistency and possible external consistency of the passages, the syntax, diction, and even nonverbal aspects of the passage, and the discovery and sense of learning that I get from reading the passage lead me to have confidence in its authenticity. Because we are concerned with the participant’s understanding of her experience, the authenticity of what she is saying makes it reasonable for me to have confidence in its validity for her. Avoiding a Mechanistic Response There is room in the universe for multiple approaches to validity. The problem is not in the multiplicity. Rather, it lies in the sometimes doctrinaire ways some advocates of divergent approaches polarize the issue (Gage, 1989). Those who advocate qualitative approaches are in danger of becoming as doctrinaire as those who once held the monopoly on educational research and advocated quantitative approaches. On occasion I see dissertations in which doctoral candidates are as mechanical about establishing an “audit trail” or devising methods of “triangularization” (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 283) as those in my generation who dutifully devised procedures to confront “instrument decay” and “experimental mortality” (Campbell & Stanley, 1963, pp. 79, 182). What is needed is not a formulaic approach to enhancing either validity or trustworthiness but an understanding of and respect for the issues that underlie those terms. We must grapple with them, doing our best to increase our ways of knowing and of avoiding ignorance, realizing that our efforts are quite small in the larger scale of things. (For a thoughtful approach to validity, see Maxwell, 2013, pp. 121–138. For a “craftsmanship” approach to validity, see Brinkmann & Kvale, 2014. For a highly personal view of validity, see Wolcott, 1994. For an alternative response to the issue of validity in qualitative research, see Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, pp. 237–266. For a phenomenological perspective on validity and reliability, see van Manen, 2016, pp. 347–352.)

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EXPERIENCE THE PROCESS YOURSELF Before readers go much further with this approach to interviewing, I recommend that they test their interest in it and explore some of the issues by doing a practice project. Team up with a peer. Interview each other about your experience in your present job or as a graduate student. (If you are doing this practice project as part of a class, this exercise can lead to some significant understanding about what graduate study is like in your school.) Use the three-interview structure. Because this is practice to become acquainted with the technique, shorten, if you choose to do so, the time normally allotted to each interview from 90 minutes to 30 minutes. In the first interview, ask your peer participant about how she came to her work or her graduate study. Find out as much as possible about the context of her life leading up to her present position or to her status as a graduate student. In the second interview, ask your participant to tell you as much as possible about the details of her job experience or her work as a graduate student. Ask, “What is your work? What is it like for you to do what you do?” In the third interview, ask your participant what her work or her experience as a graduate student means to her. You might say, “Now that you have talked about how you came to your work (or to be a graduate student), and what it is like for you to do that work (or be a student), what does it mean to you?” Arrange appointments for each of the interviews. Audio-record them, and be sure to arrange to be interviewed by your peer participant in return. The point of this practice project is to experience interviewing and being interviewed and to see whether you connect to the possibilities of the process. The practice project should alert you to how the way you are as a person affects your interviewing. You may notice how difficult it is for you to stay quiet and let another person speak while at the same time being an active listener and following up on what your participant has said. You may become aware of issues of control and focus. You may find that you have little patience for or interest in other people’s stories; or you may connect to their possibilities.

Chapter 3

Proposing Research: From Mind to Paper to Action Research-proposal writing is substantively and symbolically an important event. In an excellent book on the subject, Proposals That Work, Locke and colleagues (2014, p. 3) say that a dissertation proposal has three substantive functions: to plan, to communicate, and to establish a contract. There is, however, a fourth function. Developing a dissertation proposal and getting it approved is a crucial step in the rite of passage of earning a doctorate. Its ritualistic function can sometimes make writing a proposal seem daunting. It transforms the writer of the proposal from the status of student to that of researcher.

RESEARCH PROPOSALS AS RITES OF PASSAGE In some respects becoming an academic is like joining a club. As in most other somewhat exclusive clubs, there are those who are in and those who are out; there are elites and nonelites. There are privileges of membership, and there are penalties for not paying dues. To some extent, success in the club is a matter of merit; but that success is sometimes affected by issues of race, gender, and class that can influence entry into the club in the first place, or weight the power of those who have been admitted already. Although pressures, strains, and contradictions affect those who work in collegiate institutions just as they do those who work in others, still, college faculty are paid for the pleasurable activities of reading, writing, teaching, and doing research. Relative to public school teachers, for example, we have a great deal of autonomy over our time and professional lives. Not all doctoral candidates in education move on to faculty positions in colleges or universities. But those who use their doctorates to assume leadership positions in school systems often gain a degree of autonomy in their working lives that many would envy. Those who have already earned the doctorate often act as gatekeepers to the club. During the rituals of proposal submission, review, and approval established by the gatekeepers, the power relationship between candidate and doctoral advisor is very unequal. (See Locke, Spirduso, & 33

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Silverman, 2000, ch. 2, for further discussion of dysfunctions that can occur between doctoral candidates and faculty mentors.) Elements of sexism, racism, classism, and institutional politics can enter the process. When that relationship is inequitable, the rite of passage can be excessively anxietyproducing. It takes a great deal of thoughtfulness on everyone’s part to make the relationship between doctoral candidate and committee equitable at the proposal stage.

COMMITMENT When a candidate’s doctoral program is working well, a research topic arises out of work that has gone before. Course work, fieldwork, practica, clinical work, and comprehensive exams all lead the candidate forward to an area of inquiry about which they feel some passion. If the doctoral program has not worked well—if committee memberships have changed, if the doctoral students have been persuaded against their own interests to pursue those of a professor—the students can progress through the earlier stages of the rite of passage without identifying a topic that is personally meaningful. Kenneth Liberman (1999) notes that if doctoral candidates do not really believe in their topic and are not motivated by the intrinsic values of their own research topics, their work can lack a sense of authenticity. In such a situation, the writing of a proposal may be more excruciating than satisfying. In some cases doctoral candidates enter the program having already chosen a topic. For a while they make their peers nervous because they seem so advanced and confident. My sense is that such confidence is often misplaced. The experience of the doctoral program itself should bring about some sort of new orientation, some interest in new areas, some growth in the candidate’s outlook. If it does not, the candidate is looking backward instead of forward. Substantively, one of the underlying reasons for writing a proposal is its planning function (Locke et al., 2014). My experience is that the writing of the proposal is a prime opportunity for doctoral candidates to clarify their research design. To plan, candidates must assess where they have been and make a commitment to where they would like to go. This can be a stressful part of the process. I remember one outstanding doctoral candidate who was stalled for 6 months at the prospect of writing his dissertation proposal. It was not that he could not find a subject; nor was he in search of a method. He was just frozen in his writing. After 6 months of not being able to get around his writing block, he finally discussed his anxieties about, in effect, changing

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club memberships. He said that he had grown up in a working-class neighborhood where people sat on their front-porch steps in the summer drinking beer. That was what his parents still did. He was not sure that he wanted to leave the front porch to start drinking white wine in the living room at faculty gatherings. For many doctoral candidates, completing their dissertations implies a commitment to a new professional and personal identity that can be difficult to make. In many ways writing a dissertation proposal is a key step in the developmental process that occurs in doctoral study, and such processes are seldom free of significant complexities. (For an excellent article on social class and entry to academic life, see Borkowski, 2004.)

FROM THOUGHT TO LANGUAGE Many students have trouble writing proposals because they are plagued by a sense of audience. The process seems dominated by doctoral committees and Institutional Review Boards that must approve the proposed research. (For more on Institutional Review Boards, see Chapter 5.) When audience plays such a dominating role, writing can easily suffer. Rather than concentrating on what they want to say, candidates may filter every sentence through the screen of what is expected and what will be acceptable to the committee. Preliminary ideas about research often stay locked in one’s inner speech. They are fleeting, predicated, and unstable (Vygotsky, 1987), making communication of them difficult. However, those ideas in inner speech must be made explicit. Doctoral candidates do have to communicate clearly to their committee what they are thinking. A key to communicating about plans for research is to focus first on what is meaningful. When a proposal works best, it emanates from the motives of the candidate and works its way through thought and inner speech, and into external speech through meaning. Often, however, the form and substance of the inquiry in a dissertation proposal can seem to the candidate to be imposed from the outside; the format of dissertation proposals can seem to take precedence over their substance. Then the writing of the proposal can become mechanical and formulaic.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Peter Elbow (1981) offers an approach to writing that I think can be useful in such cases. He suggests that trying both to create with the audience in mind and to make writing perfect from the start imposes an undue burden

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on the writing process. He suggests making writing and editing two separate aspects of the writing process. And he urges deferring thoughts of the audience until the editing part of the process. To facilitate that separation, Elbow suggests what has come to be known as freewriting and focused free-writing. Focused free-writing is a process that allows the writer to concentrate on the topic and forget the audience. It advises writers to start writing on their topics and to continue for a specified period of time without stopping. If they get stuck, they should repeat their last word or write the word stuck until they get going again. A person new to the process might begin with 5 minutes of focused free-writing, gradually increasing the length of time. After freewriting sections of the proposal, writers can then select from these the most cogent, refashioning from them a first draft. Elbow suggests other methods to help writers overcome blocks due to anxiety about audience. Near the end of the writing process, rather than at the beginning, writers can edit their drafts with the audience and the form of dissertation proposal in mind. I recommend Elbow’s Writing with Power (1981); Locke, Spirduso, and Silverman’s Proposals That Work (2014); Maxwell’s Qualitative Research Design (2013, pp. 142–160); and Schram’s Conceptualizing Qualitative Inquiry (2003) as important resources for anyone about to write a dissertation proposal.

QUESTIONS TO STRUCTURE THE PROPOSAL What? Proposal writers need to ask themselves some simple questions. These can be divided into several groups. First is a group of questions I put under the heading of “What?” In what am I interested? What am I trying to learn about and understand? What is the basis of my interest? Interviewers begin with an interest in a particular area. At the beginning of interviewers’ research lurks the desire to understand what is going on. But how did that desire begin? Important questions that must be asked in interviewing research and that are seldom asked in experimental or quasi-experimental research are, What is the context of my interest? How did I come to this interest? What is my stake in the inquiry, and what do I get out of pursuing my interest and learning about it? What are my expectations about the subject of inquiry? Research, like almost everything else in life, has autobiographical roots. It is crucial for interviewers to identify the autobiographical roots of their interest in their topic. (See Locke et al., 2004, pp. 217–218, for a

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compelling discussion of this issue.) Research is hard work; interviewing research is especially so. In order to sustain the energy needed to do it well, a researchers must have some passion about their subject. Rather than seeking a “disinterested” position as a researcher, interviewers need to understand and affirm their interest in order to build on the energy that can come from it. Equally important, researchers must identify the source of their interest in order to channel it appropriately. They must acknowledge it in order to minimize the distortion such interest can cause in the way they carry out their interviewing. An autobiographical section explaining researchers’ connections to their proposed research seems to me to be crucial for those interested in in-depth interviewing. (For an example of such an explanation, see Maxwell, 2013, p. 167, and for an excellent example in her award-winning dissertation, see Hooser, 2015.) Finally, interviewers must not only identify their connection with the subject of the interview; they must also affirm that their interest in the subject reflects a real desire to know what is going on, to understand the experience. If, in fact, interviewers are so intimately connected to the subject of inquiry that they really do not feel perplexed, and what they are really hoping to do is corroborate their own experience, they will not have enough distance from the subject to interview effectively. The questions will not be real; that is, they will not be questions to which the interviewers do not already have the answers. There is, therefore, an inherent paradox at the heart of the issue of what topics researchers choose to study. On the one hand, they must choose topics that engage their interest, their passion, and sustain their motivation for the labor-intensive work that interviewing research is. That usually means in some way or another they must be close to their topics. On the other hand, to be open to the process of listening and careful exploration that is crucial in an interviewing study, they must approach their research interests with a certain sense of naiveté, innocence, and absence of prejudgments (Moustakas, 1994, p. 85). Researchers who can negotiate that complex tension will be able to listen intently, ask real questions, and set the stage for working well with the material they gather. Why? in Context The next question to ask is why the subject might be important to others. Why is the subject significant? What is the background of this subject, and why is that background important to understand? To what else does the subject relate? If you understand the complexities of this subject, what will be the benefit and who will obtain it? What is the context of previous work that has been done on the subject (Locke et al., 2000)? How will

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your work build on what has been done already? (See Locke et al., 2014, pp. 17–19; Rubin & Rubin, 2012, pp. 47–48, for succinct discussions of the issue of significance.) Locke and his colleagues are especially cogent in their discussion of what often appears in dissertation proposals as “reviews of the literature.” They stress that these sometimes mechanical summaries of previous research miss the intent of reading the literature connected to the subject. Such reading should inform researchers of the context of the research, and allow them to gain a better sense of the issue’s significance and how it has been approached before, as well as reveal what is missing in the previous research. These understandings can be integrated into the various sections of the proposal and do not necessitate a separate one that sometimes reads like a book report. (See Locke et al., 2014, pp. 68–76, and Maxwell, 2013, pp. 40–41, who are thoughtful on this issue.) In addition to asking why the topic is historically significant, critical ethnographers suggest that how the topic relates to issues of power, justice, and oppression must also be raised. Especially important are the issues of power that are implicit in the research topic itself (Solsken, 1989) and in interviewing as a methodology. John Rowan (1981) suggests that researchers consider not only how their own personal interests are served by their research but also who else’s interest is served. What about the participants in the research? What do they get out of participating? What do they risk? Does the research underwrite any existing patterns of oppression? Or does the research offer some possibility of understanding that could create liberating energy? In a world beset by inequity, why is the topic of research important? (See Fay, 1987, for an important discussion of the foundations of critical social science.) How? A next question to ask is, How? Assuming that researchers have decided that in-depth interviewing is appropriate for their study, how can they adapt the structure of in-depth, phenomenological interviewing outlined in Chapter 2 to their subject of study? I offer examples of such adaptations by two doctoral students who have worked with this approach to interviewing. (I share results of their work in the Appendix.) Marguerite Sheehan (1989), who was a doctoral candidate in early childhood education at the University of Massachusetts, addressed the question as follows. She was interested in studying child care as a career. In her review of the literature she had found that most of the research on child care providers focused on those who had left the field early because of “burnout.” Sheehan was interested in people who stayed in the field,

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especially those who saw providing child care as a career. She hoped to come to understand the nature of their experience and to see if she could unravel some of the factors that contributed to their longevity in the field. Sheehan took the three-interview structure and adapted it as follows: Interview One (life history): How did the participant come to be a child care provider? A review of the participant’s life history up to the time he or she became a child-care provider. Interview Two (contemporary experience): What is it like for the participant to be a child care provider? What are the details of the participant’s work as a child care provider? Interview Three (reflection on meaning): What does it mean to the participant to be a child care provider? Given what the participant has said in interviews one and two, how does that individual make sense of her work as a child care provider? Toon Fuderich (1995), who also was a doctoral candidate at the School of Education of the University of Massachusetts, was interested in studying the experience of Cambodian refugees who as children had experienced the terrors of war. She adapted her interest in this topic to the three-interview structure as follows: Interview One (life history): How did the participant become a refugee? What was the participant’s life history before coming to the United States? Interview Two (contemporary experience): What is life like for the participant in the United States? What is her education, work, and family life like? Interview Three (reflection on meaning): What does it mean to the participant to be living in the United States now? How does she make sense of her present life in the context of her life experience? Who? When? Where? The next set of questions asks whom the researchers will interview, and how they will get access and make contact with their participants. In Chapter 4 we discuss the complexities of access, contact, and selecting participants. What is called for at this point is a consideration of the strategy the researchers will use. What will the range of participants be? What strategy of gaining access to them will the researchers use? How will they make contact with the participants? The strategy may allow for

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a process of participant selection that evolves over the course of the study, but the structure and strategy for that selection must be thought out in the proposal. Some writers suggest that the “how” of a qualitative research study can itself be emergent as the study proceeds. That orientation assumes that because qualitative research does not begin with a set of hypotheses to test, strict control of variables is not necessary. Furthermore, because the inquiry is being done in order to learn about complexities of which researchers are not totally aware, the design and even the focus of the study have to be seen as “emergent” (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, pp. 208–211, 224–225) or “flexible” (Rubin & Rubin, 2012, p. 42). Although it is understandable that researchers would want to build flexibility into a research design, there is a danger in overemphasizing the “emergent” nature of research design in qualitative research. To the inexperienced, it can appear to minimize the need for careful preparation and planning. It can lead to the notion that qualitative research is somehow an “art” that really is incommunicable, or that somehow those who engage in it have earned a special status because they do not share the assumptions of those who do what is called quantitative research (McCracken, 1988, pp. 12–13). The danger of overemphasizing the “emergent” nature of the design of the study is a looseness, lack of focus, and misplaced nonchalance about purpose, method, and procedure on the part of those who do qualitative research. Lincoln and Guba (1985) themselves stress that the emergent nature of qualitative research cannot be used as a license for “undisciplined and haphazard ‘poking around’” (p. 251).

RATIONALE Although the paradigms that underlie research methods in the social sciences seem to be changing rapidly (Kvale, 1996; Lincoln & Guba, 1985), the extent to which researchers will have to defend their use of in-depth interviewing as their research methodology will depend on their individual departments. Some are still dominated by experimentalism or other forms of quantitative research. In others there may be a quantitative predisposition but nevertheless openness to qualitative research. In still others there may be a strong preference for qualitative research among a significant number of the faculty. Whatever the departmental context, for the interviewing process to be meaningful to researchers themselves and its use credible to reviewers, it is important that researchers understand why they are choosing interviewing rather than experimental or quasi-experimental research. They

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must understand something about the history of science, the development of positivism, and the critique of positivism as it is applied to the social sciences in general and the field of education in particular. Because there is currently more acceptance of qualitative research in graduate programs in education, many new researchers have not been asked to learn the assumptions and the practices of experimental or quasiexperimental research. Without this background, qualitative researchers do not know what they do not know about methodology. Consequently, their rationale for choosing a qualitative over a quantitative approach may not be as well-grounded as it could be. At the minimum, Campbell and Stanley’s (1963) definitive essay on threats to what they call internal and external validity in experimental and quasi-experimental research should be required reading for all those who intend to do interviewing and other forms of qualitative research. They should grapple firsthand with the issues that shaped a generation of educational researchers and that still inform a significant body of educational research practice today. Even better would be thoughtful reading in the history of science and epistemology (see, e.g., James, 1947; Johnson, 1975; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Mannheim, 1975; Matson, 1966; Polanyi, 1958).

WORKING WITH THE MATERIAL Research proposals should describe how researchers intend to work with and analyze the material they gather. Describing this process ahead of time is especially difficult for those who are doing empirical research for the first time. It is difficult to project how they will work with material from interview participants if they have never done interviewing work before. In Chapter 8, I discuss working with the material. I stress the importance of paying attention to the words of the participant, using those words to report on the results as much as possible, and looking for both salient material within individual interviews and connections among interviews and participants. The role that theory plays becomes an issue when researchers are actually trying to analyze and interpret the material they gather. Some scholars would argue that the theory used to discern and forge relationships among the words that participants share with interviewers must come out of those words themselves. Theory cannot and should not be imposed on the words but must emanate from them. This approach, extensively discussed by Glaser and Strauss (1967), has been somewhat persuasive in the field of qualitative research. It argues, rightly I think, especially against taking theoretical frameworks developed in other contexts and

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force-fitting the words of the participants into the matrices developed from those theories. On the other hand, it may be naïve for us to argue that researchers can be theory-free. Everyone has theories. They are the explanations people develop to help them make connections among events. Theories are not the private preserve of scientists. Interviewers walk into interviews with theories about human behavior, teaching and learning, the organization of schools, and the way societies work. Some of the theories are informed and supported by others, and some are idiosyncratic. Others arise from readings interviewers have done in and about the subject of their inquiry. Some scholars argue that in qualitative research such reading should be kept to a minimum lest it contaminate the view and the understanding of the researcher (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). To a certain extent I agree with that view. It helps to interview participants about their experience if the interviewers are not weighted down with preformed ideas based on what they have gleaned from the literature. For example, in an interview I had the pleasure of conducting with Linda Miller Cleary in 1996, she spoke to me about the interviewing work that she and her colleague Thomas Peacock were conducting on the experience of American Indian educators (Cleary & Peacock, 1997). She said that, especially when interviewing in a cross-cultural setting, she was cautious about doing too much reading ahead of time. While affirming that she had to do enough reading to be informed and thoughtful about her topic, she was concerned about taking too many stereotypes from the literature into her interviewing. She said that “because I hadn’t done a lot of reading, I could ask questions that were real questions” (L. M. Cleary, personal communication, August 11, 1996). Interviewers must be prepared for their work and be aware of the research on which they are building (Yow, 2015, p. 77). Some researchers go further and argue that interviewers must be expert on their topics before they begin the interviews (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2014, p. 71). I think an intermediate position is sensible at the proposal stage. It is crucial to read enough to be thoughtful and intelligent about the context and history of the topic and to know what literature on the subject is available. It is important to conduct the interviews with that context in mind, while being genuinely open to what the participants are saying. After the interviews have been completed and researchers are starting to work intensively with the material, a return to the reading will help with the analysis and interpretation of the interview material. No prior reading is likely to match the individual stories of participants’ experience, but reading before and after the interviews can help make those stories more understandable by providing a context for them.

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The range of fields and associated readings that those who do research in education must synthesize is daunting. Often, we fall short of the task. But for those who take the task seriously, it is first-rate intellectual work. This work should be affirmed, represented in the proposal, and digested before the completion of the research, but not necessarily totally before the interviewing. This is a precarious and difficult position to hold. It requires maintaining a delicate balance between the sometimes competing claims of the relevant literature and the experience of the interview participants.

PILOTING YOUR WORK The best advice I ever received as a researcher was to do a pilot of my proposed study. A definition of the verb pilot is “to guide along strange paths or through dangerous places” (Gove, 1971, p. 1716). Although it may not seem ahead of time that the world of interviewing research takes one along strange paths or through dangerous places, the unanticipated twists and turns of the interviewing process and the complexities of the interviewing relationship deserve exploration before the researchers plunge headlong into the thick of their projects. I urge all interviewing researchers to build into their proposal a pilot venture in which they try out their interviewing design with a small number of participants. They will learn whether their research structure is appropriate for the study they envision. They will come to grips with some of the practical aspects of establishing access, making contact, and conducting the interview. The pilot can alert them to elements of their own interview techniques that support the objectives of the study and to those that detract from those objectives. After completing the pilot, researchers can step back, reflect on their experience, discuss it with their doctoral committee, and revise their research approach based on what they have learned from their pilot experience. (See Locke et al., 2014, pp. 76–79; Marshall & Rossman, 2016, p. 105; Maxwell, 2013, pp. 66–68, for further discussion of pilot studies.)

CONCLUSION As teachers must plan their objectives and how their methods fit those objectives in order to be responsive to what they meet in their classrooms, so too must researchers plan carefully for research. They must be thoughtful about the what, why, how, who, when, and where of interviewing. They must be as focused and clear as possible about their inquiry when

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they begin the study. Such planning is the prerequisite for being able to respond thoughtfully and carefully to what emerges as the study proceeds. Because in-depth interviewing uses a method that is essentially openended, preparation, planning, and structure are crucial. Each interview requires a series of instantaneous decisions about what direction to take. Researchers entering an interviewing situation without a plan, sense of purpose, or structure within which to carry out that purpose have little on which to base those decisions. Without a thoughtful structure for their work, they increase the chance of distorting what they learn from their participants (Hyman et al., 1954) and of imposing their own sense of the world on their participants rather than eliciting theirs.

Chapter 4

Establishing Access to, Making Contact with, and Selecting Participants

Before selecting participants for an interview study, the interviewer must establish access to them and make contact. Because interviewing involves a relationship between the interviewer and the participant, how interviewers gain access to potential participants and make contact with them can affect the beginning of that relationship and every subsequent step in the interviewing process. In this and subsequent chapters, I discuss an idea that I think could be the first commandment of interviewing: Be equitable. Respect the participant and yourself. In developing the interviewing relationship, consider what is fair and just to the participant and to you.

THE PERILS OF EASY ACCESS Beginning interviewers tend to look for the easiest path to their potential participants. They often want to select people with whom they already have a relationship: friends, those with whom they work, students they teach, or others with whom they have some tangential connection. This is understandable but problematic. My experience is that the easier the access, the more complicated the interview. Interviewing People Whom You Supervise Conflicts of interest are inherent in interviewing people you supervise. For example, I worked with a doctoral candidate who was the principal of an elementary school. She wanted to interview teachers in her school about their experience in developing collaborative learning projects in their classrooms. She had been deeply involved in the project with her teachers and was eager to understand what effect it had had on their experiences.

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In discussions with me, the principal said that her school was small and not a large, unfeeling bureaucracy. She had a close working relationship with the teachers. She felt that they trusted her. Finally, she thought that despite her investment in the project, she could be impartial in the interview. One of the principles of an equitable interviewing relationship, however, is that the participants not make themselves unduly vulnerable by participating in the interview. In any hierarchical school system, no matter how small, in which a principal has hiring and firing power and control over working conditions, a teacher being interviewed by the principal may not feel free to talk openly. That is especially the case when the teachers know that the interviewer has an investment in the program. The issue in such cases is not whether the principal can achieve enough distance from the subject to allow her to explore fully, but rather whether the teachers she is interviewing feel secure in that exploration. If they do not, the outcomes of such interviews are not likely to be productive. As a general principle, then, it is wise to avoid interviewing participants whom you supervise (de Laine, 2000, p. 122; Morse, 1994, p. 27). That does not mean in this case that the doctoral candidate could not explore the experiences of elementary teachers in collaborative learning projects; it does mean that she had to seek to understand the experience of teachers in schools other than her own. Interviewing Your Students Inexperienced interviewers who are also teachers often conceptualize a study that involves interviewing students, and they are often sorely tempted to interview their own. As legitimate as it may be to want to understand the effectiveness of, say, a teaching method or a curriculum, a students can hardly be open to their teacher, who has both so much power and so much invested in the situation. The teacher-researcher should seek to interview students in some other setting with some other teacher who is using a similar method or curriculum. Interviewing Acquaintances Sometimes new interviewers want to select participants whom they know but not in a way related to the subject of study. For example, one doctoral candidate was contemplating an interview study about the complexities of being a cooperating teacher for social studies student teachers. He wanted to interview a participant with whom he did not work professionally but with whom he had regular contact at church. Even

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experienced interviewers cannot anticipate some of the uncomfortable situations that may develop in an interview. Having to consider not only the interviewing relationship but a church relationship as well might limit the full potential of such an interview. In this interview, the acquaintance from church might reveal that the reason for taking on student teachers is for the free time it allows. Normally, interviewers would want to follow up on an aspect of an interview that made them feel uneasy, but to do so in this case could affect their relationship with the participant at church. Interviewers may avoid a followup, slant the follow-up, or in some other way distort the interview process because of concern for their other relationship with the participant. The result is either incomplete or distorted information on a key aspect of the subject of study. Interviewing Friends Some new interviewers with whom I have worked want to interview participants to whom they have easy access because of friendship. The interviewing relationship in such cases can seldom develop on its own merit. It is affected by the friendship in obvious and less obvious ways. One of the less obvious ways is that the interviewers and the participants who are friends usually assume that they understand each other. Instead of exploring assumptions and seeking clarity about events and experiences, they tend to assume that they know what is being said. The interviewer and the participant need to have enough distance from each other that they take nothing for granted (See Bell & Nutt, 2002; Bogdan & Taylor, 1975; Hyman et al., 1954; McCracken, 1988; and Spradley, 1979. McDermid, Peters, Jackson, & Daly, 2014, have an excellent article on the complexities of interviewing colleagues and peers.) Taking Oneself Just Seriously Enough In addition to feeling shy about a process with which they have had little practice (Hyman et al., 1954), a major reason that some doctoral candidates with whom I have worked want to capitalize on easy access is that they tend not to take themselves seriously as researchers. Beginning interviewers find it difficult to imagine asking strangers to spend 4½ hours with them. Many doctoral candidates see research as something others do. Our educational system is structured so that most people consume research but seldom produce it. This has led many to adopt an uncritical attitude about published material and to regard it as somehow sacred. Doing

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research is seen as an elite occupation, done only by those at the top of the hierarchy (see Bernstein, 1975). At the same time, when dissertation research does not grow organically out of the coursework, clinical experiences, and independent reading that have gone before, it becomes a requirement to be overcome. Doctoral candidates who have had little practice in doing research and who see it as a hurdle rather than an opportunity find it difficult to affirm their own interest in their subject, their own status as researchers, the power of their research method, or the utility of their work other than to fulfill a requirement. Cumulative societal inequities can exact a heavy toll on researchers at this juncture. Research in our society has long been seen as a male preserve, especially a White male preserve, associated with class and privilege. Some doctoral candidates need bracing from their advisors and their peers at this point in their program in order to affirm themselves as researchers. Taking oneself seriously enough as a researcher is a first step toward establishing equity in the interviewing relationship.

ACCESS THROUGH FORMAL GATEKEEPERS When interviewers try to contact potential participants whom they do not know, they often face gatekeepers who control access to those people. Gatekeepers can range from the absolutely legitimate (to be respected) to the self-declared (to be avoided). Some participants are accessible only through the institutions in which they reside or work. For example, if a researcher wanted to interview prisoners about prison education programs, it is not likely that there would be any route of access other than through the warden. (See Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, §46.305, §46.306, 2018, for regulations regarding research with prisoners.) A researcher studying the experience of people at a particular site, whether it be factory, school, church, human service organization, or business, must gain access through the person who has responsibility for the operation of the site (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 252; Richardson et al., 1965, p. 97). On the other hand, one researching an experience or a process that takes place in a number of sites, but not studying the workings of any particular site, may not need to seek access through an authority. Such a researcher may want to study the work of high school teachers who teach in many schools scattered through a region or even across the country. In such a case, the researcher might go directly to them without asking for permission from their principals.

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Likewise, a researcher studying the experience of students in high school, but not in a particular high school, might not have to seek access through a principal but only through parents. However, in both cases, if a researcher does not seek permission from a principal, the researcher would not be able to interview in the school building itself. In general, the more adult and autonomous the potential participants (for example, prisoners have little autonomy), the more likely that access can be more direct, if a particular site is not the subject of the inquiry. In our study of community college faculty (Seidman, 1985), my colleagues and I interviewed 76 participants in approximately 25 different community colleges in Massachusetts, New York State, and California. Because we were not studying a particular community college, we did not seek access to individual faculty through the administrators of the colleges. On the other hand, we were never secretive about our work; it would have been difficult to be so, carrying, as we were, a tape recorder large enough to allow us to make audiotapes of a sound quality suitable for the film that we made in the first phase of our research (Sullivan & Seidman, 1982). But even if we had been using a small, pocket-sized tape recorder, we would not have hidden our research from others. When asked in the halls what we were doing at the college, we answered explicitly about our project. On only one occasion was a faculty member uncomfortable with our approaching him directly and not through his administration. We told him that he should inform the administration of our project and our wish to interview him; we made it clear that we were not doing research about the site. We said that if an administrator wanted to meet with us, we would be happy to do so in order to explain our project, but we were not eager to seek permission from administrators to interview individual faculty. The participant did inform his administration, but no one wanted to meet us. Sometimes the cooperation of formal gatekeepers may be necessary but fraught with complications. For example, gatekeepers may allow researchers access to employees in their organization and encourage them to participate. Such encouragement could raise the ethical question of how free employees are not to volunteer for the research if their supervisor is encouraging participation (Birch & Miller, 2002, pp. 99–100).

INFORMAL GATEKEEPERS Sometimes, although there is no formal gatekeeper, there is an informal one (Richardson et al., 1965). Most faculties, for example, usually include a few members who are widely respected and looked to for guidance when decisions about whether or not to support an effort are made. In small

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groups, there is usually at least one person who, without having formal authority, nevertheless holds moral suasion. If such persons participate in a project, then it must be okay; if they don’t, then the group feels there must be a good reason for not doing so. To the extent that interviewers can identify informal gatekeepers, not to use them formally for seeking access to others but to gain their participation in the project as a sign of respect for the effort, access to others in the group may be facilitated. On the other hand, groups often have self-appointed gatekeepers, who feel they must be informed and must try to control everything that goes on, even if they have no formal authority. Their self-importance is not respected by others in the group; avoiding their involvement in the study may be the best way to facilitate access to others in such a group.

ACCESSING CHILDREN The rewards of interviewing children are significant. The challenges researchers must meet in order to be allowed to interview children are equally significant. A basic characteristic of the interviewing relationship when adults interview children is the power imbalance between them (Hart, 1991; O’Reilly & Dogra, 2017, pp. 105–108). Consequently, when we consider children as potential participants in research, we must see them as a vulnerable group that requires protection against potential mistreatment and harm. Because of children’s vulnerability, there are federal regulations for accessing and securing permission for children to participate in an interview (Protection of Human Subjects— Part 46, Subpart D: Additional Protections for Children Involved as Subjects in Research.) Institutions that serve children will have a person who is responsible for their welfare. Such persons serve as gatekeepers. Researchers must convince those gatekeepers that their proposed research is worthwhile and that it presents minimal possible harm to the children’s physical and emotional well-being. In addition, although it is seldom written into public guidelines, my sense is that proposed research must involve minimal disruption to the institutions’ everyday activities and little, or even better, no, inordinate additional work for staff. If this gatekeeper says “yes,” a second gatekeeper is the child’s parent or legal guardian. In order to involve children in a study, researchers have to obtain informed consent from the children’s parents or guardian before approaching the child. (See Chapter 5 for guidance about obtaining IRB approval to contact children prior to making contact in the field with them or their parents or guardians.)

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The steps toward interviewing children are serious. But they are so because there is much at stake for the child and the researcher. Think for a moment of one example of the difference between interviewing an adult and a child. If an adult begins to cry in an interview, the interviewer may pause, wait for a moment or two, and ask the adult whether to go on or to change the subject. If a child begins to cry or otherwise acts upset during an interview, the researcher and the parent who witnessed or heard about it might stop the interview and withdraw the child from the study in order to protect the child from being upset. The more mindful that researchers who want to work with children are ahead of time, the more they believe in the significance of their research, the more confident they are with gatekeepers and parents, the more able they are to connect with children, the more likely the interviewing experience will be positive for the child and the researcher. For one example of how a researcher has met the challenges on the path toward interviewing children, see Speaking of Fourth Grade (Schaenen, 2014). In the Introduction and in her methodology section in Appendix A, the author explains her rationale for using a phenomenological approach to interviewing 4th-graders. She also gives a rich sense of the time, effort, communicative skills, and sensibility required for her to gain access to the children, consent from the parents, and finally assent from the students to successfully carry out the large numbers of interviews represented in the book. Postscript In 1989 the United Nations, motivated by the exploitation of children throughout the world, passed the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (UNICEF, 1989), which in Articles 12 and 13 stresses the rights of children to have a voice on matters of concern to them. The assertion of those rights played a role in encouraging interview studies of children throughout the world. According to one study, interviewing became the most popular method of doing qualitative research with children (Huang, O’Connor, Ke, & Lee, 2016, p. 352). The United States is the one member of the United Nations that as late as 2018 has yet to ratify the CRC. Nonetheless, interviewing studies with children have also increased in the United States. Researchers here, influenced by Piaget, have realized that earlier methods of research with children did not adequately tap nor demonstrate the complexity of children’s thinking, and that a narrative approach might be more effective (Professor Emeritus G. Forman, personal communication, May 11, 2018.)

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ACCESS AND HIERARCHY One of the differences between research and evaluation or policy studies is that the latter are often sponsored by an agency close to the people who participate in the interviews. In such studies, authority for access to participants often is formally granted by administrators in charge. There is a sense of official sponsorship of the project (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), which affects the equity of the relationship between interviewer and participant. It is almost as if the interviewer were someone higher in the hierarchy instead of outside it. Whenever possible, it is important to establish access to participants through their peers rather than through people “above” or “below” them in their hierarchy. For interviewing children, peer access may not be feasible. But in other situations, the demand of equity in the interviewing relationship calls for peer access when possible. If your participants are teachers, for example, try to establish access to them through other teachers; if they are counselors, reach them if at all possible through other counselors.

MAKING CONTACT Do it yourself. Try not to rely on third parties to make contact with your potential participants. No matter how expedient it seems to have someone else who knows potential participants explain your project to them, try to avoid doing so. Building the interviewing relationship begins the moment the potential participant hears of the study. Third parties may be very familiar with potential participants, but they can seldom do justice to the nature of someone else’s project. They have not internalized it the way the researcher has; they do not have the investment in it that the researcher does. Once having introduced the subject, they can seldom respond to questions that naturally might arise. Third parties may be necessary for gaining access to potential participants but should be used as little as possible to make actual contact with them. A contact visit before the actual interview aids in selecting participants and helps build a foundation for the interview relationship. A contact visit can also convince an interviewer that a good interviewing relationship with a particular potential participant is not likely to develop. The more care and thoroughness interviewers put into making contact, the better foundation they establish for the interviewing relationship.

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MAKE A CONTACT VISIT IN PERSON Telephoning is often a necessary first step in making contact, but if possible it should consist of only a brief introduction, an explanation of how the interviewer gained access to the person’s name, and a decision on when to meet. Avoid asking the potential participant for a yes or no answer about participating. An easy “yes” from someone who has not met the interviewer or heard enough about the interviews can backfire later. A “no” that is a defense against too much initial pressure gets the interviewer nowhere (see Richardson et al., 1965, p. 97). The major purpose of the telephone contact is to set up a time when the interviewer and the potential participant can meet in person to discuss the study. It takes time, money, and effort to arrange a separate contact visit with individual potential participants or even a group, but they are almost always well spent. The purpose of the contact visit is at least threefold. The most important is to lay the groundwork for the mutual respect necessary to the interview process. By taking the time to make a separate contact visit to introduce themselves and the study, interviewers are saying implicitly to the potential participants, “You are important. I take you seriously. I respect my work and you enough to want to make a separate trip to meet with you to explain the project.” Although individual contact visits tend to be more effective, it is possible also to meet with a group of potential participants. Group contact visits save time and wear on the interviewer by allowing one explanation of the study to several people at once. On the downside, one potential participant’s skepticism about participating can affect the attitude of others in the group. Clearly, interviewers will not always be able to make in-person contact and will have to rely on other means, such as telephone or email (see Chapter 7 for a discussion of long-distance interviewing). Email has become a prominent component of the contact process. However, doctoral candidates with whom I worked reported ambiguous results in making initial contact with potential participants by email. With the skepticism that abounds about receiving email from unknown contacts, it is possible a potential participant will disregard, or not even see, an initial contact by email. However, once the contact has been made by an in-person visit, by telephone, or via regular mail, email becomes especially useful in confirming interview appointments and follow-up arrangements, and in maintaining contact through the research process. Whether in person, on the telephone, or in an e-mail, it is important at this point to present the nature of the study in as broad a context as possible

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and to be explicit about what will be expected of the participant. Seriousness but friendliness of tone, purposefulness but flexibility in approach, and openness but conciseness in presentation are characteristics that can enhance a contact visit whether conducted in person or on the phone. (For discussions of the importance of the first contact, see Dexter, 1970, p. 34; Hyman et al., 1954, p. 201; Marshall & Rossman, 2016, pp. 107, 120–122.) The contact visit allows the interviewer to become familiar with the setting in which potential participants live or work before the interview starts. It also allows interviewers to find their way to potential participants so that they are better able to keep their interviewing appointments. In addition to building mutual respect and explaining the nature of the interview study, a second important purpose of the contact visit is to determine whether potential participants are interested. In-depth interviewing asks a great deal of both participants and interviewers. It is no trivial matter to arrange three 90-minute interviews spaced as much as a week apart. It is important that likely participants understand the nature of the study, how they fit into it, and the purpose of the three-interview sequence. The contact visit also initiates the process of informed consent, which is necessary in most and desirable in almost all interviewing research (see Chapter 5). Although I seldom show the informed consent document in the contact visit, I orally go over all aspects of the study and what the consent document covers, so participants will not be surprised by anything included on the document. I usually present the actual document and ask the participant to sign it at the time of the first interview. That is an important time, immediately before I actually start the first interview, to confirm that the participants understand what is involved in their accepting the invitation to be interviewed (Corbin & Morse, 2003, p. 341).

BUILDING THE PARTICIPANT POOL Another primary purpose of the contact visit is to assess the appropriateness of a participant for the study. The major criterion for appropriateness is whether the subject of the researcher’s study is central to the participant’s experience. For example, a doctoral candidate wanting to study the way process writing affects an English teacher’s experience in teaching writing must select English teachers for whom process writing plays a central role in their teaching. The interviewer speaks with potential participants, keeping a record of those who seem most suitable and noting key characteristics that are related to the subject of the study. Whether interviewers ask participants to join a study at some point in the contact visit or get back to them at a later

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date, they must remain aware of the character of the growing participant pool in order to be purposeful in the sampling (see the section on Selecting Participants later in this chapter).

SOME LOGISTICAL CONSIDERATIONS The experience of scheduling a contact visit often reflects what trying to schedule the actual interview with the participant will be like. If one is a reasonable process, the other is likely to be so, too. If scheduling one contact visit is unduly frustrating, the interviewer may do well to take that into account in proceeding to build the participant pool. Because of the time and energy required of both participants and interviewers, every step the interviewer takes to ease the logistics of the process is a step toward allowing the available energy to be focused on the interview itself. To facilitate communication, confirmation of appointments, and follow-up after the interviews, it is important for interviewers to develop a database of their participants. They can use the contact visit to begin to collect data. A simple participant information form can be of considerable use throughout the study. The form usually has two purposes: to facilitate communication between the interviewer and the participants; and to record basic data about the participant that will inform the final choice of participants and the reporting on the data later in the study. At minimum, the form should include the participants’ home and work addresses, telephone numbers, email address, and the best times to contact them or avoid calling them. Paying attention to the details of communications with participants from the beginning of the interview relationship can help in avoiding the mishaps of missed or confused appointments that can later plague an interview study. The contact visit can also be used to determine the best times, places, and dates to interview potential participants. These are crucial. The place of the interview should be convenient to the participants and private yet, if at all possible, familiar to them. It should be one in which the participant feels comfortable and secure. A public place such as a cafeteria or a coffee shop may seem convenient, but the noise, the lack of privacy, and the likelihood of the interview’s becoming an event for others to comment upon undermine the effectiveness of such places for interviews. If it can be determined at the time of the contact visit that a person would be an appropriate participant in the study, the interviewer can schedule times and dates right then. The interviewer should try to let the participant choose the hour, scheduling interviews within a time period

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consistent with the purpose of the three-interview structure as described in Chapter 2. As pointed out previously, because each interview is meant to build on the preceding one, they are optimally spaced no more than a week and no less than a day apart. In considering the time, dates, and place of interviews, in addition to considering the safety of the arrangements for both participants and interviewers (Smith, 1992, p. 103), the prevailing principle must be equity. The participants are giving the interviewers something they want. The interviewers must be flexible enough to accommodate the participants’ choice of location, time, and date. On the other hand, the interviewers also have constraints. Although equity necessitates flexibility, interviewers must also learn to set up interviews in such a way that they themselves are comfortable with the resulting schedule. Resentment on the part of either participant or interviewer will not bode well ultimately for the interviews. After the contact visit, interviewers should write follow-up letters or emails to the participants they select and to those they do not. The letters or emails are used to thank the potential participants for meeting with the interviewers and, in the case of those who are selected for the study and who agree to participate, to confirm in writing the schedule of interview appointments. Such detailed follow-up work in writing may seem onerous to the prospective interviewer; however, equity requires such consideration. In addition, this kind of step-by-step attention can have enormous practical benefits to the interviewer. Few things are more frustrating in an interview study than to drive a few hours to an appointment only to have the participant not show up. Sometimes the no-show is the result of poor communication. Sometimes it reflects a participant’s lack of enthusiasm for the process because the individual feels asked to give a great deal while being offered very little consideration in return. In interviewing research, paying attention to the details of access and contact before the interviewing begins is the best investment interviewers can make as they select their participants and prepare to begin the interviews.

SELECTING PARTICIPANTS Either during the contact process or shortly thereafter, researchers take the crucial step of selecting the people they will interview. The purpose of an in-depth interview study is to understand the experience of those who are interviewed, not to predict or to control that experience. (See Van Manen, 1990, p. 22; 2016, p. 298, for further comment on this fundamental characteristic of a phenomenological approach to research.) Because hypotheses

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are not being tested, the issue is not whether the researcher can generalize the finding of an interview study to a broader population. Instead, the researchers’ task is to present the experience of the people they interview in compelling enough detail and in sufficient depth that those who read the study can connect to that experience, learn how it is constituted, and deepen their understanding of the issues it reflects. Because the basic assumptions underlying an interview study are different from those of an experimental study, selecting participants is approached differently. ”Only Connect” The United States has more than 200,000 community college faculty. In our study of the work of community college faculty (Seidman, 1985), we could interview only 76 of them. The problem we faced was how to select those 76 participants so that what we learned about their experience would not be easily dismissed as idiosyncratic to them and irrelevant to a larger population. In their influential essay on experimental and quasiexperimental design, Campbell and Stanley (1963) call this the problem of external validity. A conventional way of defining the issue is to ask whether what is learned from the interview sample can be generalized to the larger population. One step toward assuring generalizability is to select a sample that is representative of the larger population. The dominant approach to representativeness in experimental and quasi-experimental studies has been the random selection of participants. Theoretically, if a large enough sample is selected randomly or through a stratified, randomized approach, the resulting participant pool is not likely to be idiosyncratic. In interview studies, however, it is not possible to employ random sampling or even a stratified random-sampling approach. Randomness is a statistical concept that depends on a very large number of participants. True randomness would be prohibitive in an in-depth interview study. Furthermore, interview participants must consent to be interviewed, so there is always an element of self-selection in an interview study. Selfselection and randomness are not compatible. The job of an in-depth interviewer is to go to such depth in the interviews that surface considerations of representativeness and generalizability are replaced by a compelling evocation of an individual’s experience. When this experience can be captured in depth, then two possibilities for making connections develop. They are the interview researcher’s alternative to generalizability. (See Lincoln & Guba, 1985, for an extensive discussion of the concept of generalization.) First, researchers may find connections among the experiences of the individuals they interview. Such

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links among people whose individual lives are quite different but who are affected by common structural and social forces can help the reader see patterns in that experience. The researcher calls those connections to the readers’ attention for inspection and exploration. Second, by presenting the stories of participants’ experience, interviewers open up for readers the possibility of connecting their own stories to those presented in the study. In connecting, readers may not learn how to control or predict the experience being studied or their own, but they will understand better their complexities. They will appreciate more the intricate ways in which individual lives interact with social and structural forces and, perhaps, be more understanding and even humble in the face of those intricacies. Purposeful Sampling How best to select participants who will facilitate the ability of others to connect if random selection is not an option? The most commonly agreed-upon answer is purposeful sampling. Patton’s (2015, pp. 264–309) discussion of purposeful-sampling techniques is very thoughtful, comprehensive, and useful. He suggests several approaches, including “typical case,” “extreme or deviant case,” “critical case,” “sensitive case,” “convenience” sampling, and “maximum variation” sampling. (For an example of purposeful sampling in a study using a phenomenological approach, see Dana, Delane, & George, 2010). Maximum variation sampling can refer to both sites and people (Tagg, 1985). The range of people and sites from which the sample is selected should be fair to the larger population. This sampling technique should allow the widest possibility for readers of the study to connect to what they are reading. It is the sampling approach I have tended to use most often in my own research. Consider, for example, a study in which the interviewer wants to explore the experience of minority teachers in local teachers’ unions in urban school districts in Massachusetts (Galvan, 1990). Using the maximum variation approach, the researcher would analyze the potential population to assess the maximum range of sites and people that constitute the population. First she would have to define what she meant by the term urban. Then she would have to determine the range of school systems in Massachusetts that fall within her definition. Within those systems she would have to decide whether she was interested in the experience of all minority teachers, those in grades K–12, or just those at some particular grade level.

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In Massachusetts, local teachers’ unions are usually affiliated with either the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers. She would have to decide whether she was interested in studying the experience of minority teachers from both unions or from just one. After considering the range of sites, she would then have to consider the range of people who are minority teachers and belong to local teachers’ unions. She would have to determine the relative number of male and female minority teachers, the range of ethnic groups represented, the range of subject matter they teach, their levels of teaching, and the age and experience of teachers represented in the larger population. The above characteristics are illustrative but not exhaustive of the range of variations present in the population whose experience this researcher might want to try to understand. If the range became unmanageable, the researcher would want to limit the study, looking at, for example, the experience of one minority group in a number of locals or the experience of the full range of minority members in one or two locals. The goal would remain to sample purposely the widest variation of sites and people within the limits of the study. In addition to selecting participants who reflect the wide range in the larger population under study, another useful approach is to select some participants who are outside that range and may in some sense be considered negative cases (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Locke et al., 2004, pp. 222–223; Weiss, 1994, pp. 29–32). In the study discussed above about what it is like for a minority teacher to be a member of a local teachers’ union, it would also be useful to include some nonminority teachers who are also members of the local. If the researcher discovers through interviews that nonminority and minority teachers are having similar experiences, then the researcher will know that some issues may not be a matter of ethnicity or majority-minority status. As another example, Schatzkamer (1986) was interested in studying the experience of older women returning to community colleges. She also decided to interview some older men who were returning to college to see in what ways their experience connected to that of the women in her sample. Selecting participants to interview who are outside the range of those at the center of the study is an effective way for interviewers to check themselves against drawing easy conclusions from their research.

SNARES TO AVOID IN THE SELECTION PROCESS New interviewers may take too personally a potential participant’s reluctance to get involved. It does little good to try to persuade such a person

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to participate in an interview she or he would rather not do. In the face of initial reluctance, interviewers may go to great lengths to exercise persuasion only to later find the interview itself to be an ongoing struggle (Richardson et al., 1965). It is particularly important to respect children’s autonomy in their deciding whether to assent to participating in an interview study. Even if parents or guardians have agreed, it would be misguided and unfortunate to try to persuade children to participate when they have expressed reluctance (O’Reilly & Dogra, 2017, pp. 96–97). The interviewer must strike a balance between too easily accepting a quick expression of disinterest from a potential participant and too ardently trying to persuade reluctant ones that they really should participate. Another snare is the potential participant who is too eager to be interviewed. During the contact visit an interviewer can ascertain whether the person has some ax to grind. In a contact visit Sullivan and I made to one community college, we learned that the college had just dismissed its president. The school was divided into factions: those who had worked for the president’s dismissal and those who had not. Some of the faculty we contacted were very reluctant to get involved in an interview. Others were too eager. The purpose of our study was understanding the work of community college faculty. Although it is true that academic politics are a part of that work, in this particular case the partisan politics of the campus threatened to load our study with interview participants inclined to be more like informers (Dean & Whyte, 1958; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Richardson et al., 1965). On occasion during a contact visit, someone would tell us we must interview a colleague who had won an award and would be wonderful to talk to. Our instinct was always to avoid such “stars.” The method of in-depth interviewing elicits people’s stories in a way that shows each person to be interesting no matter how uncelebrated.

HOW MANY PARTICIPANTS ARE ENOUGH? New interviewers frequently ask how many participants they must have in their study. (See Patton, 2015, pp. 311–315, for an excellent overview of the issues involved in sample size.) Some researchers argue for an emerging research design in which the number of participants in a study is not established ahead of time. New participants are added as new dimensions of the issues become apparent through earlier interviews (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Rubin & Rubin, 2012). Other researchers discuss a “snowballing” approach to selecting participants, in which one participant leads to another (Bertaux, 1981). But even if researchers use a purposeful sampling

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technique designed to gain maximum variation and then add to their sample through a snowballing process, they must know when they have interviewed enough participants. There are two criteria often suggested for judging when a researcher has interviewed enough participants. The first is sufficiency. Are there sufficient numbers to reflect the range of participants and sites that make up the population so that others outside the sample might have a chance to connect to the experiences of those in it? In our community college study, we had to have enough participants to reflect vocational and liberal arts faculty; men, women, and minorities; and age and experience ranges. We also considered faculty with and without advanced degrees. In addition, we were reluctant to interview only one person in any particular category. The other criterion is saturation of information. A number of writers (Douglas, 1976; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Rubin & Rubin, 2012; Weiss, 1994) discuss a point in a study at which the interviewer begins to hear the same information reported. They are no longer learning anything new. Douglas (1985) is even bold enough to attempt to assess when that began to happen in his studies. If he had to pick a number, he said, it would be 25 participants. I would be reluctant to establish such a number. “Enough” is an interactive reflection of every step of the interview process and different for each study and each researcher. The criteria of sufficiency and saturation are useful, but practical exigencies of time, money, and other resources also play a role, especially in doctoral research. (See Malterud, Siersma, & Guassora, 2016, who have suggested an alternative to saturation as a criterion for how many participants are enough.) On the other hand, if I were to err, I would err on the side of more rather than less. I have seen some graduate students struggle to make sense of data that are just too thin because they did not interview enough participants. Interviewing fewer participants may save time earlier in the study, but may add complications and frustration at the point of working with, analyzing, and interpreting the interview data. The method of in-depth, phenomenological interviewing applied to a sample of participants who all experience similar structural and social conditions gives enormous power to the stories of a relatively few participants. Researchers can figure out ahead of time the range of sites and people that they would like to sample and set a goal for a certain number of participants in the study. At some point, however, interviewers may recognize that they are not learning anything decidedly new and that the process of interviewing itself is becoming laborious rather than pleasurable (Bertaux, 1981). That is the time to say “enough.”

Chapter 5

The Path to Institutional Review Boards and Informed Consent

Many current ethical concerns for the welfare of humans who participate in research stem from indignities perpetrated on human research subjects both in Europe and in the United States throughout the 20th century. The World War II Nazi violations of basic human rights in carrying out medical experiments on prisoners in concentration camps are relatively well known. Many of the German physicians involved were brought to trial in Nuremberg after the war. In 1947, the American judges and medical experts involved in the Doctors’ Trial developed the Nuremberg Code (Annas & Grodin, 1992). That code established a fundamental, essential ethical principle in research with humans: All human participation in research must be voluntary (Annas, 1992; Mitscherlich & Mielke, 1949; Reynolds, 1979). Violations of basic human rights in research have occurred as well in the United States. The most infamous early example is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which began in the 1930s and continued for 40 years so that the researchers could track the effects of syphilis; antibiotic treatments for the disease were withheld from the study’s impoverished African American participants even after such treatments had become available (Heller, 1972; West, 2014). A more recent example has been described by Rebecca Skloot (2011) in her compelling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

THE BELMONT REPORT Faced with the fact that the disregard for human welfare in research occurred not just abroad but also at home, various departments of the U.S. government issued federal regulations concerning the protection of the rights of human subjects during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (Anderson, 1996; Appelbaum, Lidz, & Meisel, 1987; Faden & Beauchamp, 1986). In response to public outrage at the revelations of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and in an attempt to bring consistency to the federal effort to protect humans who participate in research, in 1974 Congress passed the National 62

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Research Act, and established the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (Shamoo & Resnik, 2015). After years of deliberation, the Commission produced its influential “Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research” (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1979). The Belmont Report presents clearly what the commission considered to be at stake ethically in research with humans. It establishes three basic ethical principles: 1.

2. 3.

Respect for Persons: Respect individuals’ autonomy and put in place safeguards for those individuals who are not fully autonomous. Beneficence: Do no harm to individuals; maximize possible benefits, and minimize potential risks. Justice: Ensure the equitable selection of participants, and treat all participants fairly.

The Belmont Report is available online. It is short and lucid, and because it gives the underpinning of subsequent federal regulations in this area, well worth reading.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF LOCAL INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARDS With the Belmont Report providing guidance, the federal government began the process of harmonizing regulations issued by various agencies into what is called the Common Rule (45 CFR 46). It refers to the regulations presented in Title 45, Part 46, Subpart A of the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, and is now followed by many federal agencies (Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, 2018). The 2018 revisions are available online. For a more detailed history of these regulations, see Anderson (1996) and Resnik (2018). In formulating 45 CFR 46, the government made a key decision to decentralize the process of protecting human research subjects. The regulations require colleges, universities, hospitals, research institutes, and other organizations that conduct human research and receive federal funding to establish local Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). The local IRB’s function is to protect the rights and welfare of participants in research conducted under the auspices of the institution. The federal regulations give

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institutions and IRBs flexibility in deciding whether and how to review research involving human subjects. Depending on a local IRB’s review process, most studies involving interviewing autonomous adult participants about topics that present minimal risk to their dignity and well-being may be regarded as exempt from IRB review, or reviewed at the “exempt” or “expedited” review level. IRBs across the United States often define “exempt” and “expedited” reviews differently. In some places, a decision that the proposed research is “exempt” may mean that it is exempt from full IRB review but must be reviewed by a staff member. In other places, an “expedited” review may mean that the proposal will be reviewed by one or two members of the IRB rather than the entire Board. Given the local variability of IRBs, the best guidance may be to urge researchers to meet with their IRB staff for guidance early in the research process. As we submit this edition for publication, we do so knowing that revised regulations concerning IRB review of proposed research go into effect on January 21, 2019. The treatment of in-depth interviewing research in the revised regulations is similar to that in the current regulations. It is clear that there is going to be a period of clarification in which local IRBs engage and interpret the revised regulations. To the extent, however, that a proposed in-depth interview runs some risk of making the participant vulnerable if the participant could be identified, some level of local IRB review, either full, expedited, or exempt, may be required. Over the next months, local IRBs will begin to clarify the revised regulations for themselves and for their researchers. We have erred on the side of caution and continue to write as though the regulations will require some level of IRB review in some, if not all, in-depth interviewing research. Even if proposed in-depth interview research projects were completely exempted from IRB review, we think it is fair to say that there remains an ethical obligation to go through the consent process to assure that the person’s decision to participate in the research is informed and voluntary. But we urge you to consult early with your local IRB to come to a definitive understanding of the interpretation of the revised regulations and how your research relates to them. For useful preparatory guidance see “Companion Q&As About the Revised Common Rule,” accessible online with that title. IRB Membership and Review Process If IRB review is required, researchers will need to submit their proposed research for review before they begin their project. In the case of master’s or doctoral candidates, the IRB review is an additional process separate from the approval of their thesis or dissertation proposal by their graduate committee.

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The IRB review may seem like an obstacle and may cause anxiety for new researchers. One way to gain confidence and a sense of autonomy in the review process is for researchers to read 45 CFR 46 for themselves and meet with IRB members or staff for guidance early in the proposal development process. While the regulatory language may initially seem difficult, studying it can assist new researchers to overcome feeling intimidated by the regulations. My own experience is that rather than being an obstacle, IRB review, when done well, almost always leads researchers to a heightened awareness of important ethical issues embedded in their proposed research. Each IRB will have its own application format. Substantively, IRBs ask researchers to describe briefly the aims of the research, the nature of their participants, their research methodology, the researchers’ qualifications to conduct research, the management of the data, the risks and benefits involved in the research, and the process researchers will use to obtain informed consent from potential participants. Other countries have similar review processes for research with human participants. The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) maintains the International Compilation of Human Research Standards (U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services, 2018). The Compilation lists the laws, regulations, and guidelines of over 100 countries, and provides direct links to each country’s key organizations and laws, when available. If your research originates in the United States but will be conducted abroad, you will have to comply with your local IRB process and with your host country’s formal review process, if one exists. Equally important, in some countries, which may or may not have formal review processes, researchers must be sensitive to local cultural expectations of what is ethical (Cleary, 2005, 2013). If researchers plan to conduct research abroad, they should make early contact with the host country to inquire about its review process. They might also see Hubbell (2003) and Cleary (2005, 2013) for an excellent descriptions of complexities that may occur when interviewing abroad. Also see the later section in this chapter on obtaining informed consent from participants who are abroad.

THE INFORMED CONSENT DOCUMENT While there may be some variance in what an IRB will ask researchers to submit for review, the issue of an informed consent document is almost always pivotal (Resnik, 2018; Ritchie, 2003, p. 217). New interviewers tend to be hesitant about informed consent. They have no doubt about their own good intentions and worry that somehow a formal informed consent

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process is not congruent with the relationship they envision with their participants. That may lead some new interviewers not to consider or to minimize the risks their research may indeed present (Smith, 1992, p. 102). In-depth interviewing does not pose the life-and-death risk of biomedical research, but it is not risk-free. Interviewers following the model described in this book or other qualitative interviewing approaches may delve deeply into their participants’ experiences in the areas of inquiry. In the process of interviewing, a measure of intimacy can develop between interviewers and participants. That intimacy may lead participants to share aspects of their lives that may cause discomfort and even some degree of emotional distress during the interview process. If, when they write their reports, researchers misuse the words of their participants, the researchers could leave their participants vulnerable to embarrassment and loss of reputation. Participants have the right to be protected against vulnerability in the process of the interviews and in how researchers share the results of the interviews (Kelman, 1977). Informed consent is the first step toward helping participants understand any potential risks they face when they agree to be interviewed. As expressed in the Nuremberg Code and in the Belmont Report, one essential ethical principle of research with humans is that participants freely volunteer, with no pressure in any form, to participate in the research. In order to willingly consent in the truest sense, potential participants must know enough about the research to be able to gauge in a meaningful way whether they want to proceed. (For a detailed history of the concept of “informed consent,” see Capron, 2018.) The federal regulations regarding informed consent (Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, §46.116–§46.117, 2018) were designed primarily with the risks and benefits of biomedical research in mind. Consequently, the regulations have stipulations that are appropriate for experimental research using human subjects, but also are applicable to qualitative research. (For a thoughtful discussion of the fit between the federal regulations and qualitative research, see Cassell, 1978, and Chs. 13 and 14 in van den Hoonaard & van den Hoonaard, 2013.) In the discussion below, I have adapted the requirements for informed consent, as they would be applicable to in-depth interviewing research.

SEVEN KEY SECTIONS OF AN INFORMED CONSENT DOCUMENT I have resisted the temptation to replicate a sample of an informed consent document. Since IRBs have considerable autonomy within the federal regulations, researchers should use their IRB’s consent document template.

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In addition, I think merely copying an example could lead a researcher into trouble. I urge graduate candidates and other researchers to grapple with the logic of each of the parts of an informed consent document. They then can develop a written consent document based on their understanding of the purpose of each part, the particulars of their research project, and the expectations of their IRB. In my experience, doing so leads to researchers’ better internalizing the ethical issues involved and improving how they conduct their research. In what follows, I discuss in more depth issues embedded in each of the seven key sections of the consent document as they apply to in-depth interviewing research. 1. What, How Long, How, to What End, and for Whom? What, How Long, and How? Initially, researchers must present briefly,

without jargon, what they are asking of the participants. For an in-depth interviewing research project, researchers should state that they are inviting potential participants to take part in interviewing research on the agreed-upon topic and that the process involves three separate interviews: the first on their life history, the second on the details of their experience in the area being studied, and the third on the meaning to them of their experience. The interviews will last 90 minutes each, spaced normally over a week or two. Furthermore, researchers must inform participants that their interviews will be audio-recorded. (More detailed information about confidentiality is below.) To What End? Here, researchers briefly explain both the intellectual

and instrumental purposes of their research. First, they address why they are studying the particular topic. Second, if researchers are doctoral candidates, for example, they should indicate that they intend to use the research for their dissertations, and possibly publications or presentations. For Whom? Participants should know the full identity of the inter-

viewer. For example, if an interviewer is both an employee of the school district in which the interview is occurring and a doctoral candidate at a university, both parts of this identity should be stated. Participants should be told explicitly with whom their recorded words or transcripts might be shared before publication of the study. For example, if students in a school were being interviewed, would the teachers or principal be allowed to see the transcripts? Will the doctoral committee chair have access to the audio recordings? Would the parents of a child have access to the audio recordings or to written transcripts? (Duncan, Drew, Hodgson, & Sawyer, 2009).

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Finally, if the study is sponsored in any way, that sponsorship should be made clear to participants. For example, a school system may be sponsoring the research, or a granting agency may be funding the research. The interviewer has an obligation to inform the participant of the nature of the sponsorship, if any. 2. Risks, Discomforts, and Vulnerability There are at least two types of risk: risks during the interviews, and risks after the interviews have been completed. (See Corbin & Morse, 2003, for an excellent discussion of such risks. See Opsal et al., 2016, for a discussion of how IRBs view the issue of risks and benefits.) As pointed out earlier, the process of in-depth interviewing may bring up areas that cause emotional discomfort for the participant. Depending on the potential sensitivity of the topic of study, the researcher should indicate that the process of the interviews could cause discomfort at times and that the researcher will work to minimize such occasions, including stopping the interview. Depending on the nature of the research, the researcher may want to develop a list of local referral resources (e.g., hotlines, websites) to provide to participants who appear discomfited. For example, if participants are talking about self-injurious experiences, a researcher could inform them of the website S.A.F.E. Alternatives (selfinjury.com). Furthermore, when researchers use extensive portions of their participants’ words in research reports, the participants could be recognizable. If participants’ identities were to become known and they had not agreed to be identified, the public exposure of aspects of their lives they consider private might cause them embarrassment. They might feel that a researcher, by publicly sharing private or deeply personal aspects of their lives, has injured their dignity (Kelman, 1977). 3. The Rights of the Participant One important precaution that researchers can take to minimize the risks to participants is to identify the rights that participants have when they take part in research. This part of the consent document serves to inform participants of their rights and indicates the researchers’ commitment to abide by them. These rights include, but are not limited to, the following: Voluntary Participation. Participation in research must be completely

voluntary. Therefore, the most fundamental right of the potential participant is not to participate. If an individual chooses not to participate in

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research, such a choice should not be prejudicial to the individual. For example, if a researcher is doing research in a classroom, students (and their parents) have a right to say that they will not participate. Their choosing not to participate can in no way affect the students’ progress or grade in the class. If they do choose to participate, it must be a decision based on their being fully informed about the study. Students who agree to participate in a research project should not be given preferential treatment in the classroom solely for participating in the study. The Right to Withdraw. Research participants have the right to drop

out of a study at any time. The three 90-minute interviews are designed to build a framework for a relationship between the interviewer and the participant that is equitable and leads to a reasonable level of trust between the two. The interview process may lead participants to divulge information that they later regret having shared (Kirsch, 1999). The participant may become uncomfortable with the interview process and want to withdraw. The researcher must make clear that the participant has the right to withdraw from the study at any time during the interviews and within a specified time after they are completed and before publication of the interview material. The researcher should also explain what will happen to participants’ interview material if they withdraw partway through the study. The Right to Review and Withhold Interview Material. Short of completely

withdrawing from the study, participants have the right to request that material from their interviews be withheld. To exercise that right fully, participants must have the right to review their interviews before they are published. Interviewers must give participants access to the audio recordings and to the transcripts if requested. Interviewers may share with participants the ways they have worked with an individual participant’s interview material and how they have analyzed and interpreted that particular material when writing up the study. (See “Member Check” in Schwandt, 2014, and for a critical perspective on the practice of member-checking, see Birt, Scott, Cavers, Campbell, & Walter, 2016.) Finally, interviewers may offer to share the entire report before publication or the parts of the final report that most concern a participant. Some qualitative researchers consider this step to be crucial for the credibility of the study (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). In the interview work I have done, I have often developed extensive profiles of the participants crafted in their own words from the interview transcripts. When I have done so, I contact the person and offer to share the profile with her or

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him before I disseminate it. If the participant asks to review the profile, I send it. I inform the participant that I want to know if it contains anything inaccurate or unfair to the larger interview. I also want to know if there is anything in the profile with which the participant is uncomfortable. Although at this stage I would not disseminate anything that participants told me would make them vulnerable, neither would I give them automatic censure on matters of interpretation. One participant in our community college study asked me to delete a portion of the profile I had developed of him. In the interview, he had said that he was not proud of working at his community college. I agreed to delete the passage because he felt that it could make him vulnerable if he were identified. But later in an interpretive section of the study that was not tied to any single participant, I discussed the issue of community college faculty members’ sense of status in their jobs, keeping what that participant had told me in mind. At some point interviewers have to become responsible for what they write. In this instance, I felt somewhat compromised in taking that responsibility because the participant had asked me to delete important information that had informed part of my analysis. On the other hand, I was committed to preserving the dignity of participants and not making them vulnerable as a result of their participation in the study. As in many other aspects of interviewing research, the researcher has to balance conflicting claims. The interviewer must be willing to take ownership of the material and be responsible for the consequences. I do not think the researcher can shift the burden of that responsibility to the participant, and yet the participant has an interest in how the researcher carries it out. Whatever the interviewer decides to do about the participant’s rights of review, the most important point is to be explicit about those rights. This is equally important when handling issues of remuneration, discussed in Section 6. Disputes between participants and researchers result more often from their being unclear about the framework within which they are working than from any decision on a specific issue. (For an interesting discussion of the need for clarity and the consequences of confusion in this area, see Lightfoot, 1983.) The Right to Privacy. The participant has the right to privacy and the

right to request that identities remain confidential and not be revealed. The standard assumption in in-depth interviewing research is that participants will remain unidentified. That assumption has implications for interviewers from the moment they start their research. In their proposals, for instance, which are usually public documents, they should avoid listing names of sites or people that could be traced later when the research is completed.

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Researchers working with interview material should not guarantee absolute confidentiality of identity. The focus of the research is the experience of the participants within the context of their lives. Because a considerable part of that experience may be shared in the research report, a reader who knows any participants may recognize them. Nonetheless, the interviewer can work to protect the identity of the participant and can say in the written consent document how that will be done. For example, the participant has the right to know who will transcribe the interview audio recordings. If it is not the interviewer, the researcher should outline what steps will be taken to assure that the transcriber does not misuse information about the participant. In addition, the participant should be assured that transcriptions will contain only initials for all proper names, so that even if a casual reader were somehow to see the transcripts, no proper names would be present. Third, the interviewer should promise to use pseudonyms in the final report. Fourth, in some cases the interviewer can choose to actively disguise the participant’s identity. In her study The Contextual Realities of Being a Lesbian Physical Educator: Living in Two Worlds, Woods (1990) was concerned that her participants would be vulnerable if they could be identified. As part of her written consent document, she made the following statement and outlined the steps that she would take to protect—but not guarantee—her participants’ anonymity in reporting the study results: In a study of this nature, the anonymity of participants is a priority. Although anonymity cannot be fully guaranteed, the following are steps taken at each stage of the research process to protect your anonymity. A. Access to participants has been gained in two ways: (a) my personal contacts; and (b) contacts given by those being interviewed. All initial contacts with a potential participant will be made by the person or participant suggesting the teacher to be interviewed. I will contact the potential participant directly only if she has agreed to discuss the possibility of being interviewed. B. All interviews will take place in a safe space to be designated by the participant. C. The researcher will not interview more than one teacher employed in a single district. D. With the exception of the dissertation committee chairperson, I will not discuss with the dissertation committee or anyone else any names, teaching locations, or identifying particulars of the participants. E. Interview transcripts may be completed by two persons: (a) myself; and/or (b) a reputable and discreet transcriber. If someone other than

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Woods felt that her participants would be taking risks by participating in her study. To protect them and to establish conditions in which they would feel safe to talk, she devised the most effective and practical means she could to minimize those risks. Although I was concerned about her promise to destroy the audiotapes of the interviews, the care she took to protect her participants’ identities without guaranteeing them anonymity, and her explicitness with potential participants, seemed to me a model of forthrightness. Despite recent changes in national popular opinion regarding LGBTQ rights, in different regions of the country and different segments of society LGBTQ people are still vulnerable (see for example Beall, 2018; Hauser, 2018). Such contemporary episodes indicate that the carefulness Woods exercised in the 1990s to protect the identity of her participants is still warranted. As Woods indicates, if the likelihood of participants’ being identified is high, and if being so identified would make them vulnerable, it may be best to disguise their identity. This measure, which is more active than giving the participant a pseudonym, might involve changing the location in which the person resides or the specific nature of the activity being discussed. For example, in In the Words of the Faculty (Seidman, 1985), I changed the state in which one participant taught as well as the subject she taught. The guidelines the researcher must use in judging the appropriateness of such changes are whether the likelihood of participants’ being identified is high, whether they would be made vulnerable if identified, and whether disguises can be effected in ways that do not distort the data. (For more on disguising participants, see van den Hoonaard & van den Hoonaard, 2013, pp. 61–62.) Informed consent assumes but does not require that the participant will not be identified (Reynolds, 1979; Tilley & Woodthorpe, 2011). What it does require is that the participants be informed before the interviews

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begin as to what steps, if any, will be taken to protect their identity. Mishler (1986) argues that anonymity is not automatically a good thing and that participants should be given the choice as to whether they wish their names to be used. My experience leads me to suggest that interviews be conducted under the assumption that the interviewer will take steps to protect the identity of the participants. After the interview is completed, the participants will be in a better position to judge whether they wish to conceal their identities. (See Tilley & Woodthorpe, 2011, for a thoughtful challenge to the notion that anonymity is desirable in qualitative studies.) 4. Possible Benefits This section should briefly describe any potential benefits to the participant and to others that might reasonably be expected as a result of the knowledge gained via the research. The researcher should devise a reasonably modest statement of anticipated benefits that will not raise undue expectations, not seem egotistical, and yet justify the risk that usually is present in in-depth interview situations. It is better to promise less than more. Any monetary benefits could be included in the section on dissemination and the ownership of research materials (Section 6). If interviews are done well, just being listened to may be beneficial to participants. But that type of benefit is more appropriately realized by the participant at the conclusion of the interview than stipulated by the researcher at the beginning (see Chapter 9 for a further discussion of such a benefit). Benefits to people other than the participants may be real, but also intangible. As researchers we hope to better understand the subject of our inquiry and to share that understanding as a possible contribution to the field and those affected by it. One does not want to overstate the case. It might be best for researchers to say something modest about what they hope to learn as a result of their research and how that learning might possibly benefit the field (L. Hick, personal communication, April 15, 2005). 5. Confidentiality of Records When researchers and IRBs use the term confidential in interviewing studies, they are referring to maintaining the confidentiality of the names of the participants who are the source of the records, recordings, and transcripts and any other material that could identify the participants in their research (R. Zussman, personal communication, December 2004).

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As indicated in Section 3 on rights, researchers must take steps to code the identity of their participants from the beginning of the process, so that, for instance, a casual observer happening to see a transcript on a desk could not identify the participant. Original records such as contactinformation sheets, informed consent documents, and audio recordings must be held securely to guard against the identity of participants being accidentally revealed. Limits to Confidentiality: The Subpoena and Mandated Reporter Requirements. Two major caveats, however, must be raised concerning the confi-

dentiality of records. First, research information is not privileged and is thereby subject to subpoena by the courts (McDonald, 2016; Mole, 2012; Nejelski & Lerman, 1971; O’Neil, 1996; Reynolds, 1979). Having one’s transcripts or recordings subpoenaed could put researchers in conflict with their ethical responsibility to their participants. The Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association emphasizes the primary responsibility of researchers to their participants. This statement foresees the possibility that researchers might have to terminate their research in order to protect their participants: A primary ethical obligation shared by anthropologists is to do no harm. . . . Anthropologists should not only avoid causing direct and immediate harm but should also weigh carefully the potential consequences and inadvertent impacts of their work. When it conflicts with other responsibilities, this primary obligation can supersede the goal of seeking new knowledge and can lead to decisions to not undertake or to discontinue a project. (American Anthropological Association, 2012, Ethics Statement)

When we were doing our study of community college faculty, we interviewed a number of students to understand how their experience related to what the faculty were telling us (Schatzkamer, 1986). In one of the interviews, a student revealed that he occasionally sold drugs on the campus. We were faced with a dilemma. Although it was not likely to happen, this particular person could be arrested, and our interview data could have been subpoenaed and used against him. Though we did not condone his selling marijuana on the campus, we would not have known of it through any way other than our interviews. We did not feel that we could ethically continue to interview him, if those interviews might affect him adversely later. As interesting as his perspective was, we decided that the best course of action was to terminate the interviews and destroy the tapes. It was not an altogether comfortable resolution. But at the time the decision had to be made, we could envision a situation

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in which our promises of confidentiality could not be honored, and we would not be able to maintain our ethical obligation to the welfare of the participant. (See Yow, 1994, pp. 93–95, for an excellent discussion of this type of issue.) A second limit to confidentiality is that all states have statutes regarding reporting information about suspected abuse or neglect of children. In 18 states and Puerto Rico, any person who suspects child abuse or neglect is a “mandated reporter” and must report it to appropriate state agencies. Other states list as mandated reporters specific categories of people who work frequently with children (Child Welfare Information Gateway [CWIG], 2018, pp. 1–2). Researchers who propose to interview children should check the laws for the state where their participants reside. (An excellent resource, State Laws on Child Abuse, is available on the CWIG website.) If state laws are applicable, researchers should then explain in the consent document addressed to parents or guardians that they are mandated reporters and describe the circumstances under which they would have to break the confidentiality of the interview participant. Children must also be forewarned via the assent information. Unless abuse or neglect is the subject of the interviews, one would hope researchers would never encounter such a situation; but if it occurs and interviewers are mandated reporters, they have little legal choice. All states and territories allow for what is called “permissive reporters” (CWIG, 2018, p. 2). There is no way to give blanket advice in this situation. The mandated reporting system is meant to protect children from abuse or neglect. The literature suggests, however, that it is a system that needs improvement. Some researchers caution that mandated reporting does not always lead to the hoped-for protection (McTavish et al., 2017). The best I can say in this context is for researchers in states without mandated reporting who are presented with evidence of child abuse to consider the threat to the child, talk to appropriate and experienced people about their concern, and seek the best path available on a case-by-case basis. (See Goldman, Avillion, & Evans, 2018 and Hill, 2005, for additional useful guidance.) Other types of abusive behavior, such as abuse of the elderly, may be subject to mandatory reporting as well. In New Hampshire, in addition to child abuse, an interviewer who learns of mistreatment of an incapacitated adult, student hazing, or an injury caused by a criminal act would be required to report that information (University of New Hampshire, 2015). Depending on one’s research topic and the particular requirements of the state in which the research is being conducted, researchers must caution their participants regarding the limits to confidentiality and the risk this might conceivably mean for the participant.

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6. Dissemination Joint Ownership of Research Material. Valerie Raleigh Yow (2015) takes

the position that the federal copyright law of 1976 establishes the right of the person being interviewed to copyright. Citing Neuenschwander (2014, pp. 66–69), Yow adds that some recent court rulings have determined that both the interviewer and the participant may jointly own and copyright interview material. Mary Catherine Amerine (2017), in an award-winning paper, makes a persuasive case for the interviewer’s right of copyright, but she warns that copyright law is “astonishingly unclear.” Because of this lack of legal clarity, Amerine, Yow, and Neuenschwander urge in the strongest terms that interviewers develop a release form that may be part of the informed consent document or separate from it. (See Yow, 2015, pp. 392–394, for sample forms.) Neuenschwander warns researchers to take the time necessary to make participants comfortable signing and dating the written release form. He writes, “If you do not get it in writing, you haven’t got it” (2014, p. 66). The Extensive Use of Interview Data. Another aspect of the researcher’s

plans that should be made clear to the participant is the extent to which the researcher might use the material from the interview, and in what format other than a dissertation (e.g., a presentation, book, or article). In Chapter 8, I discuss ways of working with the material and disseminating it. In reporting on in-depth interviewing, researchers often use lengthy excerpts from interview transcripts, whereas many participants imagine that only short quotations will be used. In order for participants to give informed consent, interviewers must make clear how extensively they plan to use their participants’ own words in the final report of the research. Possible Uses of Interview Data. I suggest to graduate candidates that

they cast the widest net possible in outlining in the consent document the various uses they will make of information collected. On first instinct, many students limit the list of intended uses to their thesis or dissertation. This means that if they later decide to publish something from their research or to present their findings at a conference, they would then be obligated to go back to their participants to seek additional permission to use the material in ways not originally listed in the consent document. Even though, when they are beginning their research, writing such articles or making presentations based on their interviewing may seem like a remote possibility, researchers are well advised to let their potential participants know of that possibility in the consent document.

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Remuneration. Whether the participant can expect any remuneration

for participating in the interviews is a major issue that should be explicitly addressed in the consent document. Such remuneration could range from payment for each interview to the promise that if the interviews lead to commercial publication, the participant would have the right to some portion of the royalties. Establishing an equitable percentage of royalties to allocate to participants is difficult, and except in the case of a best-seller, royalties are likely to be very small. If paying per interview, setting the level of compensation can be tricky. Anything more than a token payment could bias potential participants’ motivation for taking part in the study. On the other hand, some see the use of people’s words without paying them as exploitative (Patai, 1987). In the studies I have conducted with colleagues, we have not offered remuneration to the participants. At the conclusion of an interview, we normally present a token of our appreciation. I think there are other levels of reciprocity that occur in the interview process that can substitute for financial remuneration. Participants have told us that the occasion of their interview was the first time anyone had ever sat down to talk about their work with them. Participants have said that they appreciated being listened to and that participating in the interviews was an important experience for them. Interviewers have to figure out for themselves the issue of remuneration. Whatever they decide should be stated explicitly in the written consent document. The governing principle should be to give the participant the opportunity to join or not to join the study on the basis of explicit written information in the consent document. It should either state clearly that the participant is agreeing not to make any financial claim upon the interviewer or should state what the basis of the remuneration will be. An unclear position about the issue of money will cause more problems than a clear decision to remunerate or not. 7. Contact Information and Copies of the Document Participants must be able to contact the researcher before, during, and after the interviews are completed. The last section of the consent document should include information about how to contact the researcher in case the participant has questions or concerns about the research. The information ideally should include more than one method of contact (e.g., telephone and email). Many IRBs instruct researchers also to list contact information for their IRB in the event that participants have questions about their rights as participants in the research.

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Both participants and researcher should sign the consent document, and the researcher should provide a copy for participants as well as keeping one for their research files. An IRB may waive the requirement for participants to sign the informed consent document if that signature would provide the only record linking the participants and the research and there would be a significant risk to the participants if they were identified (Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, §46.117 [c], 2018). Other methods of documenting that informed consent was obtained can be developed with the approval of the IRB. Appropriate Language. The information in the consent document should

be written in language free of jargon, ideally at no greater than an 8thgrade reading level (most word-processing software can assess the reading level of identified text), and presented in a way that is easy to read (Perrault & Nazione, 2016). If a participant cannot fully comprehend English, the researcher should present the consent information in a way that is clear, possibly having the document translated or using a qualified interpreter. The process by which researchers present consent information to participants is as crucial as the language of the document. Researchers must talk through the sections of the document with participants to ensure that they understand everything. Neither researchers nor participants can afford to be casual about making sure that the information is understood. But it is the researchers’ responsibility to move potential participants beyond a superficial reading of the document to a thoughtful consideration of it. One proposal to replace written documents with an audio or video recording of the informed consent process was not included in the new regulations (Annas, 2018). (See Keairns, 2002, for her important observations on the import of informed consent for the girl child soldiers she interviewed.)

SPECIAL CONDITIONS FOR CHILDREN (Contributed by Julie Simpson) If participants have not attained the legal age of consent to participate in treatments or procedures involved in research (age 18 in most jurisdictions), interviewers first must obtain the informed consent of a parent or legal guardian before approaching a child to ask about being interviewed. In studies that involve “greater than minimal risk” and little direct benefit to the participant, all parents or legal guardians must give permission (Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, §46.402, §46.408, 2018).

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If a parent or guardian gives consent to allow a child to participate in the study (parental consent), researchers should then seek the “assent” of the child. According to the federal regulations, “Assent means a child’s affirmative agreement to participate in research. Mere failure to object should not, absent affirmative agreement, be construed as assent” (Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, §46.402, 2018). This means that to be interviewed, children need to actively agree after the researcher tells them about the research. Ideally, researchers should provide children with assent information separate from the parental consent information. Also, where possible, researchers should tell children about the study and seek their assent away from the influence of adults such as parents or teachers. The children should feel as free as possible to make their own decision about whether they want to be interviewed. (A parent will have already given consent at this point, and as such, either supports or does not object to the child being in the study.) As with adult participants, researchers need to provide children with assent information that is age- and developmentally appropriate.

INFORMED CONSENT WHEN USING TECHNOLOGY TO INTERVIEW (Contributed by Julie Simpson) Developments in technology now allow researchers to conduct interviews with people who are not easily accessible. Interviewing remotely via a synchronous (real-time) video connection such as Skype, Zoom, or FaceTime offers advantages. But researchers should be aware of factors that may affect the virtual interviewing experience. (For a more detailed discussion of these factors, see Deakin & Wakefield, 2014; Lo-Iacono, Symonds, & Brown, 2016; Sullivan, 2012.) As researchers will not meet face-to-face with participants, they need to develop procedures for delivering the consent information ahead of time and for receiving signed consent documents. If this is not practical, the researcher may request that the IRB approve a waiver of documentation (signature) of consent, and instead ask the participant for oral consent and capture it on the recording. Deakin and Wakefield (2014) report using an oral consent procedure where they read a script to participants at the start of the interview. While they state this was necessary to “conform to ethical guidelines” (p. 610), they explain it hindered building rapport with participants due to its “formal” tone. Even though an oral consent procedure may be appropriate for some participants (for example, anyone who is nonliterate), it does not permit participants the opportunity ahead of time to read and consider written information about the study, nor to

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retain that information. An optimal procedure to gain fully informed consent from participants when interviewing remotely would be to: • Provide participants with the consent document/information ahead of time. • Review the consent information orally with participants before starting the first interview. • Ask participants specifically whether they have any questions about the study, and answer them. • Confirm that participants give permission to record the interviews. • Remind participants throughout the study, at the start of each subsequent interview, about the consent information, provide them with opportunities to ask questions, and reaffirm their willingness to continue in the study.

INFORMED CONSENT WHEN INTERVIEWING ABROAD (Contributed by Julie Simpson) Legal, political, cultural, and ethical issues may impact the process of obtaining informed consent from potential participants in countries outside the United States, whether being interviewed via technology or in the field. Legal Considerations Early in the proposal process, researchers should determine whether they need to obtain a permit/license to conduct research in the country of interest. For example, to conduct research in Kenya researchers must first obtain a research permit from the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation. Another issue is whether approval from a local IRB (or equivalent) is required. Further, a researcher should investigate prior to starting a study in a foreign country whether there are laws or regulations that directly affect the conduct of the study or requirements for informed consent (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2018). This might include knowing a country’s laws governing whether a researcher must report certain information and to whom (similar to state mandatory-reporting laws in the United States), or any privacy laws that may affect research data. For example, researchers interviewing in a European Union (EU) country should ask their IRB about complying with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Researchers should also

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determine any pertinent legal rights of participants, such as legal age of consent, as well as the legal status of participants in the country where the interview takes place. For example, if individuals do not have legal status in a country, could their participation in the study present legal risks? Any information that may affect an individual’s willingness to participate in a study should be included in the consent document. Political Considerations Researchers should investigate the political stability of the region, what topics are politically sensitive, and what information may present legal risk to participants. Researchers must also be concerned for their own safety and the security of their interview data if authorities seize electronic recording devices or field notes while the researcher is either in-country or leaving a country. In locations where participation in a research study may cause problems with authorities, researchers should request a waiver of documentation of consent (forgoing participants’ signature on a consent document) from the IRB or, in some situations, propose to take the consent information with them after each interview so that it cannot be discovered in participants’ possession. Cultural Considerations Cultural issues often confront researchers abroad. In non-Western or communal societies, a researcher needs to find out from whom to obtain informed consent. For example, in some societies researchers must get the approval of the head person in the community for the interviews to take place before approaching any person in that community. Researchers also need to address any language differences. They should find out ahead of time whether a non-English native language has a written form, whether to expect that most participants will be able to read a consent document or instead to propose an oral process, whether a translator will be needed if the researcher does not speak the predominate language, or whether it is culturally appropriate for participants to sign consent documents; such issues will affect the proposed informed consent process. Further, researchers should determine whether audio recording is appropriate in a specific culture, try to learn about the culture’s meaning of privacy, and determine the appropriateness of any planned remuneration or token of appreciation; all this information should be reflected in the consent document. As with most research, the key to success is adequate preparation. This includes learning about the culture and customs of participants as well as the laws and politics of the country where interviews will take

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place. Such preparation is vital not only to ensure a successful interview experience but also to facilitate researchers’ gaining approval from their IRB.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF AFFIRMING THE IRB REVIEW PROCESS AND INFORMED CONSENT When regulations for obtaining informed consent were first issued by federal agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, some researchers felt that the costs of the new procedures outweighed the benefits. Experienced social scientists questioned the emphasis on written informed consent especially for participant observation studies that may be fluid, unfixed, and therefore difficult ones in which to seek explicit consent (Thorne, 1980). In a response to the first edition of this book, sociologist Kathy Charmaz commented that although informed consent seems to work well when interviewing professionals, for interviewing working-class participants, she had found that the informed consent document causes many to “feel uncomfortable and sets a suspicious tone to the interview” (personal communication, March 5, 1992). In further discussion of the issue, Charmaz (personal communication, March 23 & 30, 1997) indicated that despite her attempts to use a document that was short, clear, and devoid of jargon, the process of asking the participant to sign the document sometimes contributed to establishing a sense of authority and dominance in the interviewing relationship. I recognize that feeling in my work. When a participant signs the written consent document, I feel a sense of having gotten what I need to proceed and a small measure of control that comes with that accomplishment. Richard G. Mitchell Jr.’s (1993) monograph, Secrecy and Fieldwork, critiques the easy substitution of the form of ethical procedure for the substance of ethical responsibility on the part of the researcher. That responsibility, according to Mitchell, is to understand and report as fully as possible the experience and the social world of our participants from their perspective. Mitchell also points out that the requirement to seek informed consent protects the weak and the powerful alike. He argues that in some instances, such as his research on “survivalists,” fieldwork carried out in secret, with no pretense of seeking informed consent, is necessary if the researchers hope to gain the essential understanding of the participants they may be studying. Mitchell’s perspective is provocative and useful. Doctoral candidates with whom I have worked have indicated that the approach to interviewing I describe in this book can be problematic, for example, when

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interviewing elites and others in positions of power. (See the discussion of interviewing elites in Chapter 7.) Such participants may either refuse to sign the consent document or, having signed the consent document, take other steps to avoid giving real insight into their perspectives. There are other situations and settings in which the necessity to seek signed consent documents may hinder the interviewing process, at least initially (K. Charmaz, personal communication, March 23, 1997). In situations in which participants feel vulnerable because of the sensitive nature of the topic of the interview, they may hesitate to sign the consent document. Participants who, for a range of reasons, have a distrust of forms and formalistic language may balk at being asked to sign. Participants who feel the power relationship between them and the interviewer is inequitable may feel uneasy and awkward when asked to review and sign the document. In such situations (and others raising similar issues), researchers should ask the IRB to waive obtaining a participant’s signature on consent documents; thus the researcher still provides written information about the study to the participant, but does not collect signed consent documents. My experience is that the interviewer can deal with some of this uneasiness by thoughtfulness and care in the process of reviewing the information in the document with the participant. In addition, the process of interviewing the participant three times and developing and sustaining a relationship over a period of time can relieve initial discomfort and can assuage the suspicion that may have arisen at the time that the researcher asked the participant to sign the informed consent document. In circumstances in which the interviewer does not have the ability to build a relationship over time, the informed consent process may be inhibiting. While designed to foster equity between the interviewer and the participant, it may at times inhibit it. Some social science researchers, arguing for academic freedom of inquiry, bristle at the bureaucratic approach to ethical issues represented by the IRB review process. They insist that the risks inherent in most social science research are in no way comparable to the risks of biomedical research, which the regulations were primarily designed to address. They assert that the IRB process serves to protect the institution rather than the research participant. (For an early version of this critique, see Douglas, 1979.) My sense is that while life and death may not be at stake in educational and social science research, the risks to participants may not be trivial. The IRB review and informed consent requires that interviewers think through the structure and processes of their study, making them explicit not only to their participants but also to themselves. Developing a

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satisfactory written consent document requires that interviewers be clear about their purposes, methods, and relationship with their participants. In addition to allowing the potential participant to decide whether to participate in the study on the basis of sufficient information, the consent document can also protect interviewers in cases of misunderstanding. The process of making an informed consent document clear can lead a researcher to a more equitable relationship with participants and to the increased effectiveness that almost always flows from equity. Increasingly, IRBs have members who are familiar with the assumptions and methods of qualitative research. The give-and-take between interviewing researchers and IRBs should serve to educate both researchers and IRB members. When an IRB review is done well, that is to say more as an educational process and less as a bureaucratic review (J. Simpson, personal communication, June 2004), it can serve both research participants and researchers well. For all of us involved in this type of research, it is essential to point out that the IRB review process and informed consent are a beginning and not the end of our ethical responsibilities to our participants (McKee, 2004).

Chapter 6

Technique Isn’t Everything, But It Is a Lot

It is tempting to say that interviewing is an art, a reflection of the personality of the interviewer, and cannot be taught. This line of thinking implies that either you are good at it or you are not. But that is only half true. Researchers can learn techniques and skills of interviewing. What follows is a discussion of those skills as I have come to understand them from my own experience of interviewing and that of others.

LISTEN MORE, TALK LESS Listening is the most important skill in interviewing. The hardest work for many interviewers is to keep quiet and to listen actively. Many books about interviewing concentrate on the types of questions that interviewers ask, but I want to start this chapter by talking about the type of listening the interviewer must do. Interviewers must listen on at least three levels. First, they must listen to what the participant is saying. They must concentrate on the substance to make sure that they understand it and to assess whether what they are hearing is as detailed and complete as they would like it to be. They must concentrate so that they internalize what participants say. Later, interviewers’ questions will often flow from this earlier listening. On a second level, interviewers must listen for what George Steiner (1978) calls “inner voice,” as opposed to an outer, more public voice. An outer, or public, voice always reflects an awareness of the audience. It is not untrue; it is guarded. It is a voice that participants would use if they were talking to an audience of 300 in an auditorium. (For a very thoughtful explication of listening for inner voice, see Devault, 1990, pp. 101–105.) There is a language of the outer voice to which interviewers can become sensitive. For example, whenever I hear participants talk about the problems they are facing as a “challenge” or their work as an “adventure,” I sense that I am hearing a public voice, and I search for ways to get to 85

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the inner voice. Challenge and adventure convey the positive aspects of a participant’s grappling with a difficult experience, but not the struggle. Another word that attracts my attention is fascinate. I often hear that word on talk-show interviews; it usually works to communicate some sort of interest while covering up the exact nature of that interest. Whenever I hear a participant use fascinate, I ask for elucidation. By taking participants’ language seriously without making them feel defensive about it, interviewers can encourage a level of thoughtfulness more characteristic of inner voice. On a third level, interviewers—like good teachers in a classroom— must listen while remaining aware of the process as well as the substance. They must be conscious of time during the interview; they must be aware of how much has been covered and how much there is yet to go. They must be sensitive to participants’ energy level and any nonverbal cues they may be offering. Interviewers must listen hard to assess the progress of the interview and to stay alert for cues about how to move the interview forward as necessary. This type of active listening requires concentration and focus beyond what we usually do in everyday life. It requires that for a good part of the time, we quash our normal instinct to talk. At the same time, interviewers must be ready to say something when a navigational nudge is needed. In order to facilitate active listening, in addition to audio-recording the interview, interviewers can take notes. These working notes help interviewers concentrate on what the participant is saying. They also help to keep interviewers from interrupting the participant by allowing them to keep track of things that the participant has mentioned in order to come back to these subjects when the timing is right. A good way to gauge listening skills is to transcribe an interview recording. Separate the interviewer’s questions from the participant’s responses by new paragraphs. Compare the relative length of the participant’s paragraphs with the interviewer’s. If interviewers are listening well, their paragraphs will be short and relatively infrequently interspersed among the longer paragraphs of the participant’s responses. Note the following one-page transcript, for example. It is taken from the beginning of interview number two on the experience of being an instructional designer. Interviewer: Could you tell me as much as possible about the details of your experience at work as an instructional designer presently or as a grad student working in the area of instructional design? Participant: The details of instructional design . . . OK.

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Interviewer: Your present experience . . . Participant: Yeah. Interviewer: As an instructional designer. Participant: Umh . . . So something like . . . you mean something like perhaps the last several jobs I’ve done? Interviewer: No, what you’re presently doing, like as a student maybe right now or you said you did have a job that you’re working on. Participant: Yeah, well, I have one current, current job, umh, the thing is that when you said current I may or may in any given day, I may or may not happen to have a job; you know they just, they just fall out of the sky. You don’t really—My experience in getting work has been that—no matter what I do to try to get work I don’t see any direct results between those efforts and getting the jobs, right. On the other hand, I do get jobs. They just fall out of the sky [laugh]. All I can say about you know like meteorites. Unh, and they range over a wide, wide variety of—of contact. Umh [sniffle] it could be teaching office workers how to use software. I’ve done all of those, all of those kinds of things. Umh, and typically the things start through the proposal, umh less and less I’ve been doing the actual proposals, but usually I’m not ah—the actual getting the business is not my job and somewhere there is a line between; writing the proposal is part of getting the business and um so I usually have something to do with writing the proposal but I don’t do a lot of getting the business. Umh [sniffle] somewhere after the proposal is written or during the proposal stage I’m brought in [sniffle]—and I get to do the work. (Reproduced from Tremblay, 1990) This text is a good example of an interviewer’s listening hard to a participant. At the beginning of the interview, the participant is not quite focused. The interviewer, concentrating on what he is saying, nudges him into the frame of reference of the second interview. Once she has the participant in the right channel, she listens and lets him talk. Even when the participant pauses for a few seconds, she does not interrupt. Patai (1987) describes the process of listening to her Brazilian women participants as an intense form of concentration and openness to them that led her to become absorbed in them (p. 12). Although not every interview takes on the almost magical quality that Patai describes, interest in the participant’s experience and a willingness to hold one’s own ego in check are keys to the hard work of listening in an interview that leads to the type of absorption Patai describes.

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FOLLOW UP ON WHAT THE PARTICIPANT SAYS When interviewers do talk in an interview, they usually ask questions. The key to asking questions during in-depth interviewing is to let them follow, as much as possible, from what the participant is saying. Although the interviewer comes to each interview with a basic question that establishes the purpose and focus of the interview, it is in response to what the participant says that the interviewer follows up, asks for clarification, seeks concrete details, and requests stories. While interviewers may develop preset interviewing guides to which they will refer when the timing is right, interviewers’ initial basic work in this approach to interviewing is to listen actively and to move the interview forward as much as possible by building on what the participant has begun to share. Ask Questions When You Do Not Understand It is hard work to understand everything people say. Sometimes the context is not clear. At other times we do not understand the specific referent of what someone is saying. In everyday conversation we often let such things slide by without understanding them. In interviewing, such sliding undermines the process. The interview structure is cumulative. One interview establishes the context for the next. Not having understood something in an early interview, an interviewer might miss the significance of something a participant says later. Passages in interviews become links to each other in ways that cannot be foretold. Also, interviewers who let a participant know when they do not understand something show the person that they are listening. Sometimes it is difficult to get the chronology of an experience straight. It is important for interviewers to understand experiences in the context of time. A question like, “Can you tell me again when that happened?” is a reasonable one. I use the word again so as not to imply to participants that they are not being clear, thereby making them defensive, but rather, as is often the case, to suggest that I was just not attentive enough the first time around. Sometimes participants use vague words that seem to be communicating but are not explicit. For example, one community college faculty member whom I interviewed consistently described his students by saying, “They are very nice.” I did not know what he meant by the term nice. In a way it seemed to trivialize the respect for his students that he had communicated throughout the interview. I asked him, “What is nice?” He said,

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The students at the private university [where he had previously taught] were rude, and they were frequently demanding. I don’t mean intellectually demanding. They would say, “You didn’t say that. You didn’t say you were going to test us on that sort of thing.” Our students at the community college are really nice. I realize this sounds silly; I apologize for it. It really sounds crazy to say for some reason we happen to have the nicest people around that happen to live in this neighborhood. Now that’s not likely. But we have an attitude on this campus. There is a kind of mutual respect and I get a lot of this when our students come back after they have gone somewhere else. . . . There is a different feeling, even though it is a bigger school, and you really don’t know everybody. Uh, nonetheless there is a kind of community feeling here and there is a lack of what I call a mean spirit where you are just touchy and aggressive and, uh, inquisitive. Maybe our students are not that motivated; maybe that’s why they are not; but they are really nice to teach. You almost never have anything you could call a discipline problem. It just doesn’t happen. . . . I don’t know; I do like our students. I think it would be absolutely perfect if they were a little better prepared, but that’s not as important as being nice people. . . . They are the kind of people that are pleasant to work with. (Interview in Seidman et al., 1983)

In responding to my request for clarification about his use of the word nice, the participant went more deeply into the nature of his teaching experience. By my taking his language seriously, he explored what he meant when he used the word nice. As the interviewer, I then understood better what, for him, were the complexities implied in his use of the apparently simple word nice. Ask to Hear More About a Subject When interviewers want to hear more about what a participant is saying, they should trust that instinct. Interviewers should ask questions when they feel unsatisfied with what they have heard. Sometimes they do not think that they have heard the entire story; other times they may think that they are getting generalities and they want to hear the details; or they may just be interested in what the participant is saying and want to hear more. Sometimes when listening, interviewers begin to feel a vague question welling up inside them because they sense there is more to the story. In those instances it is important for them to ask to hear more. For example, in a study of older women returning to community colleges (Schatzkamer, 1986), one student spoke about her experience in a math course. The last two-thirds of the technical math course she was taking was devoted to calculus.

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She said, “At that point, I capsized. That was beyond the capacities of my math . . . it was beyond me. So I was obedient. This is something I don’t usually do in school, but I just memorized and did what I was told and followed out the formulas the way I was told I should and which I regret. I got an A, but I regret it.” The interviewer, hearing the phrase “I regret it,” wanted to hear more. She asked, based on what the participant had said, “What do you regret?” The participant responded, “I never really understood it, you know. I didn’t really learn. I’m sure there is something lovely there under all that calculus to be learned and I didn’t learn that. I theoretically learned how to use it as a tool. By being slavish you know: plugging numbers into formulas and finding the right formula and stuff; that’s not the way math should be learned and it’s not really understanding.” By following up on the participant’s phrase of regret, the interviewer gave the participant a chance to go a step further in her story. In so doing she revealed a desire to learn and a potential appreciation for the beauty of math that increases the reader’s understanding of her community college experience and our respect for her as an individual. Explore, Don’t Probe In referring to the skill of following up on what participants say, the literature on interviewing often uses the word probe (see, e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Rubin & Rubin, 2012, pp. 139–147). I have never been comfortable with that word. I always think of a sharp instrument pressing on soft flesh when I hear it. The word also conveys a sense of the powerful interviewer treating the participant as an object. I am more comfortable with the notion of exploring with the participant than with probing into what the participant says. At the same time, too much and ill-timed exploration of the participant’s words can create a feeling of defensiveness and shift the meaning making from the participant to the interviewer. The interview can become too easily a vehicle for the interviewer’s agenda rather than an exploration of the participant’s experience. Too little exploration, however, can leave interviewers unsure of a participant’s meaning in the material they have gathered. It can also leave the participant using abstractions and generalities that are not useful (Hyman et al., 1954).

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LISTEN MORE, TALK LESS, AND ASK REAL QUESTIONS Listen more, talk less. I repeat the first principle of interviewing here for emphasis and because it is so easy to forget. When you do ask questions, ask only real questions. By a real question I mean one to which the interviewer does not already know or anticipate the response. If interviewers want to ask a question to which they think they know the response, it would be better to say what they think, and then to ask participants what they think of the assertion. Avoid Leading Questions A leading question is one that influences the direction the response will take. Sometimes the lead is in the intonation of the question: The tone implies an expectation. Sometimes it is in the wording, syntax, and intonation of the question, as when an interviewer asks, “Did you really mean to do that?” Sometimes the lead is in the conclusion implied by the question. One interviewer, listening to a participant’s story about her family and her early schooling, asked: “Your parents pushed you to study, didn’t they?” Or in another place, the interviewer asked, “How satisfied were you with your student teaching placement?” instead of, for example, “What was your student teaching placement like for you?” (For a more extensive discussion of leading questions, see Brinkmann & Kvale, 2014, pp. 199–200; Patton, 2015, pp. 446–456; Richardson et al., 1965.) Ask Open-Ended Questions An open-ended question, unlike a leading question, establishes the territory to be explored while allowing participants to take any direction they want. It does not presume an answer. There are at least two types of open-ended questions especially relevant to in-depth interviewing. One is what Spradley (1979) calls the “grand tour” question (pp. 86–87), in which the interviewer asks the participant to reconstruct a significant segment of an experience. For example, in interviewing a counselor, an interviewer might say, “Take me through a day in your work life.” Or in working with a student teacher, an interviewer might ask, “Reconstruct your day for me from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed.” There is also the mini-tour, in which the interviewer asks the participant to reconstruct the details of a more limited time span or of a particular experience. For example, an interviewer might ask a vice principal to reconstruct the details of a particular disciplinary session with a student;

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or an interviewer might ask a teacher to talk about the experience of a particular conference with a parent. A second type of open-ended question focuses more on the subjective experience of the participant than on the external structure. For example, a participant might begin to talk about her experience in a parent conference. After asking her what happened at the conference, the interviewer might ask her to talk about what that conference was like for her. Although there are many approaches to open-ended questioning, when I am interested in understanding the participant’s subjective experience, I often find myself asking the question, “What was that like for you?” As Schutz (1967) indicated, it is not possible to experience what the participant experienced. If we could, then we would be the participant. Perhaps the closest we can come is to ask the metaphorical question implied in the word like. When interviewers ask what something was like for participants, they are giving them the chance to reconstruct their experience according to their own sense of what was important, unguided by the interviewer. (For a thoughtful discussion of questioning strategies she uses in oral history interviewing, see Yow, 2015, pp. 113–124.)

FOLLOW UP, BUT DON’T INTERRUPT Avoid interrupting participants when they are talking. Often an interviewer is more interested in something a participant says than the speaker seems to be. While the participant continues talking, the interviewer feels strongly tempted to interrupt to pursue the interesting point. Rather than doing so, however, the interviewer can jot down the key word and follow up on it later, when doing so will not interrupt the participant’s train of thought. The opportunity may come later in the same interview or even in a subsequent one (Richardson et al., 1965). Once, for example, a teacher had been talking early in the second interview about the frenetic pace of her day and about having no place to hide. At the time, I was very interested in what she said, but she went right on to other aspects of her experience. Rather than interrupting her then, I wrote down in my working notes the phrases “frenetic pace” and “no place to hide.” Later, when there was a pause in her responses, I returned to those phrases by saying, “A while back you talked about a very frenetic pace. You talked about coming in the door, teaching your class, walking to your office, keeping extensive hours, having no place to hide. Would you talk more about that frenetic pace and having no place to hide?” (Richardson

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et al., 1965, pp. 157–163, term this approach “the echo” and caution against its overuse. Weiss, 1994, pp. 77–78, however, says that it is important to return to words and phrases that serve as “markers” of something that may be very important to a participant, but for which you might not want to interrupt at the time.) The participant responded by talking about the effect of her community college’s architecture on her daily life. In order to make faculty as accessible as possible to students, the designers of her campus had created faculty offices along a hallway with a glass wall. The participant spoke about her frustration with never having a place to go in her building where she could get some work done without being seen and, most likely, interrupted. Although she could close the door of her office, she could never close out those who sought her.

TWO FAVORITE APPROACHES Every interviewer probably develops favorite approaches to participants. I have two to which I return often. Ask Participants to Talk to You as If You Were Someone Else I use the first approach when I sense that I am hearing a public voice and I am searching for an inner one (see above). In those situations, I often use what Patton (2015, pp. 458–459) calls role-playing questions (see also Spradley, 1979). I try to figure out the person with whom the participant might be most comfortable talking personally. I then try asking the participant to imagine that I am that person. I might say, “If I were your spouse (or your father, or your teacher, or your friend), what would you say to me?” Sometimes this question falls flat. I am unable to shift participants’ frame of reference enough so that they talk to me as though I were someone else. But often, if used sparingly, the role-playing approach works. The participant takes on a different voice and becomes animated in a way not seen before, and both the participant and I enjoy for a few moments the new roles that we have assumed. Ask Participants to Tell a Story I also often ask participants to tell me a story about what they are discussing. In a sense, everything said in an interview is a story. But if they were talking about, for example, relationships with students, I might ask for a story about one particular student who stands out in their experience.

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Not everybody is comfortable with being asked directly to tell a story. The request seems to block people who may think they do not tell good stories or that storytelling is something only other people do. Others, however, suddenly remember a particular incident, become deeply engrossed in reconstructing it, and tell a wonderful story that conveys their experience as concretely as anything could. I will always remember the story one student teacher told when she was describing the trouble she was having figuring out how to relate to her students. She had envisioned herself as a friendly older sister to them. One day she overheard a group of her students telling dirty jokes, and she told them a mild one. About a week later, the vice principal called her to his office to say that parents were outraged about the joke. The student teacher went on to tell of a series of meetings with parents in which she had to explain herself. She described the vice principal’s lack of real support during those meetings. Finally, she talked about the sobering realization that she had not known where to draw the line with her students. She said, “The dirty joke was horrendous, and I understood that. I understood that I was just trying to be one of the kids, that I felt close to them. . . . I was just being too familiar. I always thought that teaching . . . was relating to the kids.” Stories such as this convey experience in an illuminating and memorable way. The student teacher described a segment of her experience with a clear beginning, middle, and end. She drew characters, presented conflict, and showed how she dealt with it. (See Mishler, 1986, Ch. 4, for an extended discussion of the power of narratives, and Mattingly, 1998, Chs. 1 and 2, for the complexities of stories and narratives.) If an interviewer continually asks participants to illustrate experiences with a story, the technique will wear out quickly. Used sparingly, however, and targeted at particular aspects of the participant’s experience, it can lead to treasured moments in interviewing.

ASK PARTICIPANTS TO RECONSTRUCT, NOT TO REMEMBER Avoid asking participants to rely on their memories. As soon as interviewers ask if people remember something, impediments to memory spring up (Tagg, 1985). Ask participants, in effect, not to remember their experience but rather to reconstruct it. Ask directly “What happened?” or “What was your elementary school experience like?” instead of “Do you remember what your elementary school experience was like?”

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Interviewers can assume that the participants will be able to reconstruct their experience and thereby avoid many of the impediments to memory that abound. Reconstruction is based partially on memory and partially on what the participant now senses is important about the past event. In a sense, all recall is reconstruction (Thelen, 1989). In interviewing, it is better to go for that reconstruction as directly as possible.

KEEP PARTICIPANTS FOCUSED AND ASK FOR CONCRETE DETAILS Keep participants focused on the subject of the interview. If they begin to talk about current experience in the first interview, try to guide them back to the focus of that interview, which is to provide contextual background from their life story. Although interviewers must avoid a power struggle, they must offer enough guidance in the process so that participants can come to respect the structure and individual purpose of each of the three interviews in the series. Throughout the interviews, but especially in the first two, ask for concrete details of a participant’s lived experience before exploring attitudes and opinions about it. The concrete details constitute the experience; attitudes and opinions are based on them. Without the concrete details, the attitudes and opinions can seem groundless.

DO NOT TAKE THE EBBS AND FLOWS OF INTERVIEWING TOO PERSONALLY Watch for an ebb and flow in interviews and try not to take it too personally. In-depth interviewing often surprises participants because they have seldom had the opportunity to talk at length to someone outside their family or friends about their experience. As a result, they may become so engrossed in the first interview that they say things that they are later surprised they have shared (Spradley, 1979; Kirsch, 1999). Interviewers often arrive at the second interview thinking what a wonderful interview the first was, only to be surprised that now the participants pull back and are not willing to share as much as before. (Young & Lee, 1997, identify a similar phenomenon; see p. 106.) At this point, interviewers have to be careful not to press too hard for the type of sharing they experienced before. The third interview allows participants to find a zone of sharing within which they are comfortable. They resolve the issue for themselves.

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LIMIT YOUR OWN INTERACTION Only Share Experiences Occasionally There are times when an interviewer’s experience may connect to that of the participant. Sharing that experience in a frank and personal way may encourage participants to continue reconstructing their own in a more inner voice than before. Overused, however, such sharing can distort an interview and distract participants from their own experience to the interviewer’s. I can remember sharing stories of mine that I thought connected to what the participant was saying and sensing that the participant was impatient for me to stop talking. (For a somewhat different perspective on the amount of interaction that is desirable between interviewer and participant, see Oakley, 1981, and a reassessment in Oakley, 2016.) Avoid Reinforcing Your Participants’ Responses Avoid reinforcing what your participant is saying, either positively or negatively. A useful training exercise is to transcribe verbatim 5 minutes of an early interview. What sometimes becomes clear is that the interviewer is in the habit of saying “uh huh” or “OK” or “yes” or some other short affirmative response to almost every statement from the participant. Sometimes interviewers are hardly aware that they are doing it. On having such reinforcement called to their attention, many new interviewers suggest that there is nothing inappropriate about the practice. They argue that it shows they are listening and being attentive and that participants appreciate knowing that; it keeps them talking. Often, I think, it is a relatively benign controlling mechanism that is difficult to give up. But interviewers who reinforce what they are hearing run the risk of distorting how the participant responds. A more effective and less invasive method to let your participants know you are listening is to refer later in an interview to something participants said earlier. (For a more balanced perspective on reinforcements, see Richardson et al., 1965.)

EXPLORE LAUGHTER Often participants will say something and then laugh, sometimes because what they just said is self-evidently funny. At other times, the laughter may be nervous or ironic, its origin unclear to the interviewer and often worth exploring. For example, when interviewing a female science teacher, I asked her how the fact that there were 10 women in her community

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college science division of 60 faculty affected her sense of power in the college. I related the question to Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s discussion of numbers and power in her book Men and Women of the Corporation (1977). The participant responded: Well, you see, this isn’t a corporation. I mean, people are not jockeying for position within, and that would make a tremendous difference, I think, if we were really competitive with one another for something, [laugh] it might be a tremendously important factor. But we’re not competing for anything. There are very few people who want to, say, go up to the next step, which is division director. I feel I could get elected to division director, if I so chose. [Pause] My sex would not at all interfere. [Pause] It might even be a plus, but, uh, most people here are not interested, it’s not a power play situation; we’re all retired really [laugh]. (Interview in Seidman et al., 1983)

After she finished and I weighed in my mind the juxtaposition of her laughter with what she was saying, I said, “That sounds bitter.” In reply, she spoke about the positive and negative aspects in her experience of not being in a highly competitive, upwardly mobile faculty. I did not follow up at that point because I thought doing so might make her defensive. I wrote in my working notes, “laughter?” and came back to it later in the interview. As Studs Terkel has said, “A laugh can be a cry of pain, and a silence can be a shout” (Parker, 1996, p. 165).

FOLLOW YOUR HUNCHES Follow your hunches. Trust your instincts. When appropriate, risk saying what you think or asking the difficult question. Sometimes during an interview, a question will start to form, perhaps first as a vague impression, then as a real doubt. My experience is that it is important to trust those responses, to figure out the question that best expresses them, and to ask it. During one interview with an intern teacher, I became increasingly uncomfortable. I could not figure out what was bothering me until I realized that the participant was talking positively about his teaching experience in a very formal way but with very little energy. His nonverbal language was contradicting his verbal language. I began to think he was really very unhappy with his teaching, even though he was talking relatively positively about it. I was very uncomfortable with this hunch, but finally after we were more than two-thirds of the way into the second interview, I said to him,

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“You know, I can’t figure this out. You are talking as though you are enjoying your teaching, but something about the way you are talking makes me think you are not. Is that fair?” He responded as though I had opened a floodgate. He began to talk about how angry he was that intern teachers got all the “lowest” classes. He said that even though he had solid math preparation, he would not have a chance to teach upper-level courses for perhaps 5 more years, because all course assignments were made on the basis of seniority. Then he talked about how hard he worked, how little time he had on weekends to be with his wife, and how little money he was making. As a result of following up on a hunch, I gained a completely different picture of his experience, and in the rest of the interview his verbal and nonverbal language coincided.

USE AN INTERVIEW GUIDE CAUTIOUSLY Some forms of interviewing depend on an interview guide (see, e.g., Yow, 2015, pp. 80–83). The interviewers arrive with preset questions to which they want answers or about which they want to gather data. In-depth interviewing, however, is not designed to test hypotheses, gather answers to questions, or corroborate opinions. Rather, it is designed to ask participants to reconstruct their experience and to explore their meaning. The questions most used in an in-depth interview follow from what the participant has said. Nonetheless, in-depth interviewers may want to develop an interviewing guide. The basic structure of the interview is the question that establishes the focus of each interview in the series. However, interviewers never come into an interview situation as clean slates. They have interests, or they would not have chosen the research topic they did. In addition, some participants will require more prompting than others to go forward in the reconstruction of their experience. Also, over the course of a number of interviews, the interviewer may notice that several participants have highlighted a particular issue, and the interviewer may want to know how other participants would respond to that issue. For these reasons, in our study of the experience of student teachers we developed a guide that listed the following areas: student teachers’ relationship with mentors, with students, with other student teachers, with parents, with tracking, testing, and grading. In most cases, student teachers raised these topics on their own as they talked about their teaching experience. In those instances when they did not, and if there was an opportunity to do so without interrupting or diverting participants’

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reconstructions of their own experience, the interviewer referred to the interview guide and raised an issue that had not been touched upon. If interviewers decide to use an interview guide, they must avoid manipulating their participants to respond to it. Interviewers should ask questions that reflect areas of interest to them in an open and direct way, perhaps acknowledging that the question comes more from their own interest than from what the participant has said. Interviewers must try to avoid imposing their own interests on the experience of the participants. Interviewers working with an interview guide must allow for the possibility that what may interest them or other participants may be of little interest to the person being interviewed. Interview guides can be useful but must be used with caution. (For the development of interview guides, see Weiss, 1994, pp. 45–51.)

TOLERATE SILENCE Interviewers sometimes get impatient and uncomfortable with silence. They project that discomfort onto their participants. They see pauses as voids and jump into the interview with a quick question to fill the void. A useful exercise is to play back an interview recording and note how much time the interviewer gives the participant to think before jumping in with a question. My experience is that new interviewers think they are waiting a considerable time before asking their next question, but when we go over audio recordings of their interviews, we determine that in reality they are waiting only a second or two. Thoughtfulness takes time; if interviewers can learn to tolerate either the silence that sometimes follows a question or a pause within a participant’s reconstruction, they may hear things they would never have heard if they had leapt in with another question to break the silence. (See Mary-Budd Rowe, 1974, on how the time teachers wait for answers to questions affects the quality of students’ responses.) On the other hand, Yow (1994, p. 63) and Gordon (1987) point out that too long a studied silence on the part of the interviewer can put undue pressure on the participant. The interviewer’s staying silent too long can turn a “pregnant or permissive pause” into an “embarrassing silence” (Gorden, 1987, pp. 423, 426). As in other aspects of interviewing, there is a delicate balance between jumping in too soon with a question and waiting too long in silence. There are no rules of thumb here. It is important to give your participants space to think, reflect, and add to what they have said. This may take a second or two for some participants and 20 seconds for others.

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CONCLUSION There is no recipe for the effective question. The truly effective question flows from an interviewer’s concentrated listening, engaged interest in what is being said, and purpose in moving forward. Sometimes an important question will start out as an ill-defined instinct or hunch, which takes time to develop and seems risky to ask. Sometimes the effective question reflects the interviewer’s own groping for coherence about what is being said and is asked in a hesitant, unsure manner. Effective questioning is so context-bound, such a reflection of the relationship that has developed between the interviewer and the participant, that to define it further runs the risk of making a human process mechanical. To some extent, the way interviewers are as people will be the way they are as interviewers. If interviewers are the sort of people who always have to be talking, who never listen, who demand to be the center of attention most of the time, who are really not interested in other people’s stories, those characteristics will probably pervade the interviewing relationship no matter what procedures they follow. The most important personal characteristic interviewers must have is a genuine interest in other people. They must be deeply aware that other people’s stories are of worth in and of themselves as well as for the usefulness of what they offer to interviewers’ research. With a temperament that finds interest in others, a person has the foundation upon which to learn the techniques of interviewing and to practice its skills.

Chapter 7

Interviewing as a Relationship Interviewing is both a research methodology and a social relationship that must be nurtured, sustained, and then ended gracefully (Dexter, 1970; Hyman et al., 1954; Mishler, 1986). In part, each interviewing relationship is individually crafted. It reflects the personalities of the participant and the interviewer and the ways they interact. The relationship is also a reflection of the purpose, structure, and method of in-depth interviewing. For example, the fact that the participant and the interviewer meet three times over 2 or 3 weeks results in a relationship different from that which would result from a single-interview structure. Interviewers can try to craft relationships with their participants that are like islands of interchange separate from the world’s definitions, classifications, and tensions. However, individual interviewing relationships exist in a social context. Although an interviewer might attempt to isolate the interviewing relationship from that context and make it unique to the interviewer and the participant, the social forces of class, ethnicity, race, and gender, as well as other social identities, impose themselves. Although interviewers may try to ignore these social forces, they tend to affect their relationships with participants nonetheless. INTERVIEWING AS AN “I–THOU” RELATIONSHIP In a section of his book that is elegant even in translation, Schutz (1967) explains that one person’s intersubjective understanding of another depends upon creating an “I–Thou” relationship, a concept bearing both similarities to and significant differences from the philosopher Martin Buber’s use of the phrase. “Thou” is someone close to the interviewer, still separate, but a fellow person. We recognize “Thou,” according to Schutz, as another “alive and conscious human being” (p. 164). Implicit in such an “I–Thou” relationship is a shift from the interviewers’ seeing participants as an object or a type, which they would normally describe syntactically in the third person. Schutz goes on to say that a relationship in which each person is “Thou”-oriented—that is, in which the sense of “Thou-ness” is mutual—becomes a “We” relationship. 101

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The goal of interviewers is to transform their relationship with the participant into an “I–Thou” relationship that verges on a “We” relationship. In the approach to interviewing I have been discussing, the interviewer does not strive for a full “We” relationship. In such a case the interviewer would become an equal participant, and the resulting discourse would be a conversation, not an interview. In an “I–Thou” relationship, however, the interviewer keeps enough distance to allow participants to fashion their responses as independently as possible. In some approaches to participatory research, however, the interviewers do attempt to create a full “We” relationship (Griffin, 1989; Reason, 1994). Oakley (1981) argues that not doing so is manipulative and reflects a male, hierarchical model of research. (See de Laine, 2000, pp. 108–116; Stacey, 1988, for respectful but critical discussions of the feminist position Oakley’s 1981 perspective represents. See Oakley, 2016, for her reassessment of her earlier position.) I try to strike a balance, saying enough about myself to be alive and responsive but little enough to preserve the autonomy of participants’ words and to keep the focus of attention on their experience rather than mine.

RAPPORT That balancing act is central to developing an appropriate rapport with the participant. I have never been completely comfortable with the common assumption that the more rapport the interviewer can establish with the participant, the better. Rapport implies getting along with each other, a harmony with, a conformity to, an affinity for one another. The problem is that, carried to an extreme, the desire to build rapport with the participant can transform the interviewing relationship into a full “We” relationship in which the question of whose experience is being related and whose meaning is being made is critically confounded. In our community college study, one participant invited my wife and me to his house for dinner after the second interview and before the third. I had never had such an invitation from a participant in the study. I did not want to appear ungracious, so we accepted. We had a wonderful California backyard cookout, and it was a pleasure to spend time with the participant and his family. But a few days later, when I met him at his faculty office for the third interview, he was so warm and familiar toward me that I could not retain the distance I needed to explore his responses. I felt tentative as an interviewer because I did not want to risk violating the spirit of hospitality that he had created by inviting us to his home.

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The rapport an interviewer must build in an interviewing relationship needs to be controlled. Too much or too little rapport can lead to distortion of what the participant reconstructs in the interview (Hyman et al., 1954). For the sake of establishing rapport, for example, interviewers sometimes share their own experience when they think it is relevant to the participant’s. Although such sharing may contribute to building rapport, it can also affect and even distort what the participant might have said had the interviewer not shared. The interviewing relationship must be marked by respect, interest, attention, and good manners on the part of the interviewer. The interviewer must be constantly alert to what is appropriate to the situation. As in teaching, the interviewing relationship can be friendly but not a friendship. On this subject, Judy Stacey (1988, p. 24) is especially compelling. She warns that the greater the intimacy and the apparent mutuality of the relationship between the researcher and the researched, the greater is the danger of the exploitation of the participant. In his keynote address to the 17th Qualitative Health Research Conference, Svend Brinkmann (2012, p. 60) criticizes researchers who use non-genuine methods to establish rapport with participants. Citing Duncombe and Jessop (2002), he uses as an example researchers who engage in “faking friendships” in order to obtain knowledge. At the beginning of an interviewing relationship, I recommend erring on the side of formality rather than familiarity (see also Hyman et al., 1954). For example, an early step in an interviewing relationship is to ask participants if they mind being called by their first name. To do so without asking presumes familiarity, which can be off-putting, especially to older people. Common courtesies such as holding a door, not sitting until the person is seated, and introducing yourself again so that you make sure the participants knows to whom they are talking are small steps. But they all add up to expressing respect for the participant, which is central to the interview process. Once the interview is under way, and as participants begin to share their life history and details of present experience, it is crucial for the interviewer to maintain a delicate balance between respecting what the participant is saying and taking advantage of opportunities to ask difficult questions, to go more deeply into controversial subjects. In our seminar, In-Depth Interviewing and Issues in Qualitative Research, for example, one interviewer said that a participant had made remarks that reflected what the interviewer thought to be racist attitudes. At the time, which was early in her pilot project, the interviewer did not feel comfortable in following up on that aspect of what the participant had said. She hadn’t yet developed a technique for exploring such a difficult subject without appearing judgmental. However, by not following up, she later realized

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that she was left with material that, if used, might be unfair to the participant. She decided that she could not use the material. (See de Laine, 2000, pp. 197–203; Lee, 1993, pp. 187–194, for discussions of self-censorship that researchers sometimes impose on themselves.) In future interviews she would find a tactful way to encourage her participants to explore their own words further when she perceived ambiguity in their narrative. Another reason to control the rapport an interviewer builds in an interviewing relationship is that when the interviews are concluded, the interviewing relationship shifts dramatically. It becomes more distant, less intimate, focusing on what happens to the material generated by the interview. Issues of ownership of the material can easily arise. Interviewers should agree to give a copy of the transcripts or audio recordings to the participant, who has a basic right to these. Participants may want to review the transcripts to see if there is any part with which they might not be comfortable and wish to have excluded from the study. This stage of the relationship is likely to be conducted by phone, letter, or email. The rapport an interviewer builds during the interview must be consistent with the relationship the interviewer expects to have with the participant after the interviews are concluded. Once an interviewer writes a report on the interviews, they may share the report with the participants. Lincoln and Guba (1985) refer to such sharing as member-checking, and they indicate that it contributes to the trustworthiness and credibility of the report. (See Birt et al., 2016, for a critical view of member-checking.) Difficult issues can arise at this point. Some interviewers give a right of review to the participant that can amount almost to a veto on how the interviewer works with, analyzes, and writes up the results of the interviewing project. Some researchers go further and suggest that the participant in the interview should also become a participant in working with the material (Griffin, 1989). The stances researchers take on this issue are wide-ranging (Patai, 1987). At one end of the continuum are those who argue for a type of co-ownership. (Oakley, 2016, has revised her earlier position on co-ownership.) At the other are those who suggest that the relationship terminate with the interview, and the only obligations that the writer has are to make sure the participants knew why they were being interviewed and the interviewer has not distorted the spirit of what the participant said. My practice has been to offer to share with participants any material that concerns them. I especially want to know if in working with the interview data I have done anything that makes them vulnerable, or if I have presented anything that is not accurate. Except with regard to issues of vulnerability or inaccuracy, however, I retain the right to write the final report as I see it. At the same time, I would hold myself to the principle de

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Laine (2000, p. 191) articulates: not saying anything in print that I would not say directly to my participants. (In her study of high schools, Lightfoot, 1983, tells of the awkward situation she encountered when participants in her study disagreed with her interpretations.) The type of relationship the interviewer anticipates after the interview is concluded affects the nature of the relationship the interviewer nurtures during it. If interviewers have created a full “We” relationship in the process of the interviewing, then they must be prepared to deal with the consequences when the time comes to work with the material generated in an interview and report on it. To establish such a deeply sharing, mutually intimate interviewing relationship and then claim one-sided ownership of the material at the conclusion of the interview may cause problems. On the other hand, interviewers who are explicit about the rights of the participant before the interview begins, and who control the distance they maintain with the participant, establish the condition for an equitable relationship when working with the material.

SOCIAL GROUP IDENTITIES AND THE INTERVIEWING RELATIONSHIP Issues of equity in an interviewing relationship are affected by the social identities that participants and interviewers bring to the interview. Our social identities are affected by our experience with issues of class, race, ethnicity, and gender, and those social forces interact with the sense of power in our lives (Kanter, 1977). The interviewing relationship is fraught with issues of power—who controls the direction of the interview, who controls the results, who benefits (see Ribbens, 1989, for an incisive view of the responsibility such power demands from the interviewer). To negotiate these variables in developing an equitable interviewing relationship, interviewers must be acutely aware of their own experience with them as well as sensitive to the way these issues may be affecting the participants. Race and Ethnicity In our society, with its history of racism, researchers and participants of different racial and ethnic backgrounds may face difficulties in establishing an effective interviewing relationship. It may be especially complex for Whites and African Americans to interview each other, but other interracial or cross-ethnic pairings can also be problematic. (To explore this important issue more deeply, see Boushel, 2000; Dexter, 1970; Dollard, 1949; Hyman et al., 1954; Labov, 1972; May, 2014; Phoenix, 1994; Reese,

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Danielson, Shoemaker, Chang, & Hsu, 1986; Richardson et al., 1965; Song & Parker, 1995.) In addition, interviewing relationships between those of the same racial-ethnic background but of different gender, class, and age can engender tensions that inhibit the full development of an effective interviewing relationship. Because of the complexities of cross-racial interviewing, some might argue that interviewers and participants should be racially matched. The feminist theory of intersectionality, however, rejects such dualistic thinking (Ferguson, 2017). The attempt to match interviewers and participants on the basis of one similar aspect of social identity such as race is doomed to fail. Intersectionality argues that it is never one social force that defines us. Rather, it stresses that the intersection of multiple social forces such as class and gender become embedded in our sense of ourselves (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989). Such embedded intersections would complicate any simplistic approach to matching interviewers and participants (Mellor, Ingram, Abrahams, & Beedell, 2014). Matching on the basis of one variable fails to address the intersecting complexity of people’s lives. Oakley (2016) writes the following on the idea of matching interviewers and participants: Over a 50-year “career” in research I have interviewed many people in many different research projects whose values, lifestyles and backgrounds are unlike my own: the point about the professional practice of interviewing (whether self-avowedly “feminist” or not) is that its starting point is interviewers’ interest in other people’s lives, responsiveness to their stories about these and a responsible attitude towards the data and the participants. (p. 198)

In the interviewing studies in which I have been involved, I have subscribed to Oakley’s position. I have not attempted to match interviewers and participants. Although the shared assumptions that come from common backgrounds may make it easier to build rapport, interviewing requires interviewers to have enough distance to enable them to ask real questions and to explore, not to share, assumptions. It would be an unfortunate methodological situation if African Americans could interview only African Americans, Latinos only Latinos, Asian Americans only Asian Americans, Native Americans only Native Americans, and Whites only other Whites. In my own experience, I have found that the three-interview structure goes some way toward overcoming the initial distrust that can be present when a White person interviews an African American. (See May, 2014, for an important article on when the shoe is on the other foot.) The

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three-interview structure can mitigate tensions in other cross-racial interviewing relationships as well. By returning to the participant three times, an interviewer has the opportunity to demonstrate respect, thoughtfulness, and interest in that individual, all of which can work toward ameliorating skepticism. Nonetheless, my experience is that racial politics can make interracial and cross-ethnic interviewing, no matter the structure of the interviews and the sensitivity of the interviewers, difficult to negotiate. Of the 76 faculty and administrative participants we interviewed in our community college study (Seidman et al., 1983), only one terminated the interviews before the series was completed. That participant was a male, African American administrator at a community college who withdrew near the end of the first interview. At the time, he gave no reason. He just said that he wanted to stop. I remember the feeling of disappointment as my colleague Sullivan and I left the interview. We searched our minds for what had precipitated his decision. I felt both guilty and disheartened and was on the verge of losing confidence in the interviewing methodology. Later, as I reflected further on the episode, I realized that our interview study had become caught up in the racial history and politics of our society. Perhaps instead of being a failure, our interview method had been working too well. As our participant had spoken of his life history, he had begun to deal with the way racism had played out in his life and his career. I think he found himself speaking more openly to White interviewers than he cared to (Anderson, Silver, & Abramson, 1988; Cotter, Cohen, & Coulter, 1982). His withdrawing was a loss to us and our study. Linda Miller Cleary met a similarly complex situation in her research on American Indian education. Cleary prepared teachers of secondary English at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She had a significant number of students who were Ojibwe, and most would teach American Indian students. She developed a research project, initially to find out more about the experience of teachers of American Indian students, to better prepare her students to do that work. In an interview with me in 1996, Cleary said that she felt “always suspect” whenever she sought access to American Indian educators. She said she sensed a distrust of her motives and intentions. After one series of interviews was completed, one participant asked her pointedly, “Why are you doing this?” She was well into her research when, because of the suspicion she had faced in establishing access and in each initial interview, she realized that “people aren’t going to trust me as an author.” Although she felt she had been able to get beyond much of the initial distrust and gather good material in her interviews, she wanted “another perspective . . . in the process of analysis.” She came to the decision that “I really couldn’t do it alone . . .

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the gap was too big” (L. M. Cleary, personal communication, August 11, 1996). Facing the issue head-on, Cleary solved it by inviting a colleague, Thomas Peacock, who held the Endowed Chair of American Indian Education at her university, to join her in the research project. By teaming with a colleague who knew firsthand the complexities of their American Indian participants’ experience, she took a significant step toward strengthening the equity between researchers and participants and the authority of the research. Their collaborative work is represented in their book, Collected Wisdom: American Indian Education (Cleary & Peacock, 1997), in which they discuss not only the subject of the research but also the significant methodological issues inherent in it. Gender There is evidence that interviewers and participants of different genders get different interviewing results than do those of the same gender (Hyman et al., 1954). The interviewing relationship that develops when participant and interviewer are different genders can be deeply affected by sexist attitudes and behaviors interacting with issues of class and race. All the problems that one can associate with sexist gender relationships can be played out in an interview. Males interviewing female participants can be overbearing. Women interviewing men can sometimes be reluctant to control the focus of the interview. Male participants can be too easily dismissive of female interviewers. Interviewers of both genders can fail to see the possibilities of whole areas of exploration if their perspectives are ideologically laden. Nor are interviews between interviewers and participants of the same gender automatically unproblematic. They can be imbued with the false assumption of shared perspectives or a sense of competition never stated. In addition to affecting individual relationships between interviewers and participants, sexism influences the total context of research. Interviewing research itself can be characterized as “soft” research—research not likely to yield “hard” data—and can thereby be minimized by a sexist research community (Callaway, 1981). On another level, Patai (1987) argues that if interviewers use women for their own research ends, no matter how well-intentioned the research study is, the dominant paradigm of a society’s exploiting women is supported rather than challenged. There is also the possibility of sexual exploitation in in-depth interviewing because of the sense of intimacy that can develop. Participants talk about the details of their lives while the interviewer listens attentively. A natural bond of fondness and respect develops as the interviewer and

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the participant explore the participant’s experience. Clearly, it is important for interviewers not to exploit that bond sexually. In one study, a research assistant told me how she had become attracted to one of her participants as a result of interviewing. She wanted to talk about her feelings and their implications for the interview process. She knew that any connection with the participant outside the interview structure would serve only to distort the interviewing relationship. She was worried that even if she had no outside contact with the participant, her fond feelings were affecting the way she asked questions. (See Hyman et al., 1954, p. 54, for another example of how the cordiality of the interviewing relationship affects the way interviewers ask questions.) It helped when I assured her that her feelings were reasonable, but I also emphasized the importance of staying focused on the purpose of the interviews. (See Yow, 2015, p. 203, for a discussion of the possibility of sexual exploitation in interviewing relationships.) It is possible for male and female interviewers and participants to subvert the gender-role stereotypes sexist society would have them play. Interviewers of both sexes can study transcripts of interviews they have done, reconstructing the arrangements they have made to see how they might have employed sexist assumptions in building their interviewing relationships. They can also examine those relationships by reflecting on their interviewing experience in a journal or with a peer. Most important, in the interviewing relationship itself, they can demonstrate a consciousness of sexism and concern for gender equity. The complicated role of gender in interviewing relationships has become even more complex in recent years. Since the release of the 4th edition of this book in 2013, there has been a remarkable transformation in the public’s awareness of challenges to traditional views of gender. Such challenges go back in history (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 2000; Reis, 2009). At the root of the challenge is the principle that one’s gender identity is deeply self-determined and may or may not be consistent with one’s physical appearance and sexual assignment at birth. (See Elias et al., 2018; International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, 1995.) Some people strive to align their internal sense of gender with their outward appearance—through what they wear, how they refer to themselves, and how they behave. Others try to align themselves through medical intervention (Human Rights Campaign, 2018). Historically, such gender-expansive behavior has been marginalized at best and treated with intolerant cruelty at worst (Sharzer, 2017). But to some degree, and in at least some parts of the United States and the world, attitudes have shifted. The LGBTQ movement has become more public and better organized in demanding equal treatment

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under the law. On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the United States (Lopez, 2016). Moreover, the LGBTQ community has become more open about their public lives, in writing, on TV and in film, and online (Sharzer, 2017, p. 2). In the 2018 election cycle, a record number of openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender candidates ran for office (Stack & Edmondson, 2018), more than 150 successfully (Moreau, 2018). This changing consciousness challenges the easy dichotomizing of gender identities into male and female. Many variants must be added to that binary divide. The interviewing relationship when seen in a binary way—between male and female—is complicated. The relationship between interviewer and participant in a world of gender expansiveness will not be simpler. But, in fact, such interviewing relationships call for the very same principles for the interviewer: genuine interest in the stories of the participant and respect for all participants. (For further reading on the subject of gender and interviewing, see an excellent discussion in Yow, 2015, pp. 200–203. Also see Devault, 1990; Edwards, 1990; Herod, 1993; Oakley, 2016; Ribbens, 1989; Riessman, 1987; Rosser, 1992; Williams & Heikes, 1993.) Class, Hierarchy, and Status When interviewer and participant eye each other through the lens of class consciousness, the stories told and the experiences shared can be distorted (Hyman et al., 1954). A lack of consciousness about class issues can be injurious to both the participant and the interviewer (Sennett & Cobb, 1972). In a discussion of class in Marxist terms, Patai (1987) described the interviewer as a hybrid of a capitalist and a laborer who is capable of treating the words of participants as commodities to be exploited. If one understands class as a function of status, education, and wealth, interviewers are often middle-class and university-based, interviewing those who are in some way lower on a scale of status. (Dexter, 1970, runs counter to that notion.) When we did our study of community college faculty, I became conscious of their sensitivity to the higher education totem pole. In the context of the university, school of education faculty rank low. Some community college faculty participants, however, treated me with either an unwarranted skepticism because of my affiliation with what they perceived as the ivory tower, or an unearned deference because of my affiliation with a university, in contrast to their self-description of being “just” in a community college.

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Even the use of interviewing itself can be affected by class-based assumptions. For example, Richardson et al. (1965) wrote that participants of “low socio-economic status, or low status in an organized hierarchy may find it difficult to tolerate a preponderance of open questions because they are unused to talking at length spontaneously, articulately, or coherently, or because they are uncomfortable in an unstructured situation” (p. 149). My experience contradicts Richardson’s assumptions. I have found that when participants, whatever their class background, are encouraged to place their work in the context of their life histories and are given the space to tell their stories, they can respond well to open-ended questions. On the other hand, when class, gender, or racial tension pervades the interviewing relationship, participants are likely to be tight-lipped and restricted in their responses (Labov, 1972). (For a British view of the import of class on interviews, see Mellor et al., 2014. See also Roer-Strier & Sands, 2015, concerning interviews of groups that are in conflict.) Some interviewers have a wider range of class versatility than others. Given their own life histories, they are able to operate comfortably with people lower and higher in the class structure than they are. Others’ life experience has been so homogeneous that they are comfortable only when they are interviewing participants whose social-class experiences are similar to their own. They are reluctant to interview classes of people with whom they have had little contact or in settings in which they have little experience. That reluctance can sometimes result in a skewed sample of participants being interviewed and a picture of the experience being studied that is narrower than warranted. Linguistic Differences An issue embedded in many of the social relationships described above is linguistic differences between interviewers and participants. Sometimes English-speaking researchers interview participants for whom English is not the first language. If interviewers are fluent in the participants’ mother tongue and interview in that language, they will subsequently face the complexity of translation. The issue of finding the right word in English or any other language to represent the full sense of the word the participants spoke in their native language is demanding and requires a great deal of care (Vygotsky, 1987). Some doctoral students with whom I have worked who are fluent in the native language of their participants have experimented with interviewing in English but going along with participants who may shift between English and their first language. When reporting on the interviews, especially in crucial segments, the researchers sometimes include words participants

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have spoken in their native language, to honor the language and the thought patterns inherent in it. They then provide a translation immediately following each excerpt. What is at issue in interviewing participants whose first language is not that of the interviewer is the extent to which the language used by both the participants and the interviewer affects the progress of the interview. The thinking of both the participants and the interviewer is intertwined with the language they are using (Vygotsky, 1987). As in most issues regarding interviewing, there is not one right way to respond to these situations, except to recognize the importance of language and culture to thought. With that awareness, both interviewer and participants can experiment with ways of talking to each other that most authentically reflect their thinking. (For further reading on this subject, see Al-Amer, Ramjan, Glew, Darwish, and Salamonson, 2014; Esposito, 2001; Goldstein, 1995; Santos, Black, & Sandelowski, 2015.) Age In addition to race, gender, and class, the relative ages of the participant and the interviewer may affect the type of relationship that develops between them. Some older participants may feel uncomfortable being interviewed by a young interviewer, especially if they feel that the interviewer places them in a subordinate role (Briggs, 1986). Interviewing participants who are much younger or much older takes a special type of sensitivity on the part of interviewers. They must know how to connect to children or seniors without patronizing them. When class, race, linguistic, and age differences are combined, especially in groups of school-age children, the danger that an interviewer will elicit distorted responses is high (Brenner, Brown, & Canter, 1985). But when interviewed skillfully and with consciousness of class, race, and age, children can be thoughtful about their experience in and out of school and are capable of reflection that is informative and compelling (Labov, 1972). (For an example of effective interviewing of young adults, see Cleary, 1990, 1991; Schaenen, 2014.) Elites Of the imbalances that can occur in the relationship between interviewer and participant, one of the most difficult to negotiate occurs when researchers try to use an in-depth interviewing approach with people in positions of power. Sally Lynne Conkright (1997) used the method described in this book to interview 11 chief executive officers or those on the next rung of authority in 11 significant U.S. corporations. She met the

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expected problems of access, which she overcame to a considerable extent. She also faced serious problems in carrying out her interviewing plan. Executives who had agreed in advance to 90-minute interviews would develop very busy schedules. By the time she arrived for the interview, some could or would only give her a shorter amount of time. On a different level, she noted that elites are often accustomed to being in charge of situations in which they find themselves. A number of her participants tried to take charge of the interviews. Sometimes, when Conkright tried to direct the interview, she noted that her participants became uncomfortable. “In some instances,” she wrote, “the signals were nonverbal in nature and, in other instances, the participants verbally expressed that they would direct the interview” (pp. 274–275). She had to walk a very narrow line between asking questions in which she was interested and recognizing that such questions might threaten to lead to the termination of the interview. Despite these complexities, she sustained her research and learned a great deal about both her subject and the methodology as applied to interviewing elites. Although I see in-depth interviewing as most appropriate for getting at the details of everyday experience of those in less powerladen and status-oriented positions, still, the attempt to gain the inner perspective of elites is worthwhile and important. (For further reading on this topic, see Beckman & Hall, 2013; Dexter, 1970; Hertz & Imber, 1995; Marshall & Rossman, 2016, pp. 159–161. See also Lancaster, 2017, for excellent references to other studies of elites and discussion of the possibilities and problems of such research.)

DISTINGUISH AMONG PRIVATE, PERSONAL, AND PUBLIC EXPERIENCES Interviewing relationships are also shaped by what the interviewer and participant deem are appropriate subjects to explore in the interview. In considering what is appropriate, interviewers may find it useful to distinguish among public, personal, and private aspects of a participant’s life (Shils, 1959). The public aspect is what participants do, for example, at work or at school, in meetings, in classes, in offices where their actions are subject to the scrutiny of others. Interviewers tend to be most comfortable exploring these public aspects of participants’ experience. Participants’ private lives involve matters of intimacy, like aspects of relationships participants do not discuss with outsiders for fear of violating those relationships. Participants or interviewers may have different boundaries for what they consider public, personal, and private. In one

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interview, I asked a participant to talk more about her engagement, which she had mentioned briefly earlier. She said to me very directly, “That’s none of your business.” Participants also have personal lives that bridge their public and private experiences. Personal lives are of at least two basic types. The first is participants’ subjective experience of public events. Interviewers tend to feel comfortable exploring that aspect of personal experience. Indeed, that is one of the major functions of interviewing as a research method. The second is participants’ experience of events that do not occur in their public lives but in their experience with friends and family away from the workplace or school. New interviewers tend to be less comfortable exploring experiences in this realm. They often question its relevance to the subject of their study. The dichotomy between what is personal and what is public, however, is often false. What happens in people’s personal lives often affects what happens in or provides a context for their public lives and can be useful if tactfully explored in interviewing research. “May I ask,” not just as a pro forma statement but seriously meant, is a preface I often put to questions when entering troubling or sensitive areas. Sometimes interviewers shy away from exploring areas such as death and illness because they themselves are personally uncomfortable, and they assume the participant is too. (See Young & Lee, 1997, for an exploration of the interaction of the feelings of the interviewer with the interview process. Also see Hyman et al., 1954; Rowan, 1981.) However, if participants mention topics such as these, they must believe they are relevant. To ignore these topics or not to explore how they might relate to the subject of the research may signal to participants that what is most important to them is somehow not important to the interviewer. If a participant has risked mentioning a personal topic, my experience is that it is important to acknowledge it and to explore the relationship between that personal experience and the subject of the inquiry. (See Guillemin & Heggen, 2009, for the “ethical mindfulness” required when interviewers explore private issues that might make participants vulnerable. Also see Fahie, 2014, for an article that explores the effect on a doctoral candidate doing research in a sensitive area.)

AVOID A THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP At the same time, interviewers must avoid changing the interviewing relationship into a therapeutic one. Many see a similarity between the type

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of open-ended, relatively nondirective interviewing that I have been discussing in this book and the type of exploration that takes place in psychotherapy. It is essential that research interviewers not see themselves as therapists. The goals are different (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2014, p. 48; de Laine, 2000, pp. 116–118; Kahn & Cannell, 1960; Kvale, 1996, pp. 155–157; Weiss, 1994, pp. 134–136). The researcher is there to learn, not to treat the participant. The participant did not seek out the researcher and is not a patient. The researcher will see the participant three times, after which their connection will substantially end. They will not have a continuing relationship in which the researcher takes some measure of ongoing responsibility. Researchers are unlikely to be trained therapists. They should know both their own limits and those imposed by the structure and goal of the interviewing process. Researchers must be very cautious about approaching areas of participants’ private lives and personal complexities to which they are ill-equipped to respond and for which they can take no effective responsibility. But even when researchers exercise such caution, the intimacy that can develop in in-depth interviewing sometimes threatens those limits, and a participant may find the interviewing process emotionally troubling (Griffin, 1989). Adult participants may start to cry in an interview. Interviewers may themselves become upset in the face of a participant’s tears and not know what to do. My experience is that many times the best thing to do is nothing. (See Brannen, 1988, pp. 559–560, on the importance of listening hard and saying little at times like this in interviews.) Let the participant work out the distress without interfering and taking inappropriate responsibility for it. On the other hand, if the distress continues, the interviewer then has the responsibility to pull back from whatever is causing it. (See Bernard, 1994, p. 220; Smith, 1992, p. 102; Weiss, 1994, pp. 127–131, for further guidance on interviewers’ responsibility for their participants. For working with children who become distressed in an interview, see Greene & Hogan, 2005; O’Reilly & Dogra, 2017.) In my mind, a key to negotiating potentially troubled waters is to assess how much responsibility the interviewer can effectively take in navigating them. In one interview, a participant referred repeatedly to a colleague’s nervous breakdown. As much as I was interested in the subject, I did not follow up on it because the participant’s repeated references to it troubled me. We were near the end of the third interview. I was not planning to return to the participant’s campus the next week. I would not be able to follow up if exploring the topic caused the participant emotional distress. One boundary I learned to observe was the one that marked where I could take effective responsibility for follow-up and where I could not.

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RECIPROCITY The issue of reciprocity in the interviewing relationship can be troubling. The more the interviewing relationship is charged with issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, the more complicated the problem of reciprocity can be. Patai (1987) in her study of Brazilian women, most of whom were poor, agonized over what could be perceived as inequity in her research. She wrote a book (Patai, 1988) based on her findings and gained the benefits that usually accrue from such publication. On the other hand, she felt her participants gained little tangible benefit from their cooperation with her. Rowan (1981) talks about the lack of reciprocity that can lead to alienation in research. He sees it as alienation because researchers are separating participants from their words and then using those words to researchers’ own ends. This is the most problematic aspect of interviewing to me. I am sympathetic to the argument that the researcher gets more out of the process than the participant. I know, however, and others write about (Patai, 1987; Yow, 1994) the type of listening the interviewer brings to the interview. It takes the participants seriously, values what they say, and honors the details of their lives. The reciprocity I can offer in an interview is that which flows from my interest in participants’ experience, my attending to what they say, and my honoring their words when I present their experience to a larger public. Although at the conclusion of the interview I do present my participants with a small gift, that gift is only a token of my appreciation in the fullest sense of the word token. I use it to say thank you and to mark the conclusion of that part of our interviewing relationship. (See Marshall & Rossman, 2016, pp. 125–126, for a fuller discussion.)

EQUITY Interviewers and participants are never equal. We can strive to reduce hierarchical arrangements, but usually the participant and the interviewer want and get different things out of the interview. Despite different purposes, researchers can still strive for equity in the process. By equity I mean a balance between means and ends, between what is sought and what is given, between process and product, and a sense of fairness and justice that pervades the relationship between participant and interviewer. Building equity in the interviewing relationship starts when the interviewer first makes contact with the participant. Equity means the interviewer’s going out of the way to get the stories of people whose stories are not usually heard. It means the interviewer’s not promising what cannot

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be delivered, and making sure to deliver what is promised. It means being explicit about the purposes and processes of the research. Equity is supported in an explicit written consent document that outlines the rights and responsibilities of the interviewer and the participant in as detailed a manner as reasonable. Equity is involved in scheduling the time and place of interviews. Interviewers ask a great deal of participants. It keeps the process fair when interviewers set up times and places that are convenient to the participant and reasonable for the interviewer. Equity is also involved in the technique of interviewing. Interviewers who are intrusive, who constantly reinforce responses they may like—who are really looking for corroboration of personal views rather than the story of the participant’s experience—are not being fair to the purpose of in-depth interviewing. Being equitable in interviewing research means, as we see in Chapter 8, valuing the words of the participant because those words are deeply connected to that participant’s sense of worth. Being equitable in interviewing research means infusing a research methodology with respect for the dignity of those interviewed. Researchers cannot be expected to resolve all the inequities of society reproduced in their interviewing relationships, but they do have the responsibility to be conscious of them. Some would argue, though, that research in the social sciences that does not confront these problems contributes to them. (See Fay, 1987, for a review of critical research.) My own sense of the matter is that although it is difficult to do equitable research in an inequitable society, equity must be the goal of every in-depth interviewing researcher. Striving for equity is not only an ethical imperative; it is also a methodological one. An equitable process is the foundation for the trust necessary for participants to be willing to share their experience with an interviewer. Every step of the interview process can be designed and carried out with the idea of equity in mind. But try as one may to be equitable in interviewing research, equity in interviewing is affected by factors such as racism, classism, and sexism originating outside the individual interviewing relationship or taking place within it. What I have come to grasp over the years I have been doing interviewing research is that the equity of an interviewing relationship, and thereby the quality of the interview, is affected and sometimes seriously limited by social inequities. At the same time, individuals committed to equity in research can find a way to become conscious of the issues and their own role in them. They can then devise methods that attempt to subvert those societal constraints. In the process they may end up being able to tell their participants’ stories in a way that can promote equity. (See Yow, 2015, pp. 185–211, for her thoughtfulness on interview relationships within the social contexts in which we live.)

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INTERVIEWING ONLINE OR BY TELEPHONE, AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARTICIPANT AND INTERVIEWER There are occasions when—for reasons of time, distance, money, or unwillingness or inability of the participant to meet face-to-face—interviewers and participants agree to interviews using telephone, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, or video-conferencing applications such as Skype and GoToMeeting. Technical and methodological issues arise that must be considered when interviewers think of conducting long-distance interviews. (See Chen & Hinton, 1999; Seitz, 2016.) John Matthews and Elizabeth P. Cramer (2008) have thoughtfully explored the advantages and disadvantages of interviewing marginalized and stigmatized populations who, if they agree to any interview, prefer to stay “hidden.” A few years ago, a doctoral candidate who lived in Montana contacted me. The medical personnel she wanted to interview lived spread across the state, hundreds of miles from her and each other. To secure even a small number of participants for face-to-face interviews would have meant hours of driving back and forth across Montana. Her proposal had been approved in the fall, winter was approaching, and she was eager to begin her interviews by telephone. I suggested that she try pilot interviews by telephone with two different participants. If they worked for her and her participants, I encouraged her to continue her research by telephone interviews. I think that a phenomenological approach to interviewing by telephone or online can work. I am less enthusiastic about interviewing by email, in which the spontaneity of oral responses is lost, as is the ability of interviewers to reshape their questions easily. (See Bowden & GalindoGonzales, 2015, for a more positive view of interviewing via email.) I would not elect to do long-distance interviews instead of face-to-face interviews if it were not necessary. But if necessity demands, or opportunities occur to interview otherwise inaccessible participants, I would encourage researchers to do so. There is a challenge implicit in long-distance interviewing when it is the interviewers, not the participants, who are choosing the remote interview for their purposes. Interviewers want something from their participants, but are often concerned with what they offer participants in return (see the section on Reciprocity in this chapter). By not seeking their participants out in person, researchers are emphasizing the utilitarian aspect of their relationship. At that level, they are giving less back to their participants than they are receiving from them. Thoughtful interviewers, however, who decide that it is necessary to interview via the telephone (Drabble, Trocki, Salcedo, Walker, & Korcha,

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2016) or video conferencing can work to redress that imbalance. Normally, we think of a telephone exchange as casual and relatively spontaneous. But in making contact via telephone or online, seeking informed consent, setting up times for interviews, and carrying out the interviews, researchers must consciously and purposefully work to convey their consideration, their interest, and their respect, all without being patronizing. (See Adams-Hutcheson & Longhurst, 2016, for a thoughtful exploration of the affective atmosphere of interviewing by Skype.) Interviewers’ greatest resources in their interviews are their own sensibilities, and their abilities to use those sensibilities not only to draw out their participants, but also to value them. When working by telephone or video conferencing, interviewers must communicate the importance of conducting the interview versus not being able to interview at all. They must convey their genuine interest in and wish to connect with the participant despite the physical distance between them. For further reading on interviewing through technology, see Merriam and Tisdell (2016), who have a short but very thoughtful discussion of interviewing by Skype and email. Laurie Drabble and her colleagues (2016) have thoroughly examined the issues involved in telephone interviewing. Nigel King and Christine Horrocks (2010) have an excellent overview of approaches to remote interviewing and the methodological and ethical issues involved. Lo-Iacono et al. (2016), Deakin and Wakefield (2014), and Weller (2015) discuss the advantages and difficulties of interviewing by Skype. Tsangaridou (2013) discusses using Skype for her dissertation. Salmons (2015) devotes an entire book to a thoughtful explication of the issues and possibilities of online interviewing. Although the context for Winzenburg’s (2011) discussion of interviewing via Skype is academic job interviewing, the article contains very useful suggestions. The shift to instant communication seems to run counter to the communicative carefulness necessary for interviewing via telephone or video conferencing. My former student and colleague, Jennifer Cook, then Associate Professor of English and Education at Rhode Island College, taught writing by having her students conduct interviewing research in the Providence community. Through their writing, they shared the process and results of their research. She wrote me to share her impression of how her students had been affected by their dependence on mobile phones: They seemed to have developed an inclination to avoid face-to-face contact. She wrote, “I can see that when I watch . . . students stream onto campus after classes let out, and nearly every single one of them is looking down at a phone and typing something as they walk. It is very unusual to hear or see people shouting ‘Hi’ across the quad or traveling in a gaggle and talking” (J. Cook, personal communication, April 2012).

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Cook went on to cite a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project (Smith, 2011), which indicated that young adults between 18 and 25 send an average of 109.5 text messages a day, which works out to 3,200 texts per month. (A 2018 Pew report indicates that device ownership has plateaued, but only because in some parts of the population it has reached a saturation point. See Hitlin, 2018.) “I can see with my own eyes,” Cook wrote, “my students’ near addiction to their electronic devices. . . . Interviewing requires such a different way of being, a slowing down, a comfort with one’s self, a sense of purpose, a sense of direction, an ability to make eye contact and another person comfortable in your presence, a calm voice, and inviting nature.” The characteristics Cook describes as essential to interviewing people face-to-face can be approached by telephone and perhaps enhanced by Skype. But a relationship based on a phone or a computer screen will take constant, thoughtful alertness on the part of the interviewer to transfer a voice on the telephone or an image on a screen to a sense of presence that honors the process of interviewing as Cook describes it. (Sadly, Professor Cook died on March 14, 2014, as a result of an accident.)

Chapter 8

Analyzing, Interpreting, and Sharing Interview Material

Research based on in-depth interviewing is labor-intensive. There is no substitute for studying the interviews and winnowing the almost 1 million words a study involving 25 participants might yield. (Each series of three interviews can result in 150 double-spaced pages of transcript.) In planning such a study, allow at least as much time for working with the material as for all the steps involved in conceptualizing the study, writing the proposal, establishing access, making contact, selecting participants, and doing the actual interviews.

MANAGING THE DATA To work with the material that interviewing generates, researchers first have to make it accessible by organizing it. Keeping track of participants through the participant information forms, making sure the written consent documents are copied and filed in a safe place, labeling audio recordings of interviews accurately, managing the extensive files that develop in the course of working with the transcripts of interviews, and keeping track of decision points in the entire process all require attention to detail, a concern for security, and a system for keeping material accessible. One goal of this administrative work is to be able to trace interview data to the original source on the audio recording at all stages of the research. Another is to be able to contact a participant easily. The simple act of misfiling a written consent document from a participant upon whose material a researcher wants to rely heavily can create hours of extra work and unnecessary anxiety. The best description I have seen of file management for a qualitative research study is in Lofland (1971). However, in recent years, some researchers have turned to Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (CAQDAS) software to organize all aspects of their research project in one place. (See the section on CAQDAS later in this chapter.) There is no one 121

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right way to organize the research process and the materials it generates. Every moment the researcher spends paying attention to order, labels, filing, and documentation at the beginning and in the formative stages of the study can save hours of frustration later.

KEEPING INTERVIEWING AND ANALYSIS SEPARATE: WHAT TO DO BETWEEN INTERVIEWS It is difficult to separate the processes of gathering and analyzing data. Even before the actual interviews begin, researchers may anticipate results on the basis of their reading and preparation for the study. Once the interviews commence, the researcher cannot help but work with the material as it comes in. During the interview the researcher processes what the participant is saying in order to keep the interview moving forward. Afterward, the researcher reviews each interview in anticipation of the next one. If the interviewer is working as part of a research team, the team may get together to discuss what they are learning from the process of the interviews. Some researchers urge that the two stages be integrated so that each informs the other (see, e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Maxwell, 2013, pp. 104– 105; Miles & Huberman, 1984). They would have interviewers conduct a number of interviews, study and analyze them, frame new questions as a result of what they have found, and then conduct further interviews. Although pure separation of generating data from analyzing data is impossible, my own approach is to avoid any in-depth analysis of the interview data until I have completed all the interviews. Even though I sometimes identify possibly salient topics in early interviews, I want to do my best to avoid imposing meaning from one participant’s interviews on the next. Therefore, I first complete all the interviews. Then I study all the transcripts. In that way I try to minimize imposing on the generative process of the interviews what I think I have learned from other participants. However, I do not mean to suggest that between interviews, interviewers avoid considering what they have just heard in order not to contaminate the next interview. In fact, I live with the interviews, constantly running them over in my mind and thinking about the next. Others may want to be even more explicit. For example, one doctoral candidate with whom I worked explained: After listening to and transcribing the interview, I made a list of the follow-up questions I hoped would be included in the next interview. . . . Having gone over the tape prior to the session, it was

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fresh in my mind and I was able to reassess the type of information I was getting and write questions to guide me in the next session. (L. Mestre, personal communication, May 7, 1996)

RECORDING INTERVIEWS I have no doubt that in-depth interviews should be recorded; however, the literature reflects varying opinions on this point (Bogdan & Taylor, 1975; Briggs, 1986; Hyman et al., 1954; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Patton, 2015, pp. 471–472; Weiss, 1994). I believe that to work most reliably with the words of participants, the researcher has to transform those spoken words into a written text to study. The primary method of creating text from interviews is to record the interviews and to transcribe them. Each word participants speak reflects their consciousness (Vygotsky, 1987). The participants’ thoughts become embodied in their words. To substitute the researcher’s paraphrasing or summaries of what the participants say for their actual words is to substitute the researcher’s consciousness for that of the participant. Although inevitably the researcher’s consciousness will play a major role in the interpretation of interview data, that consciousness must interact with the words of the participant recorded as fully and as accurately as possible. Recording offers other benefits as well. By preserving the words of the participants, researchers have their original data. If something is not clear in a transcript, the researchers can return to the source and check for accuracy. Later, if they are accused of mishandling their interview material, they can go back to their original sources to demonstrate their accountability to the data. In addition, interviewers can use recordings to study their interviewing techniques and improve upon them. Recording also benefits the participants. The assurance that there is a record of what they have said to which they have access can give them more confidence that their words will be treated responsibly. In the past, some interviewers, fearing that the presence of a recorder would affect the responses of their participants, used the smallest, least intrusive ones they could find, often sacrificing audio quality. For me, the muffled sound would make transcribing agony, so I used a separate microphone. Today, high-quality digital recorders are smaller than most TV remote controls and produce excellent sound. Still, it is prudent to test the recorder before starting the actual interview. It would be frustrating, after 90 minutes of interviewing, to discover that the conversation is difficult to decipher. (See Yow, 2015, pp. 93–95, for an excellent presentation of many technical details interviewers must consider.)

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TRANSCRIBING INTERVIEWS Transcribing interviews can be time-consuming and potentially costly work. But later, when researchers are sorting and organizing their material, having the interviews in text-based files will prove highly efficient and labor-saving. It once took 4 to 6 hours to transcribe a 90-minute tape. However, today’s all-in-one transcription kits, with their built-in software, hold out the promise of a less arduous process. Still, the work is very demanding. (See the CAQDAS section below for other approaches to initial transcription and filing.) Doctoral students have asked me if there is a substitute for transcribing the entire interview. My response is yes, but not a good one. It is possible to listen to the recordings a number of times, pick out sections that seem important, and then transcribe just those. Although that approach is labor-saving, it is not desirable because it imposes the researcher’s frame of reference on the interview data one step too early in the winnowing process. In working with the material, it is important that the researcher start with the whole (Briggs, 1986). Preselecting parts of the recordings to transcribe and omitting others tends to lead to premature judgments about what is important and what is not. Once the decision is made not to transcribe a portion of the recording, that part of the interview may be lost to the researcher. This alternative approach saves labor, but the cost may be high. Researchers who transcribe their own recordings come to know their interview material better, but they can tire and lose enthusiasm for interviewing as a research process. One alternative is to hire a transcriber. That, however, is expensive, and the job must be done well to be worth the effort. If interviewers can hire transcribers, or even if they do the transcriptions themselves, it is essential to develop explicit written instructions concerning the transcribing (Kvale, 1996). Writing out the instructions will improve the consistency of the process, encourage the researchers to think through all that is involved, and allow them to share their decisionmaking with their readers at a later point. Although a transcript can be only a partial representation of the interview (Mishler, 1986), it can reflect the interview as fully as possible by being verbatim. In addition, the transcriber should make note of all nonverbal signals, such as coughs, laughs, sighs, pauses, outside noises, telephone rings, and interruptions. Both the interviewer and the transcriber must realize that decisions about where to punctuate the transcripts are significant. Participants do not speak in paragraphs or always clearly indicate the end of a sentence by voice inflection. Punctuating is one of the beginning points of the process of analyzing and interpreting the material (Kvale, 1996) and must be

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done thoughtfully. (For further discussion of transcription, see Mishler, 1991; Yow, 2015, pp. 355–364, is excellent on transcribing; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, pp. 131–136, report on training a computer to the voice of the interviewer in order to transcribe audio recordings. Also see Stuckey, 2014, who sees transcription as the first step in data analysis.) A detailed and careful transcript that re-creates the verbal and nonverbal material of the interview can be of great benefit to a researcher who may be studying the transcript months after the interview occurred. Note the care and precision with which the following section of an interview recording was transcribed. The interviewer is studying what it is like to be a communications major in a large university. Here she is asking the participant about financing her college education: Interviewer: Uhm, what does that experience mean to you? Participant: The fact that I spent so much money or that my parents like kind of rejected me? Interviewer: Both. Participant: Uhm, the fact that I spent so much money blows my mind because now I’m so poor and I’m. I can’t believe I had so much, I mean I look back [slight pause] to the summer and the fall and [slight pause] I know where my money went. I mean, I was always down the Cape and I’d just spend at least $50 or $60 a night, you know, 3 or 4 nights a week. And then when I did an internship in town I was always driving in town, parking, saying “who cares” and I waitressed three shifts a week so I always had money in my pocket. So it was just, I always had money so, I never really cared and I never prepared for the future or never even considered that my parents wouldn’t be there to foot the bill like they’d always been. And I wasn’t really aware that they [pause] that they [slight pause and voice lowers] were becoming insulted. (Reproduced from Burke, 1990)

STUDYING, REDUCING, AND ANALYZING THE TEXT In-depth interviewing generates an enormous amount of text. The vast array of words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages have to be reduced to what is of most significance and interest (McCracken, 1988; Miles & Huberman, 1984; Wolcott, 1990). Most important is to reduce the data inductively rather than deductively. That is, researchers should not address the material with a set of hypotheses to test or with a theory developed in another context to which they wish to match the data (Glaser & Strauss,

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1967). The researcher must come to the transcripts with an open attitude, seeking what emerges as important and of interest from the text. At the same time, no interviewer can enter into the study of an interview as a clean slate (Rowan, 1981). All responses to a text are interactions between the reader and the text (Fish, 1980; Rosenblatt, 1982). That is why it is important that researchers identify their interest in the subject and examine it to make sure that the interest is not infused with anger, bias, or prejudice. The interviewer must come to the transcript prepared to let the interview breathe and speak for itself. Marking What Is of Interest in the Text The first step in reducing the text is to read it and highlight the passages that are interesting. The best description I have read of this aspect of the winnowing process is Judi Marshall’s “Making Sense as a Personal Process” (1981). She acknowledges that what she can bring to the data is her sense of what is important as she reads the transcripts. She expresses confidence in being able to respond to meaningful “chunks” of transcript. She says that she recognizes them when she sees them and does not have to agonize over what level of semantic analysis she is doing. She affirms the role of her judgment in the process. In short, what is required in responding to interview text is no different from what is required in responding to other texts—a close reading plus judgment (Mostyn, 1985). Marshall also talks about the dark side of this process: that time when, while working with interview data, you lose confidence in your ability to sort out what is important, you wonder if you are making it all up, and you feel considerable doubt about what you are doing. You become worried that you are falling into the trap of self-delusion, which Miles and Huberman (1984) caution is the bane of those who analyze qualitative data. Marshall (1981) calls it an anxiety that you learn to live with. It is important that researchers acknowledge that in this stage of the process they are exercising judgment about what is significant in the transcript. In reducing the material, interviewers have begun to analyze, interpret, and make meaning of it. The interviewers can later check with the participants to see if what they have marked as being of interest and import seems that way to the participants. Although member-checking can inform a researcher’s judgment, it cannot substitute for it (Lightfoot, 1983). That judgment depends on the researcher’s experience, both in the past in general and in working with and internalizing the interviewing material; it may be the most important ingredient the researcher brings to the study (Marshall, 1981).

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Although I can suggest some of the characteristics that make interviewing texts meaningful to me, there is no model matrix of interesting categories that one can impose on all texts. What is of essential interest is embedded in each research topic and will arise from each transcript. Interviewers must affirm their own ability to recognize it. There are certain aspects of individual experience and social structure to which I respond when they appear. I am alert to conflict, both between people and within a person. I respond to hopes expressed and whether they are fulfilled or not. I am alert to language that indicates beginnings, middles, and ends of processes. I am sensitive to frustrations and resolutions, to indications of isolation and the more rare expressions of collegiality and community. Given the world in which we live, I am sensitive to the way issues of class, ethnicity, race, and gender play out in individual lives, and the way hierarchy and power affect people (Kanter, 1977). I do not, however, come to a transcript looking for these. When they are there, these and other passages of interest speak to me, and I bracket them. Even when working with a research team, I give little instruction about marking what is of interest in a transcript other than to say, “Mark what is of interest to you as you read. Do not ponder about the passage. If it catches your attention, mark it. Trust yourself as a reader. If you are going to err, err on the side of inclusion.” As you repeat the winnowing process, you can always exclude material; but materials once excluded from a text tend to become like unembodied thoughts that flee back to the stygian shadows of the computer file, and tend to remain there (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 210). Despite my open instruction about marking transcripts, I have often found considerable overlap among my colleagues in what we have marked.

SHARING INTERVIEW DATA: PROFILES AND THEMES One goal of the researcher in marking what is of interest in the interview transcripts is to reduce and then shape the material into a form in which it can be shared or displayed (Miles & Huberman, 1984). Reducing the data is a first step in allowing the researchers to present their interview material and then to analyze and interpret it (Wolcott, 1994). It is one of the most difficult steps in the process because, inevitably, it means letting interview material go. I have used two basic ways to share interview data. First, I have developed profiles of individual participants and grouped the profiles in categories that made sense. Second, I have marked individual passages,

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grouped these in categories, and then studied the categories for thematic connections within and among them. Rationale for Crafting Profiles Although there is no right way to share interview data, and some researchers argue for less reliance on words and more on graphs, charts, and matrices (Miles & Huberman, 1984), I have found that crafting a profile or a vignette of a participant’s experience is an effective way of sharing interview data and opening up one’s interview material to analysis and interpretation. The idea comes from Studs Terkel’s Working (1974). Not all interviews will sustain display in the form of a profile. My experience is that only about one out of three interviews is complete and compelling enough to be shaped into a profile that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, as well as some sense of conflict and resolution. Other interviews may sustain what I call a vignette, which is a shorter narrative that usually covers a more limited aspect of a participant’s experience. A profile in the words of the participant is the research product that I think is most consistent with the process of interviewing. It allows us to present participants in context, to clarify their intentions, and to convey a sense of process and time, all central components of qualitative analysis. (See Dey, 1993, pp. 30–39, for an excellent discussion of the question, “What is qualitative analysis?”) We interview in order to come to know the experience of the participants through their stories. We learn from hearing and studying what the participants say. Although the interviewer can never be absent from the process, by crafting a profile in the participant’s own words, the interviewer allows those words to reflect the person’s consciousness. Profiles are one way to solve the problem of how to share what interviewers have learned from the interviews. The narrative form of a profile allows the interviewer to transform this learning into telling a story (Mishler, 1986). Telling stories is one major way that human beings have devised to make sense of themselves and their social world. I would add that telling stories is a compelling way to make sense of interview data. The story is both the participant’s and the interviewer’s. It is in the participant’s words, but it is crafted by the interviewer from what the participant has said. Mishler provides an extended discussion of interviewing and its relationship to narratives as a way of knowing, and I strongly recommend it both for his own insights and the further reading that he suggests. (Also see Bruner, 1996, Chs. 6 and 7, for an important discussion of the role of narrative in constructing reality in the field of education.) What others can learn from reading a profile of a participant is as diverse as the participants we interview, the profiles we craft and organize,

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and the readers who read them. I have found crafting profiles, however, to be a way to find and display coherence in the constitutive events of a participant’s experience, to share the coherence the participant has expressed, and to link the experience to the social and organizational context within which the individual operates. If researchers think that their interview material can sustain a profile that would bring a participant alive, offer insights into the complexities of what the researcher is studying, and is compelling and believable, taking the steps to craft a profile can be a rewarding way to share interview data (see Locke et al., 2004, pp. 219–220). Crafting a profile can bring an aesthetic component into reporting our research that makes both the researchers’ and readers’ work enriching, pleasurable, and at times touching to the spirit (Garman, 1994). Steps in Crafting a Profile Crafting profiles is a sequential process. Once you have read the transcript, marked passages of interest, and labeled those passages, make two copies of the marked and labeled transcript. (The labeling process is explained later in this chapter.) Using a word-processing application, a dedicated qualitative-analysis program, or even a pair of scissors, organize the highlighted passages from one copy of the transcripts into folders or digital files that correspond to the labels you devised for each passage. These excerpts will be used in the second, thematic way of sharing material. It is important never to cut up or edit the original transcript because it serves throughout the study as a reference to which the researcher may turn for placing in context passages that have been excerpted. From the other copy of the transcripts, select all the passages that you marked as important and put them together as a single transcript. Your resulting version may be one-third to one-half the length of the original threeinterview transcript. The next step is to read the new version, this time with a more demanding eye. It is very difficult to give up interview material. As you read, ask yourself which passages are the most compelling, those that you are just not willing to put aside, and highlight them. Now you are ready to craft a narrative based on them. One key to the power of the profile is that it is presented in the words of the participant. I cannot stress too much how important it is to use the first person, the voice of the participant, rather than a third-person transformation of that voice. To illustrate the point for yourself, take perhaps 30 seconds from one of your pilot interviews. First present the section verbatim. Then craft it into a mini-narrative using the first-person voice of the

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participant. Next try using your voice and describing the participant in the third person. Using the third-person voice distances the reader from the participant and allows researchers to intrude more easily than when they are limited to selecting compelling material and weaving it together into a first-person narrative. Brinkmann and Kvale (2014, p. 246) point out the temptation for researchers to expropriate and to use inappropriately their participants’ experience for their own purposes. Using the first-person voice can help researchers guard against falling into this trap. In creating profiles it is important to be faithful to the words of the participants and to identify in the narrative when the words are those of someone else. Sometimes, to make transitions between passages, you may wish to add your own words. Elsewhere you may want to clarify a passage. Each researcher can work out a system of notation to let the reader know when language not in the interview itself has been inserted. I place such language in brackets. I use ellipses when omitting material from a paragraph or when skipping paragraphs or even pages in the transcripts. In addition, I delete from the profile certain characteristics of oral speech that a participant would not use in writing—for example, repetitious uhms, ahs, you knows, and other idiosyncrasies that do not do participants justice in a written version of what they have said. Some might argue that researchers should make no changes in the oral speech of their participants when presenting it to an audience as a written document. I think, however, that unless the researcher is planning a semantic analysis or the subject of the interview itself is the language development of the participant, the claims for the realism of the oral speech are balanced by the researcher’s obligation to maintain the dignity of participants in presenting their oral speech in writing. (For further discussion of this issue see Blauner, 1987; Devault, 1990, pp. 106–107; Weiss, 1994, pp. 192–197.) Normally, I try to present material in a profile in the order in which it came in the interviews. Material that means something in one context should not be transposed to another context that changes its meaning. However, if material in interview three, for example, fits with a part of the narrative based on interview two, I may decide to transpose that material, if doing so does not wrench it out of context and distort its meaning. In making all these decisions, I ask myself whether each is fair to the larger interview. An important consideration in crafting a profile is to protect the identity of the participant if the written consent document calls for doing so. Even when transcribing the interview, use initials for all names that might identify the participant in case a casual reader comes across the transcript. In creating the profile itself, select a pseudonym that does justice to the

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participant. This is not an easy or a mechanical process. When choosing a pseudonym, take into consideration issues of ethnicity, age, and the context of the participant’s life. Err on the side of understatement rather than overstatement. If a participants would be made vulnerable were their identity widely known, take additional steps to conceal it. For example, change the participant’s’ geographical location, the details of their work— a physics teacher can become a science teacher—and other identifying facets of their experience. The extent to which an interviewer needs to resort to disguise is in direct relation to how vulnerable the person might be if identified. But the disguise must not distort what the participant has said in the interview. (See Lee, 1993, pp. 185–187; Saunders, Kitzinger, & Kitzinger, 2015; and Tilley & Woodthorpe, 2011, who critically examine the notion of anonymity.) Researchers must also be alert to whether they have made the participant vulnerable by the narrative itself. For example, Woods (1990) had to exercise extreme caution because if her participants were identified, they might be fired from their teaching positions. Finally, the participant’s dignity must always be a consideration. Participants volunteer to be interviewed but not to be maligned or incriminated by their own words. A function of the interviewing process and its products should be to reveal the participant’s sense of self and worth. Profiles as a Way of Knowing I include in the Appendix two examples of profiles. The first is an edited version of a profile developed by Toon Fuderich (1995), who did her doctoral research on the child survivors of the Pol Pot era in Cambodia. She interviewed 17 refugees who had come to the United States to start a new life. The profile presented is of a participant called Nanda who was 28 at the time of her interview and worked part-time in a human services agency. In a note to her paper, Fuderich indicated that in order to present the material clearly, she eliminated hesitations and repetitions in Nanda’s speech. She also removed some of the idiosyncrasies of Nanda’s speech and made grammatical corrections while at the same time remaining “respectful of the content and the intended meaning of the participant’s words” (Fuderich, 1995). I hesitated to include the profile of Nanda because I was afraid readers would think in-depth interviewing is only successful when it results in the kind of dramatic and heart-rending material Fuderich shared in Nanda’s profile. I was concerned that potential researchers, especially graduate candidates, would hesitate to try the process if their research areas seemed mundane by comparison.

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As Nanda’s profile reveals, in-depth interviewing is capable of capturing momentous, historical experiences. I wanted to both reveal that capability and share Fuderich’s work, which seemed to me so compelling. However, in-depth interviewing research is perhaps even more capable of reconstructing and finding the compelling in the experiences of everyday life. As a second example, therefore, I include in the Appendix an edited version of a profile developed by Marguerite Sheehan (1989). (For other examples of such profiles, see Seidman, 1985.) This profile resulted from a pilot study Sheehan conducted of the experience of day-care providers who have stayed in the field for a long time. (See Chapter 3 for a description of her interview structure.) The profile presented is of a participant, Betty, who is a family day care provider. She takes care of six children in her home every day. Most of the children are in “protective slots,” that is, their day care is paid for by the state. Their parents are often required to leave them in care because the children either have been or are at risk of being abused or neglected. Sheehan presented a version of this profile to our seminar on In-Depth Interviewing and Issues in Qualitative Research. In her final comments, she wrote: Betty had many other things to say that I was not able to fit into this report. She talked quite a bit about how her daughter and husband were involved in the Family Day Care whether through their physical presence or their interest in the children. She told me more stories about individual children and families that she worked with. I was impressed with how she identified at different times with both the children and the parents and how she had to let go while still remaining involved with them. Betty was often nervous and worried that she was not saying the “right thing.” She told me that this was the first time that anyone had asked her about the meaning in her work. (Sheehan, 1989)

Betty’s profile tells an important story in her own words. It may not have the life-and-death drama of Nanda’s profile, but it captures compellingly, I think, the struggle of a day care provider from which anyone interested in day care can learn. As both Fuderich and Sheehan pursued their research, they interviewed additional participants. If they had chosen to do so, they could have presented a series of profiles grouped together around organizing topics. In addition to the profiles’ speaking powerfully for themselves, the researchers would have been able to explore and comment on the salient issues within individual profiles and point out connections among

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profiles. For example, in the profile of Betty, the issues of how people come to the work of day care, the preparation they have, the support they are given, the effect of the low status and genderized nature of the work, the relatively unexplored subject of working with the parents, and the issue of child abuse, to name several, are raised. In Nanda’s profile, issues inherent in the traumas of history, being a refugee, learning English as a second language, and the tensions and complexities of acculturation are raised, among others. Each researcher would be able to make explicit what she has learned about those subjects through the presentation of the profiles and also through connecting those profiles to the experience of others in her sample. By telling Betty’s story of her everyday work in her own words, Sheehan is setting the stage for her readers to learn about the issues involved in providing day care through the experiences of a person deeply involved in that work. By telling Nanda’s story, Fuderich is inviting readers to both bear witness and begin to understand the factors influencing resilience among those who, as children, survived the Cambodian genocide, which is the subject of her dissertation study.

MAKING AND ANALYZING THEMATIC CONNECTIONS A more conventional way of presenting and analyzing interview data than crafting profiles is to organize excerpts from the transcripts into categories. The researcher then searches for connecting threads and patterns among the excerpts within those categories and for connections between the various categories that might be called themes. In addition to presenting profiles of individuals, researchers, as part of their analysis of the material, can then present and comment upon excerpts from the interviews thematically organized. During the process of reading and marking the transcripts, the researchers can begin to label the passages that they have marked as interesting. After having read and indicated interesting passages in two or three participants’ interviews, the researcher can pause to consider whether they can be labeled. What is the subject of the marked passages? Are there words or a phrase that seems to describe them, at least tentatively? Is there a word within the passage itself that suggests a category into which the passage might fit? In Sheehan’s transcript, some of the labels for the passages included in the Appendix might be “background of provider,” “support groups,” “impact on family,” “abuse,” and “parents.” This process of labeling is called coding. Don’t let the word coding intimidate you. It

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is really just a shorthand method for naming what a section of text might be about. (See Dey, 1993, p. 58; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014, for a critique of the term coding as applied to qualitative research.) Many researchers now use analytical software to classify and sort interview data. (See a discussion of CAQDAS later in this chapter.) However, I suggest caution in performing the initial coding or editing on a screen. I recommend working first on paper and then transferring the work to the computer. In my experience, there is a significant difference between what one sees in a text on paper and the same text shown on-screen, and one’s response is different, too. I have learned that when I edit on-screen, I invariably miss issues that are easily evident when I work with a hard copy. Something in the mediums of screen and paper affects the message the viewer retrieves. (See McLuhan, 1964, for an early and influential commentary on this process.) I know I may sound old-fashioned, but I think it is good counsel. At this point in the reading, marking, and labeling process it is important to keep labels tentative. Locking in categories too early can lead to dead ends. Some of the categories will work out. That is, as the researcher continues to read and mark interview transcripts, other passages will come up that seem connected to the same category. On the other hand, some categories that seemed promising early in the process will die out. New ones may appear. Categories that seemed separate and distinct will fold into each other. Others may remain in flux almost until the end of the study.1 (See Charmaz, 2014, for an excellent description of the process of coding; also see Davis, 1984.) The next step is to organize the passages that have been marked and tentatively labeled. Years ago, we did this with scissors and manila folders. Now, of course, you can accomplish this electronically. But before you cut and paste, you should label each coded passage with a notation system that will designate its original place in the transcript. (CAQDAS software can perform this function.). Later, when working with the material and considering an excerpt taken from the original transcript, you may need to check the accuracy of the text and review it in its full context, even going back to the audio recording itself. No matter how you approach organizing the coded excerpts, the next step is to reread all of them file by file. Start sifting out the ones that now seem very compelling, setting aside those that seem at this stage to be of less interest. At this point, the researcher is in what Rowan (1981) calls a “dialectical” process with the material. The participants have spoken, and now the interviewer is responding to their words, concentrating his or her intuition and intellect on the process. What emerges is a synthesis of what the participant has said and how the researcher has responded.

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Some commentators regard this sorting and culling as an entirely intuitive process (Tagg, 1985). It is important, however, that researchers also try to form and articulate their criteria for the winnowing process. By doing so, they give their readers a basis for understanding the process they used to reduce the mass of words to more manageable proportions. I do not begin to read the transcripts with a set of categories for which I want to find excerpts. The categories arise out of the passages that I have marked as interesting. On the other hand, when I reflect on the types of material that arouse my interest, it is clear that some patterns are present, that I have certain predispositions I bring to my reading of the transcripts. When working with excerpts from interview material, I find myself selecting passages that connect to other passages in the file. In a way, quantity starts to interact with quality. The repetition of an aspect of experience that was already mentioned in other passages takes on weight and calls attention to itself. I notice excerpts from a participant’s experience that connect to each other as well as to passages from other participants. Sometimes excerpts connect to the literature on the subject. They stand out because I have read about the issue from a perspective independent of my interviewing. Some passages are told in a striking manner or highlight a dramatic incident. Those are perhaps the most troublesome for me. They are attractive because of their style or the sheer drama of the incident, but I know that I have to be careful about such passages. The researcher has to judge whether the particular dramatic incident is idiosyncratic or characteristic (Mostyn, 1985). Some passages stand out because they are contradictory and seem decisively inconsistent with others. It is tempting to put those aside. These in particular, however, have to be kept in the foreground, lest researchers exercise their own biased subjectivity, noticing and using only materials that support their own opinions (Kvale, 1996, p. 212; Locke et al., 2004, pp. 222–223). Researchers have to try to understand their importance in the face of the other data they have gathered (Miles & Huberman, 1984). The process of working with excerpts from participants’ interviews, seeking connections among them, explaining those connections, and building interpretative categories is demanding and involves risks. The danger is that researchers will try to force the excerpts into categories and the categories into themes that they already have in mind, rather than let them develop from the experience of the participants as represented in the interviews. The reason an interviewer spends so much time talking to participants is to find out what their experience is and the meaning they make of it, and then to make connections among the experiences of people who share the same structure. Rowan (1981) stresses the inappropriateness of

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force-fitting the words of participants into theories derived from other sources. There is no substitute for total immersion in the data. It is important to try to articulate criteria for marking certain passages as notable and selecting some over others in order for the process to have public credibility. It is also important to affirm your judgment as a researcher. You have done the interviewing, studied the transcripts, and read the related literature; you have mentally lived with and wrestled with the data, and now you need to analyze them. As Judi Marshall (1981) says, your feeling of rightness and coherence about the process of working with the data is important. It is your contribution as the researcher.

INTERPRETING THE MATERIAL Interpreting is not a process researchers do only near the end of the project. Even as interviewers question their participants, tentative interpretations may begin to influence the path of their questioning. Marking passages that are of interest, labeling them, and grouping them is analytic work that has within it the seeds of interpretation. Crafting a profile is an act of analysis, as is presenting and commenting upon excerpts arranged in categories. Both processes lay the ground for interpretation. (I am using Wolcott’s [1994] distinction between the words analysis and interpretation. I think Wolcott offers a solid approach to working with interview data in his thoughtful explication of the terms description, analysis, and interpretation. In this book, I have used the phrase sharing the data instead of Wolcott’s description.) In some ways, it is tempting to let the profiles and the categorized, thematic excerpts speak for themselves. But another step is appropriate. Researchers must ask themselves what they have learned from doing the interviews, studying the transcripts, marking and labeling them, crafting profiles, and organizing categories of excerpts. What connective threads are there among the experiences of the participants they interviewed? How do they understand and explain these connections? What do they understand now that they did not understand before they began the interviews? What surprises have there been? What confirmations of previous instincts? How have their interviews been consistent with the literature? How inconsistent? How have they gone beyond? Charmaz (2014, pp. 162–191), Glaser and Strauss (1967), and Maxwell (2013, pp. 19–21) address these questions with a practical suggestion: When you have identified passages that are important but the category in which they fall seems undefined or its significance is unclear, write a

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memorandum about those passages. Through your writing about them, about how they were picked, about what they mean to you, the properties and import of the category may become clear. If you write such memoranda about each of the categories you have developed and about the profiles you have crafted, the process of writing about them will lead you to discover what it is you find important in them both individually and relative to others that you have developed. Much of what you learn may be tentative, suggesting further research. In the early stages of our study of student teachers and mentors (Fischetti, Santilli, & Seidman, 1988; O’Donnell et al., 1989), we began to see evidence in the language of the student teachers we interviewed that tracking in schools was affecting how they were learning to become teachers. That led O’Donnell (1990) to conceptualize a dissertation study on the impact of tracking on learning to become a teacher. The last stage of interpretation, then, consistent with the interview process itself, asks researchers what meaning they have made of their work. In the course of interviewing, researchers asked the participants what their experience meant to them. Now they have the opportunity to respond to the same question. In doing so, they might review how they came to their research, what their research experience was like, and, finally, what it means to them. How do they understand it, make sense of it, and see connections in it? Some of what researchers learn may lead them to propose connections among events, structures, roles, and social forces operating in people’s lives. Some researchers would call such proposals theories and urge theorybuilding as the purpose of research (Fay, 1987). My own feeling is that although the notion of grounded theory generated by Glaser and Strauss (1967) offered qualitative researchers a welcome rationale for their inductive approach to research, it also served to inflate the term theory to the point that it has lost some of its usefulness. (See Dey, 1993, pp. 51–52, for a useful critique of the casual use of the word theory.) The narratives we shape of the participants we have interviewed are necessarily limited. Their lives go on; our presentations of them are framed and reified. Betty, whose profile is in the Appendix, may be still working out her relationship to childcare. Nanda is still living out her life in the United States. Moreover, the narratives that we present are a function of our interaction with the participants and their words. Although my experience suggests that a number of people reading Betty’s or Nanda’s transcripts separately would nevertheless develop similar narratives, we still have to leave open the possibility that other interviewers and crafters of profiles would have told a different story (Fay, 1987, pp. 166–174). So, as illuminating as in-depth interviews can be, as compelling as the stories

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are that they can tell and the themes they can highlight, we still have to bear in mind that Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy pervades our work, as it does the work of physicists (Polanyi, 1958). We have to allow considerable tolerance for uncertainty (Bronowski, 1973) in the way we report what we have learned from our research.

COMPUTER ASSISTED QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS (CAQDAS) The fundamental steps in beginning to analyze research data described in the previous pages of this chapter are: • Reducing interview data to what the researcher considers important. • Labeling important excerpts into categories, either to develop a profile of a participant or to explore themes that may be embedded in the excerpts. • Sorting those labeled excerpts into files that are easily identifiable and retrievable for study. According to Audience Dialogue (2012), some researchers continue to choose to do this work by hand and manage perfectly well: “They use scissors, sticky tape, large areas of floor, index cards—plus plain old insight. That insight is gained by immersing yourself in the data, till you practically know it by heart.” Other researchers take advantage of word processing programs (e.g., Hahn, 2008). A growing number of qualitative researchers are exploring the possibilities of CAQDAS. Such software can greatly assist researchers in managing and organizing the enormous number of words generated in an interview study. One researcher estimated that approximately 25% of the research published in the field of family studies between 2006 and 2010 included the use of CAQDAS (Humble, 2012, p. 128), and the number of articles reporting the use of CAQDAS is increasing yearly (Woods, Paulus, Atkins, & Macklin, 2016). There is no one best qualitative data analysis program. They tend to have different emphases, but share common basic functions. However, they may use different vocabularies to describe similar functions. Any review here of such programs is subject to falling quickly out of date. Each academic year seems to bring announcements of new tools designed to support researchers. The best way to get specific information on current software is by searching online.

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However, there are some significant differences that researchers should consider as they explore using a CAQDAS program. I was glad to be able to have a telephone interview concerning CAQDAS with assistant professor Andrew D. Coppens (personal communication, September 21, 2018, and subsequent email correspondence). He teaches qualitative research methods at the University of New Hampshire, Durham campus. Coppens pointed out that in selecting a program, students should be aware of some important economic and functional considerations. First, many of the most popular programs are expensive. He recommends that his students use CAQDAS when their participant pool is large and the amount of interview text collected from different sources is significant. Second, Coppens pointed out that some of the proprietary programs are cloud-based while others can be downloaded and installed. The former are advantageous for remote collaboration among researchers. Some programs are subscription-based; researchers have access to the program’s tools as long as they continue to pay the monthly fee. Others are purchased outright. Some colleges and universities may purchase a site license and provide full or limited access to the resident researchers. But that is far from a universal practice. Researchers should explore the expense and the implications for their research project of buying the software, with its significant up-front cost, versus subscribing to a program. Coppens noted that an emerging area of development in CAQDAS is open-source platforms, whose advantages are free use and more frequent updates. This CAQDAS software combines the remote collaboration advantages of cloud-based platforms with the benefits of a dedicated, installed software application. Current CAQDAS programs allow researchers to • import their interview transcripts. • type in material, such as reading notes and memos, so that they may capture any reflection, query, confusion, or insight about their research material and connect those reflections to specific interview text that has already been selected and coded. • label and code material that they have identified as important. • assign more than one code to any excerpt and then file appropriately according to the multiple codes the researcher assigns. • file coded material, identifying the source of the material and making the labeled material easily retrievable. • track every decision the researcher makes while working with the program, allowing for more transparency in the research process.

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In other words, CAQDAS software shortcuts the process of marking, labeling, and cutting and pasting. A researcher can perform each of these steps using word processing, but CAQDAS software can do the same work in seconds. (Sapat, Schwartz, Esnard, & Sewordor, 2017, have an excellent overview of the functions of major CAQDAS programs, as well as an excellent discussion of advantages and cautions.) CAQDAS can also perform many other functions. Some proprietary programs currently advertise “third- and fourth-generation” features that their developers say will help users formulate theory based on their research material (Davidson & di Gregorio, 2011; Humble, 2012). Paulus and Bennett (2017) report that some programs now allow the coding of audio and visual materials. I highly recommend this article to new researchers and faculty considering CAQDAS. It is balanced, comprehensive, and well-written. Lynne Johnston (2006, p. 383) encourages doctoral researchers to use CAQDAS early in their doctoral programs—not waiting to turn to such software until they are ready to analyze their transcripts. Johnston’s suggestion is similar to Davidson and Jacobs’s (2008) recommendation that students create and maintain an e-project. When compiling an e-project, researchers organize and keep track of all material directly and indirectly related to their dissertation research as it occurs in their doctoral study. The consolidation of research work into an e-project means that researchers can carry their research with them on a flash drive. There are at least two advantages for such inclusiveness and early use of CAQDAS: First, the material that the researchers may find useful later in their study is safely stored, categorized, and easily retrievable. Second, the learning curve for these programs tends to be steep. Researchers may experience a great deal of frustration in the early stages of working with such software. Before researchers actually start coding and organizing their interview material, the sooner they become comfortable and confident using CAQDAS software, the better.

CAUTIONS REGARDING CAQDAS A Dangerous Misconception Some new researchers using CAQDAS misconceive what such software can do for them: They think, or at least hope, that CAQDAS will analyze their interview material for them. The notion that CAQDAS will somehow do the researchers’ work of analyzing and interpreting the data can lead to frustration and wasted time and money. CAQDAS can help

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organize and manage researchers’ data, but it cannot analyze or interpret it (Banner & Albarrran, 2009, p. 25; Carvajal, 2002; Humble, 2012, p. 125; Matheson, 2005, p. 122; L. C. Onyett, telephone interview, June 5, 2012). Davidson suggests that the acronym CAQDAS might be less likely to stimulate such misconceptions if it were changed to CAQDOS. The O would represent Organization and stress what she considers the real strength of the software: to assist researchers in organizing and managing their qualitative data (J. Davidson, personal communication, June 15, 2012; Sapat et al., 2017). Coding Trap Another problem associated with the use of CAQDAS is what some call a “coding trap.” One example is coding too much too quickly. Johnston, in discussing her early experience with CAQDAS, wrote: I never imagined that I would invest so much time learning the technical aspects of the software, or that I would squander a considerable amount of time doing irrelevant things with it. I failed to recognize that I had fallen into a coding trap. (2006, p. 380)

Later, as she began to train researchers in the use of CAQDAS, Johnston observed that: Researchers, particularly (but not exclusively) novice qualitative researchers found themselves coding in a somewhat mechanistic manner, often for excessively long periods of time, without using some of the in-built tools to help them see the proverbial wood from the trees. The incessant desire to code every part of a document without taking the time to think and reflect upon the data can lead to an overly descriptive prosaic project. (2006, p. 383)

The ease of coding and filing using CAQDAS software can encourage overcoding. After creating transcripts and studying them, the next step that researchers must take is to reduce the interview material to what is important. It is difficult to let participants’ words go, but the work of analyzing interview material requires a winnowing process. Labeling or coding excerpts requires researchers to bring all their knowledge and experience (Davidson, 2012), sensibilities and intuitions to the task of answering the question, “How should I label this important excerpt?” “Where does it fit in?” “How does it connect to other material?” While labeling excerpts can be done carelessly regardless of whether researchers are working by hand, with the aid of word processing, or by means of CAQDAS, my sense is that the ease of coding with

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such software may lead to quicker and less reflective labeling than the material deserves. I asked Professor Coppens if he found his students becoming frustrated with the steep learning curve involved in using CAQDAS programs. To my surprise, he said that was not the major challenge his students faced. Like Davidson, Coppens stressed that the impulse to code too early and too much in the analytic process could result in frustration for new researchers. He attributed the overcoding impulse to his students’ being initially nervous and a bit mystified by how to interpret qualitative data. Coppens viewed the “too early, too much” impulse as common among novice qualitative researchers, but noted that using CAQDAS can amplify the tendency. He said they are just getting their feet wet, and the programs seem to hold a promise of reducing their uncertainties. Coppens urges his students to be cautious in their initial approaches to coding, which for him means advising students to delay use of CAQDAS until later in the analytic process. He would like them to think about why they are coding a certain word or passage; why they think it important; what about it makes it stand out. He believes that coding must be inductive and interpretive, which, he points out, contrasts with the common misconception that by mechanically processing qualitative data—either by overcoding or coding superficial attributes of the text— the findings will “emerge.” Coppens has seen significant time invested in “mechanical” or taxonomic (i.e., “everything needs a code”) qualitative data processing, with frustrated researchers no closer to addressing their research questions than when they began. He encourages his students to begin their search for meaning by being mindful of their impulse to code every passage. Coppens stressed his concern that overcoding can lead to new researchers’ confusing the frequency of certain passages with the cogency of a passage. And he and other experienced researchers point out that while new researchers may have the program search for words that fit the coded label they have assigned, the participant may have used other language to discuss the same idea. For example, the researcher may have a code label for “religion,” but the participant may never use the word and stress “spirituality” instead. The religiosity of a participant also may emerge subtly over several pages of text, rather than be named explicitly in a single response. CAQDAS programs can be ill-equipped to handle such a pattern, due to their designed emphasis on 1:1 correspondence between text symbols and meaning. Despite the complexities inherent in CAQDAS, Coppens emphasized that the software is a wonderful organizational tool for interview

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studies with a large number of participants or a significant quantity of data. In smaller studies, researchers can utilize the computer competencies they already have and not waste time and money on learning a new vocabulary and a new technological logic. He also pointed out that students who have mastered CAQDAS programs would offer a valuable skill set to employers outside of academia, such as in business or governmental agencies. Does CAQDAS Distance Researchers from Their Interview Material and Its Context? A major concern is whether the use of CAQDAS distances researchers from their interview material and its context. It is a truism in the field of qualitative research that making sense of interview data requires immersion in the words that interviews generate. Does the complicated software and its focus on coding distract or distance researchers from what is being coded? The literature recognizes this as an important issue (Humble, 2012, p. 132; Matheson, 2005, p. 127), but some think it is more a function of the way the researcher works than the way the software encourages them to work (Carvajal, 2002). In a telephone interview, I asked Lloyd Onyett, an experienced researcher who is comfortable with CAQDAS, whether he thought that CAQDAS distanced him from his interview material. He did not share that concern. He said that in doing his research he had personally transcribed all the recordings of his interviews (Onyett, 2011). That alone made him intimate with the words his interviews generated. Furthermore, he said he spent hours rereading the excerpts he had coded and stored in his CAQDAS software. Elizabeth Aries (personal communication, June 11, 2012) spoke with me about the hours she sat with interview excerpts in front of her—reading, rereading, grappling, pondering “what does this mean?” for her book Race and Class Matters at an Elite College (2008). She also indicated that she used only the coding and retrieval features of her software, and it “in no way distanced me from my material.” However, another researcher new to the software reported that she lost a sense of the context for the interview material she had coded. In my telephone interview with Angela Kohnen (2012), she spoke of her initial delight in how easy it was to retrieve coded material in the dedicated software she was using; however, she added, “What happened to me as I stared at the excellent lists of excerpts that came up under the various codes I had entered, is that I kept losing the context in which the coded excerpts had occurred.”

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She soon found herself going back to her hard copies of the interview transcripts to establish again in her mind that contextual frame. Finally, after spending too much time going back and forth, she decided to go back to working with her coded paper copies and gave up her work with CAQDAS. She realized that there may have been features in her software that would have allowed her to place the coded material in a broader context, but she said, “I never got to the point where the benefit outweighed the time and trouble it took to learn the special features of the program.” She became more concerned with getting her sense of her participants’ experience “right” in her dissertation (Kohnen, 2012) than with trying to figure out how to use the software program more effectively. In a phenomenological approach to interviewing, researchers strive to understand their participants’ lived experiences and the subjective meaning they make of those experiences. The context of those experiences is crucial to making sense of it. One researcher’s experience is far from conclusive; if Kohnen were to do it a second time, she might code differently from the beginning. But I do not think her experience was idiosyncratic. Kohnen’s experience parallels a basic discomfort with CAQDAS that Barney Glaser also expresses (Glaser, 2003). He asserts that CAQDAS reflects a serious misunderstanding and distortion of the basic notions of grounded theory that he and Anselm Strauss had presented in The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). His criticism has not gone unchallenged (see, e.g., Johnston, 2006, p. 381), but his position in the field of qualitative research does not permit a quick and easy dismissal of his critique. Michael Frisch suggests that the powerful search-and-retrieve abilities of CAQDAS may be a double-edged sword. First, like Andrew Coppens, he notes that the search engines cannot get beyond the “stubborn fact that people in interviews do not say, “And now I will tell a story about the social construction of gender,” or “about class consciousness.” They just tell a story about their mother or a strike—and in doing so they might not actually use the word mother or strike (Frisch, 2011, p. 133). He further notes that “we [researchers] may have some broad curiosity . . . but we usually enter a landscape and need to be alive to what we may notice, discover, bump into, stumble across, pick up by mistake. . . . Exploring is more interesting than searching” (Frisch, 2011, p. 131). I think that CAQDAS software, at this point, excels in searching, but perhaps not in exploring. Institutional Support Whatever the reasons for it, and despite some of its strengths, some have “a sense of unease” with CAQDAS (Davidson & di Gregorio, 2011,

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p. 634). One practical reaction to this discomfort would be that new researchers should try to determine ahead of time how much support their institution can offer them if they decide to use a particular qualitative data-organizing software (Banner & Albarran, 2009). Does the institution offer workshops in the program you have chosen? Paulus and Bennett (2017) suggest that such support is indispensable for researchers new to CAQDAS. Does the institution have a site license that could moderate the cost of investing in such programs? Matheson (2005) recommends that researchers take into consideration the cost of the proprietary programs and the amount of time they have to learn the program before they choose to invest in the software. I have been cautious about CAQDAS as a resource for a phenomenological approach. My interview with Professor Coppens assuaged some of my concerns and alerted me to its advantages. There is also evidence that generations of graduate students who are “digital natives” (Paulus & Bennett, 2017) learn the software more easily than their predecessors, especially if they have the support of their program and the wider institution. There is a consensus on two major notions: First, CAQDAS provides an organizational tool that shortcuts the old cut-and-paste methods. Second, CAQDAS, while offering major time-saving support in organizing data, cannot interpret and analyze that data. That remains the task of the researcher. My reading pointed me to a comment that Jean Lave made to Steinar Kvale in a response to a question about research methodology. Lave said, “I think the most general view is that the only instrument that is sufficiently complex to comprehend and learn about human existence is another human. And so what you use is your own life and your own experience in the world” (Lave & Kvale, 1995, p. 220).

NOTE 1. The number of themes that emerge in an interview study has implications for the organization of a dissertation. While the format of a dissertation is within the purview of dissertation committees, I think it reasonable to suggest that interviewing studies, so rich in words, may not lend themselves to the conventional five-chapter dissertation. That format was developed with quantitative research in mind. In the five-chapter format, the first chapter introduces the problem or issue and its significance. The second reviews the related research. The third outlines the research method used in the study. The fourth reports on the results or findings, which in a quantitatively based study are often numeric in form. The fifth offers a discussion of the results.

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In an interview study, researchers may want to present themes that have evolved from their study of the transcript as the focus of their findings or results. Instead of one chapter of findings, researchers may decide to present each major theme, illustrated by the words of their participants, in its own chapter (see Cook, 2004, for an example). Alternatively, it might be possible to connect two or three lesser but related themes in a chapter and perhaps illuminate them with supporting profiles or vignettes. So an interviewing study might have two or three chapters that replace the conventional fourth chapter of results and findings. In a concluding chapter, researchers interpret and discuss their findings, and may reflect upon what they have learned and what the interviews mean to them.

Chapter 9

The Ethics of Doing Good Work

The Institutional Review Board (IRB) and informed consent processes are based on serious ethical principles meant to guide researchers’ relationships with their participants. The IRB process alerts researchers to the need to protect participants from harm and to assure their rights in the research process. The informed consent document provides a plan for action. But the IRB processes take place, in most cases, before interview researchers sit down with their participants and face the challenge of putting the principles of ethical behavior into practice. Ethical challenges can occur at each step of the research process. It is not possible to identify every situation that may raise an ethical concern when doing interviewing research. Also, it is too easy to adopt a moral high road and yet fail to acknowledge that we live and work in an imperfect and sometimes ambiguous world. Shades of gray are often more prevalent than black and white. No matter how ardent we are about ethical principles, acting ethically as a researcher almost always involves a struggle of some kind. The ethical ideals that follow are just that: ideals that are difficult to accomplish in real life, but that offer guidance and encouragement to do the very best we can do. (For different but very thoughtful approaches to thinking about doing research ethically, see Locke et al., 2014, pp. 25–40, and van den Hoonaard & van den Hoonaard, 2013.)

DOING GOOD WORK In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrestled with the notion of what it means to act virtuously. He said that if there are rational principles involved in the tasks with which humans engage, then the path toward virtuous behavior is to perform each of the tasks “well and rightly” (1976, p. 76). To do as researchers what Aristotle would call virtuous work, interviewers must approach each component of the interviewing process with a sense of the underlying logic of each task. Then they must carry out each task “well and rightly.” We might call what Aristotle describes as doing “well and rightly” doing “good work.” 147

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Interviewers’ work of making contact, establishing access, selecting participants, setting up interviewing arrangements, seeking informed consent, interviewing participants, managing the relationship between interviewer and participant, and working with and sharing the words that result from interviewing can be done according to each task’s internal logic and done “well and rightly.” Doing good work is a process in which the methodology and ethics of the work overlap. For example, as we make contact with participants to invite them to participate in our research, we would not persuade them or “bend their arms” to participate. The underlying guiding principle inherent in the task of inviting people to become participants is that their participation must be voluntary. Volunteering to participate in a research project must be based on being informed, not persuaded. At the same time, researchers have an interest in securing participants’ involvement in their study. It is difficult not to try to persuade—not to promise benefits from participating that are more than what can be delivered. And it is difficult not to take it personally when a potential participant says, “No thank you. I don’t want to participate in your research.” But in doing this part of the work well, we inform, we encourage, but we do not persuade or cajole participants to join the study. The process of securing informed consent also has its ethical pitfalls. I have talked with a number of new researchers who have gained approval from their IRB for their informed consent process. I ask them how they went about securing their participants’ consent. Some told me that they gave them the document to read and asked them to sign it. Some even would say to their participants, “Don’t worry, this is just a form that I am required to get signed.” But carrying out the logic of the informed consent process would mean that researchers go over the document with their participants to make sure they understand and take the document seriously. A signature based on a glance and a quick discussion may seem a relief to the researcher. But it is not doing “good work.” What does doing “good work” mean when interviewing participants? If using a phenomenological approach to interviewing, that researchers understand that they are seeking the participants’ perspective on their experience and the meaning they make of it. This goal implies that often the most important skill of interviewing is listening (see Chapter 6). Researchers bent on doing good work should check a sample of their interview voice recordings to ascertain how often they are talking in the interview compared to how often the participants are talking. Interviewers seeking their participants’ subjective understanding should check their transcripts to note whether their participants are represented mostly in

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longer paragraphs and whether they, the interviewers, are most often represented in a few lines. Further, researchers should avoid asking leading questions that result in answers they might be seeking, rather than giving participants free rein to go in whatever direction they might choose. Researchers seeking their participants’ perspective on their experience and the meaning they make of it should treat interviewing as an exploration, not an attempt to prove something they have in mind. Studs Terkel, the master interviewer who passed away in 2008, suggested that the interviewer must be full of curiosity and gentleness. In one obituary, Terkel is quoted as having said, “Interviewing . . . isn’t an inquisition; it’s an exploration, usually an exploration into the past. . . . So I think the gentlest question is the best one and the gentlest is, ‘and what happened then?’” (Grimes, 2008, p. B9). Terkel’s sense of gentle exploration in interviewing does not mean that the interviewer avoids difficult areas that come up in the process. But it does mean that the interviewer treads carefully into those areas. The interviewer may even ask permission from the participant to explore sensitive topics by asking something like, “Do you mind if I ask you more about what you just said?” Managing the relationship between interviewer and participant often rests on researchers’ recognizing that the researcher–participant relationship can be power-laden and unequal. (See Chapter 7 for a discussion of equity in the interviewing relationship; see also Brinkmann, 2012, p. 60, for a compelling discussion of the asymmetrical nature of the power relationships in interviewing.) Researchers must strive to establish an equitable relationship, often through attention to what seem like minor matters. For example, as we first meet with participants, we might ask (rather than assume) if it is all right if we address participants by their first name, or perhaps even better, simply ask how they would prefer to be addressed. As we arrange seating in the first interview session, we should think not only of where to place the voice recorder, but also of where the participant would like to sit or would be the most comfortable. As the interview proceeds, to be equitable, we should honor the scheduled ending time of the interview, even if it seems desirable to go forward. At a different level, doing good and equitable work means that we take to heart and mind Immanuel Kant’s imperative sense that we treat others not merely as means to some end we have, but as ends of worth in and of themselves. Kant wrote, “Now a human being, and in general every rational being, does exist as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that will as it pleases” (Kant, 2002, p. 229, emphasis in

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original). In emphasizing the words not merely as a means, Kant recognized that treating people as means to our ends is a part of everyday life. But he stipulates that we treat them not merely as a means. In doing interviewing research, we clearly are using our participants as a means to accomplish our ends. But we can begin to treat participants as ends in themselves when we express real interest in their stories. Yes, we as interviewers are interested in understanding how the participants’ stories inform the topic of our research. But we can also make an effort to appreciate the complexities of our participants’ experience, the struggles they face, the way they experience life, and the meaning they make of it. As Angela Kohnen remarked in thinking about her research experience, “For my part, through these interviews I came to admire and respect each of my participants in a way that I hope enhances my understanding of their experience, rather than clouding my vision” (personal communication, June 27, 2012). In collecting, organizing, analyzing, interpreting, and sharing the words of an interview, doing good work “well and rightly” would mean, among other important steps, remembering our commitment to not making the participants vulnerable through our use of their words. We should remember the American Anthropological Association’s (1983) stipulation that researchers’ first responsibility is to their research participants. This can lead to some hard choices in terms of which of the participants’ words to present or to not present, and can lead to issues of how to edit the oral speech of participants in a way that is fitting for written reproduction of that speech. In some cases where participants share a perspective that may be unflattering to themselves, it can lead interviewers to revisit their interview recordings to examine whether they went deeply enough in the interview to understand the context of the unflattering material. Published as is, the material could damage the participants’ interests. The researcher then has to choose whether to report the material, hold back the material because the researcher did not pursue the matter far enough, or perhaps, if it was not too awkward to do so, return to the participant to explore further the area under question and its antecedents and context.

THE RECIPROCITY IMPLICIT IN TREATING PARTICIPANTS WITH DIGNITY Aristotle’s exploration of the virtue of good work allows us to see that the method of our work interacts with the virtue of our work. We may never be perfect in our quest to do good, careful, and thoughtful work

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in every step of the process, but a sense of imperative to move in that direction would lead us in the direction of doing ethical research with our participants. It is by doing good and equitable work in our interactions with the participant that we act out the underlying goals of the IRB and the informed consent process. By valuing our participants in and of themselves, by recognizing the worth of their stories both as means and as ends, we take a moral step that I believe is entwined with good interviewing practice. That moral step is implicitly recognizing, acknowledging, and affirming the dignity of our participants. As Donna Hicks writes in her book, Dignity (2011), in which she considers the role of dignity in the process of mediation and conflict resolution, there is a remarkable effect on people, “when they feel that they are seen, heard, understood and recognized as worthy. . . . Honoring people’s dignity is the easiest and fastest way to bring out the best of them. . . . Leading with dignity would mean that you know how to treat people as though they matter” (Hicks, 2011, p. 67). As my colleague Patrick Sullivan suggested in a personal conversation in the spring of 2012, listening to people is the first step in affirming their dignity. There is always a danger of exploitation in an interview situation (Patai, 1988). Researchers struggle with issues of remuneration for and reciprocity with their participants. Researchers can feel indebted to their participants. Doctoral researchers know that they stand to gain from earning their doctorate through their research, but may wonder what their participants might gain from taking part in that research. Perhaps the most genuine way that we as researchers can reciprocate participants for having taken part in our research is to carry out an interview in a way that supports and even enhances their dignity. As Hicks says, we may not be able to quantify the worth of acting with dignity and conveying to our participants a sense of awareness of their dignity. At the end of a three-interview series, when I have been able to approximate what I have written above—on those occasions when I have come close to having done good work—I sometimes sense in the eyes and comments of my participants that they have felt heard, perhaps even understood, and feel grateful to have participated in the interviews. That does not happen in every interview, but when it does, the benefits of doing good work for both the interviewers and participants are clear.

CONCLUSION Every research method has its limits and its strengths. In-depth interviewing’s strength is that through it we can come to understand the details of

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people’s experience from their point of view. We can see how their individual experiences interact with powerful social and organizational forces that pervade the context in which they live and work, and we can discover the interconnections among people who live and work in a shared context. From the act of doing interviewing, I have gained a deeper understanding and appreciation of the amazing intricacies, and yet coherence, of people’s lives. Interviewing has also led me to a more conscious awareness of the power of the social and organizational context of people’s experience. In addition, I have gained a fuller appreciation of the difficulties of change and the complexity of progressive reform through research (Bury, 1932; Fay, 1987). But most important, and almost always, interviewing continues to lead me to respect the participants, to relish the understanding that I gain from them, and to take pleasure in sharing their stories. In speaking of the role of researchers in a keynote speech, Professor Maisha Winn, who had done extensive research with incarcerated teenage girls (Winn, 2010), stressed that researchers must strive to be “worthy witnesses” of their participants (Winn, 2011). As I sat in the audience, her phrase struck me and resonated with an aspect of my experience that I had felt, but not fully articulated: that it is a privilege to interview our participants. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), “privilege” in the case of interviewing is a prerogative beyond the common advantage of others. Interviewers seek and are given the opportunity to enter the lives of their participants. Participants share and reflect on their experience with their interviewers. They entrust their interviewers with a part of themselves. They make themselves vulnerable to their interviewers. Interviewers learn from them. What interviewers do as part of their research is not an everyday experience for either the participant or the interviewer. Interviewers are more than witnesses. Yet Winn’s phrase captures the sense of our responsibility to do good work, as best as we can, in order to be worthy of the privilege of interviewing.

APPENDIX

Two Profiles

NANDA: A CAMBODIAN SURVIVOR OF THE POL POT ERA (Toon Fuderich) Before the war, . . . we had a very large extended family . . . a lot of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. I am one of four children. I have an older brother and a younger brother and sister. My family was quite welloff. My father had his own business; my mother owned a grocery store; my paternal grandparents owned a flour mill. My father was well-respected in our village. He was a handsome and intelligent man who valued education highly. He always told us about the importance of getting an education. I was 8 years old when Pol Pot took over Cambodia . . . forced labor camps were established throughout the country. People were forced to leave their home to work in these camps. When the war broke out, Khmer Rouge soldiers came to our village. They told us that they came to free us from the oppressive government. They told us not to worry about anything and that everything will be fine. But nothing was fine. It was all a lie. They killed innocent people. The educated professionals like doctors, businessmen, teachers were the first to be killed. It was just horrible. Every day the soldiers organized a meeting to re-educate the villagers. The meeting usually runs from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Everyone had to attend except for those who were gravely ill. . . . One day just before my father left for the meeting, a group of soldiers came for my father. My mother was already at the meeting. I was the only one left at home at the time. They entered our house. Ransacked the whole place (long pause) took everything. . . . Then my father was led outside, his hands were tied behind his back. I was so frightened, but decided to follow them. I hid behind a cupboard and tried to peer through a small crack to see my father. The soldiers accused my father of betraying his country. My father kept saying to them, “I love my country. I have children. I love my country,” and the soldiers kept berating him, yelling at him, accusing him of working for the government and hiding guns in his house. A young soldier no more than 10 years old put a gun on my father’s forehead. I was 153

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terrified. Then I saw an older soldier winking at the young soldier, signaling him to pull a trigger. And that was it. They killed my father. They shot him. I saw it with my own eyes. I couldn’t move. I was too scared to cry. I sat frozen behind my hiding place. I was alone. I was the only one who saw this happen. I was numb. I couldn’t feel anything. . . . I tell you I was so numb. After they shot him they took out a big machine gun and started to shoot at his already dead body, his chest, head, legs. They took his wallet and other valuables. I saw everything, but I felt nothing. It was awful. When I got over the shock, I ran to my mother and told her about what happened to my father. My mother was 9 months pregnant at the time. She was crying and sobbing. She kept asking the soldiers why they killed my father. One soldier looked at her and pointed a gun at her stomach. He said, “Don’t cry, my friend. Your husband is a bad man. He betrayed his country. Tomorrow I will find a nice man to marry you.” My mother kept on crying, crouching down to the ground. I couldn’t cry. I could not feel anything. I asked my older brother to take me to grandmother’s house. It was not until I reached her house that I began to cry. I couldn’t stop crying. My grandmother was annoyed, so she said to me, “Why are you crying so much? Did someone kill your father?” I looked at her and said, “Yes.” And I told her what happened. My grandmother, when she realized, she just fainted. My brother and I then went back to our house. My mother was still crying. Neighbors and friends came to see us. They were sad and shocked but couldn’t do anything to help. They were scared [of the soldiers]. They felt bad but there was nothing they could do to help. My mother asked the soldiers if she could properly bury my father but they refused. They told us that my father’s body should be left for the dogs to eat or we can throw him into the stream to feed the fish. My mom cried so much. We all cried. I will never forget this. Eventually, the soldiers allowed us to bury my father. We used a straw mat to wrap his body before burying him. A few days after my father died, the soldiers ordered all of the villagers to leave the village. They told us that we were only going to be gone for a few days but . . . we . . . never got to return to our home. We took nothing with us. They led us to a work camp at the edge of the forest. My mom was very pregnant. It was hard for her. There were no shelters, no nothing. Our family and extended families were together at this point. We gathered some wood to make temporary shelters for us. Shortly after we arrived at this work camp my mother went into labor. There was no midwife. My grandmother asked around but found no one. Somehow she managed to deliver the baby. After the delivery, my mother was so exhausted that she became unconscious for 2 hours. The baby survived. My mother survived. It was a good thing that she managed to live.

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After giving birth, my mother had to go directly to work in the rice field. My grandparents looked after the baby. Older people were assigned to take care of younger children during this time. Children from 5 years old up had to work. The children and parents worked separately. Husbands and wives had to be separated. There was a lot of killing and shooting. I saw a man killed because he refused to be separated from his wife and children. Yeah, they shot him. So many people died of sickness and starvation too. After a year, they moved us to another work camp. At this camp I was separated from my mother. I had to go live in the children’s camp. Here, they tried to brainwash us, turning us against our parents, telling us to spy on them. They told us that we don’t have to respect our parents anymore and that giving birth to a child is a natural life process. We don’t have to be faithful to our parents. They said that children are precious and special and our lives worth more than adults’. But it wasn’t true. They killed children too. While separated from my mother I was miserable. I missed her so much. More than once I tried to run away to join her at her campsite but they found me. They tied me up and punished me, told me not to do it again. They told me that my life belongs to the public now and I have to contribute. I cried all the time. I missed my father so much. I was hoping that he will reincarnate. I waited for him but he never came back. I asked my mother about the reincarnation but she said my father is not coming back. I was upset with her. I cried and she cried. I suffered so much. I had very little food to eat. Sometimes I was so hungry that I would eat anything, leaves, raw snails, crabs or anything I caught while working in the field. I got sick all the time. The children fought with each other a lot. One day I had a very high fever and couldn’t get up to work. One kid came to me, pulled my hair and dragged me to work. . . . Yeah, kids ruled one another. The stronger ones were the ones who had power. I was so thin. My belly always swollen. We didn’t eat well. Once a year maybe the soldiers would cook us rice and soup. I remembered one time during this so-called feast I ate too much that I nearly died. I could not move. You know, my stomach was full but my mouth was hungry. Two kids died from overeating. . . . Since we had no food to eat, we had to move on. We gathered what was left and headed toward the Thai border. We walked for days without food. I had to carry my 3-year-old brother on my back. He was so heavy that I wanted to kill him (small laugh). . . . By the time we arrived at the border everyone was so tired we just flopped on the ground. There was an intense fighting between the Vietnamese troops and Khmer Rouge

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soldiers. We slept amid bombing and gun firing. Bullets were flying over our heads. There was nothing we could do. The next day we moved to another camp. At this camp, refugee relief organizations gave us some food and sheets of plastic to make shelter for ourselves. We searched for my older brother but couldn’t find him. Someone told us that he joined Khmer Srai [Free Khmer]. Life in this camp was not easy. We slept on the ground. It was during the rainy season so it rained all the time. Sometimes I slept with half of my body lying in the water. But nothing really mattered anymore . . . live or die. We just let it go. My mom usually stayed up to guard us while we slept. I worked all the time, fetching water for people. They paid me a little bit of money. I earned 30 bahts a day [$1]. I saved money to buy things for my family. After a few months my older brother reunited with us. We were relieved but we had to move again because the fighting at the border intensified. It was getting too dangerous to live here. We had to make it to the holding center for refugees in Thailand in order to be safe. We walked, ran, and dodged. We had to be careful not to step on minefields. Luckily, the United Nations truck picked us up on the way. Everything was in such a rush. My older brother couldn’t make it on the bus so we lost him again. Everyone on the truck was crying, asking for their family members. It was very sad and confusing. We made it to Thailand finally. The UN put us into a refugee holding center. I was happy that we managed to stay alive. The UN gave us some materials to make our own shelter . . . you know . . . poles and plastic sheets. It was a break but I was still in shock. The UN gave us canned sardines, rice, and cooking oil. It was good (laugh). Life at the holding center was not bad. Sometimes I sneaked outside the camp with some adults to buy food from the Thai market. We are not supposed to do that but I did it anyway, out of curiosity. I got caught once and was put in jail for 3 days. They cut my hair off. My mother spent 3 days crying, looking for me everywhere. She thought I was killed. I attended an elementary school in the camp and learned Khmer . . . I enjoyed living there. People, Thai people are helpful and nice. I made some Thai friends there. But only for 6 months because we had to move to another camp . . . just as we began to feel comfortable, the UN decided to close the camp down so we had to move back to the first refugee camp again. It was not easy, you know, moving back and forth. Sometimes it was unbearable. When we came back, I attended a class in public health that was offered by a relief organization. I studied and passed the test. Afterward, I

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went to work in a camp day care center. I met my future husband there. We worked together. During this time I worked and studied all the time . . . later on I took another job as a translator at the camp hospital. It was very hard work, but important work. I helped the foreign doctors and nurses tend the wounded Khmer soldiers. There were truckloads of them coming to the hospital each day. It was very painful for me to see so much suffering. One good thing that happened while we were in the first camp was that we reunited with my brother. He was working for the American embassy as a translator. We submitted the application applying for a resettlement in the United States and were accepted. Shortly after we were sent to a transit camp to learn some English. We spent 1 month before leaving for another transit camp in the Philippines. The camp in the Philippines was beautiful. It was right on the ocean. Plenty of food and fruits. People were nice and friendly. I relaxed and learned English. While waiting in the Philippines, I married my colleague with whom I worked at the camp day care center. Shortly after I got married, my mother and siblings left for Florida. I stayed behind with my husband. We left the Philippines for the USA in 1984. Coming from the war zone where I saw nothing but cruelty and destruction I was overwhelmed by everything I saw in the U.S. Everything is different. I couldn’t understand the language. People speak too fast for me to understand them and my accent is too difficult for them to understand me. So what are you going to do? It was extremely frustrating. I remembered feeling depressed, lonely, and confused all the time. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t know why I had to be here. I couldn’t stop thinking about my past, about Cambodia. Learning English was a real struggle for me. My accent is so bad that people always have a hard time understanding my English. I tried so hard to learn English because I know that I have to live here for the rest of my life. I had to do something. I attended an ESL class. I can speak better English but still have problems with my accent and pronunciation. Living with my husband’s adopted family was hard. They don’t know me so they don’t understand me. I don’t have anyone but my husband to turn to . . . I cried all the time because I felt sad, lost, and unloved. I lost hope in my life. Then I found out that I was pregnant. My pregnancy changed everything . . . for the better. I think because it gave me strength and some hope. I knew that I had to do something. I had to change a course in my life. I have come this far I must continue. I thought about my time in Cambodia during the war when I had nothing to eat. I could not do much there but at least here I have food to eat and

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a roof over my head. I can make it here and I have to take advantage of it. I knew that I had to get some education before I can move on to do something. I had to pick myself up. I enrolled in the GED class. My first day in class was not a pleasant one. Most of my classmates are teen mothers like myself. I did not feel welcome. They laughed at my accent. One time the teacher asked me to read a paragraph in the book. I must have sounded very funny that a classmate laughed so hard that she fell off her chair. I was so humiliated . . . so angry. My teacher reprimanded her for doing that. It hurt so much. The girl just couldn’t understand where I come from. It became obvious to me that I was an outsider. I was not a part of their circle of friends. I didn’t know who Michael Jackson is. I didn’t know any of the talk show hosts on television so I couldn’t participate in their conversation. I was always on the outside. After the birth of my daughter I studied at home. A tutor came to my home to help me with my homework. My husband and I moved out of my in-laws’ house . . . it took me 3 years to finally pass the GED test. It was quite an accomplishment. The local paper wrote an article about me. At the graduation ceremony I was walking on air. I was happy and proud of myself, but at the same time felt very sad because my father and mother were not with me on this very important day of my life. After I got my GED I applied for a job. I was hired as a translator. I worked as a translator for a while. After a year or so I asked my supervisor if I can do some counseling. She let me. I was very nervous the first time I did it. I told my client to take it easy if I made a mistake. My boss sent me to Boston for additional training in nutrition and counseling. I also took two courses in nutrition and counseling at the community college. I worked very hard all the time. Homework was always difficult. It always took me a long time to complete my homework assignments. It was not easy but I enjoyed learning. I am certified to do nutritional counseling and have been working for 8 years now. In 1989 I was diagnosed of having a molar pregnancy. My placenta kept growing but there was no baby inside. The doctor performed surgery and tried to clean it up but it didn’t work. It got so serious that the doctor told me I may die. Can you imagine someone told you that you only have a few more months to live. It was very scary. My daughter was only 3 years old. I went to a hospital in Boston for chemotherapy treatment. Chemotherapy made me feel really sick. After each dosage I felt sick for 2 weeks. I couldn’t walk, eat, or help myself. You could not breathe well after chemotherapy treatment. I was so miserable that several times I wanted to kill myself. I was totally crazy. Every time I heard

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the word chemotherapy I cried. I took 6 months of chemotherapy to get rid of the irregular hormone. I am fine now but after the chemotherapy I am not the same person anymore. I am moody, impatient, and get tired easily. I have to take it very easy. Now I only work part-time. I try to spend a lot of time with my child. I try to enjoy my life. In the past I didn’t have time to think about having a good time because I always had to struggle to survive. Being close to death twice I knew that anything can happen. I lost my childhood to war. I nearly died of sickness. Now I have a chance to live; I have to enjoy it. Life is too short you know. Here today gone tomorrow. First I thought I wanted to continue with school but I realized that I could not possibly put up with the pressure. It’s OK. I like where I am now. I have my family. I keep minimum contact with the Cambodian community here because the more I get involved the more headache I get. Cambodians used to love each other but here [it is different]. I think a lot of people here still have not yet come to terms with their past. They are disturbed and have a hard time coping. I had to work very hard to overcome my painful past, but some people just don’t know how to do that. . . . They accuse me of being too American. I don’t know what that means. I am not American. I don’t know, really, who I am, but I like where I am. It is confusing sometimes you know, not really fit in anywhere. I don’t know much about Cambodian culture because I spent most of my childhood dodging bullets. I try to learn about my culture now so I can teach my kids. Yes, it is funny, not knowing much about your own roots. In general, I think I am pretty lucky. I have a job that I like, a supportive husband, and two lovely kids. My colleagues are great. . . . I try not to think too much about my past. But how can one forget the unforgettable? I remember it. In fact I am trying to write a book about it. I write in English, though it may not make sense at all because my English is poor. I do it anyway because writing helps relieve my pain. Maybe someone out there can learn from my story. I remember everything that happened to me during the war but it doesn’t bother me anymore because I am looking forward . . . want a future. My past is very dark and there is nothing I can do to change it. I can not undo it . . . no. I can only go forward. I have to be strong for my children. Life is full of surprises. Today we are laughing and feel good but tomorrow who knows. Nothing is permanent I learn. I learn also that I can depend on no one but myself. When I am strong people recognize me. When I am weak people step on me. I think I am strong and prepared. If something very bad happens to me tomorrow I will not fall apart. The worst things already happened to me, you know, sickness, war. I think I can handle it. (Fuderich, 1995)

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BETTY: A LONG-TIME DAY CARE PROVIDER (Marguerite Sheehan) It’s my 9th year [of day care]. It’s a long time. I only wanted to do it for a year, see how my daughter would feel about it. . . . I had a different idea of day care. It was more or less like one or two kids come and play. I didn’t realize how much work was really involved. But then it became a routine. We eat, we go to the park. There were two ladies in the area who also did child care, that I found out went every morning to the playground. That’s how I met a lot of other people. I found out things I never knew before about child care and certain things to do with a certain age. It helped me a great deal with my own daughter. It was good for her. Even then I was taking protective children, so it taught her that not everyone lived the way we did. It helped my husband too. It helped the whole family. I grew up as an only child [adopted at infancy] but we lived in an apartment house and there were always kids around me. I always took care of kids. . . . My mother never worked. There was that thing with my father: A woman stayed home, takes care of the children and the house. Nothing else, though we could have used the money. I’m sure I bothered my mother a lot of times. She wished she could have gone out and gotten a job instead of staying home with me. But after a while I guess she didn’t mind anymore. [Now] it’s funny when kids turn around to me and say, “How come you aren’t working? How come you don’t have a job?” I try to explain to them, I am working. I’m doing day care. [They say,] “No, you don’t. How come they are giving you money? You don’t even work.” A lot of people [in the neighborhood] know you after a while. “Here comes that lady with all the kids.” They know you and help you cross the street. I think they appreciate me but I hear all the time people telling me, “Oh my God, how can you do that? I couldn’t do it. Six little kids. God, I’d rather work in a factory!” I do get looks sometimes when I go to the store. I don’t care. I couldn’t care less. It doesn’t bother me. . . . There are times when I say, “I can’t do this anymore. I’ve got to quit. I’m going crazy.” And then you get a child that didn’t talk at all when he came, or was really shy and then all of a sudden you get a big hug. That makes me feel good because I know I accomplished something too. Maybe it took a long time but he finally came out of his shell. It makes me feel real good. . . . Somebody asked me a while back, “Wouldn’t you like to do something else? What do you see? What is in the future? You know, no promotions.” For me there is a promotion. When a kid comes and finally talks or gives you that big hug or cries by the time they have to leave, it really makes me feel good. That’s my promotion. It sounds corny but it’s true.

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[The children] are not going to be the way you want them to be like, talking or laughing all the time. . . . I had one particular case where the child told me he was going to kick my butt, and he told me how, with a knife! [He said] “That’s how you cut up people.” He did come back the next day; in his sneakers was a little can opener that you hang on a key chain. He showed it to me. [He said again], “That’s how you cut up people.” It really scared me. [I thought] this kid has got to go, he’s dangerous. But he really isn’t. A lot of the time it isn’t the kids at all. It’s the parents. They [the kids] have to act it out somehow. I think [day care] a lot of the times really helps the parents. If the child’s away for certain hours of the day it gives them a break and hopefully things will go better for them when they realize there is a break. When you get to know the [parent] after a while, sit down and have a cup of coffee, lots of parents sat and cried and told me what happened. Starting from when they were children, or what happened the night before. Sometimes you could really feel for them. . . . Some protective parents don’t really want to deal with me. You can tell. They either don’t let me know when the kid is missing; [they say,] “So what’s the big deal, you don’t really need to know.” Probably they feel threatened by me. What if the kid does tell me something in the morning that I have to report . . . the parents have needs too. Some of them are really alone. And then I have parents who have kids who weren’t abused or neglected. . . . I could say the wrong thing and set them off. I’m not a professional. . . . We have a support group where we meet once a month. The support group consists of four providers and a social worker. We can sit and discuss problems we have with the kids [and ask] what somebody else would do about it. I think that is why a lot of providers quit. Especially the ones who are isolated. There is nobody you can talk to. You talk to little kids all day. It happens to me too. I’ll go to a birthday party and I see myself going to the little kids instead of the adults. I feel comfortable there. Sometimes you don’t know what to say to adults because you are so alone sometimes. That’s why the support group is good . . . . It’s only 1½ or 2 hours long, but you hear someone else. Just to sit and talk to another adult makes you feel really good. I have to keep a log on each of the children. You hear all those things now lately about providers being accused of abusing one of the kids. It really helps to [be able] to go back a couple of months. [To be able to] say, “Wait a minute, this child wasn’t even in” [that day] or whatever. That’s what I like about a [day care] system too. You can go back and I know they will support you. I mean [if] somebody doesn’t know you [after] 9 years, they never know you. . . .

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When it happened to me, when the parent called me up I felt angry. I think I would have done something very stupid if the person [had been] in the house. It had started off with, “The child is coming home with bruises every day and I want to know” [what’s happening]. She was cursing on the phone. And then it got worse. [She said,] “My lawyer wants to meet you.” Finally I said, “Look, I’ve been doing this for such a long time. I’ve never abused anybody.” I was really angry. And I said to myself, “I’m crazy to do this kind of job.” I still don’t know what happened with the bruises. The bruise was made out to be as though the kid was black and blue from top to bottom. There were two, not even the size of a penny, around the knees. It’s probably from crawling. I don’t deny the bruises, but I do deny that I’m hurting someone. It did make me angry. I think that’s why a lot of people quit. It’s just the idea that what if they do believe the other party? What if they close you up? Will they do an investigation? What happens in the meantime? Maybe I triggered it off because the baby was really sick. I kept telling her to take her to the doctor. I said to the social worker that I want that baby to be seen by a doctor or she doesn’t return to day care. It happened on Friday, and Monday I was called. They were threatening me I think, not knowing that I really meant well for the baby, plus for the protection of the other kids. . . . A few years ago, my husband would have said, “That’s it. You’ve got to quit!” Now he says, “Calm down. They’re going to be calm by tomorrow.” I can talk to my kids or talk to him. That helps, if you have someone to talk to. . . . There was one case where I ended up taking the younger child into foster care. I think we would still have her but there were family problems. The father interfering, threatening me, and it became really too much to deal with. When I do see her, I feel awfully bad, like I should have kept her. But we had a choice to make then. [It was] even to the point where my daughter was frightened. She received a call and she got afraid and then we had to make a choice. We couldn’t live in fear. I didn’t want my daughter to live in fear. . . . I guess I feel good that several kids really trust me. [They have with me] a place they can come to, a routine. Also they come and tell me certain stuff. [There were] two mothers who felt threatened. One mother stopped by. She told me she had a little bit of a problem with her husband. She sat there where she would never have come before. So it’s both children and parents that begin to trust. . . . My kids all come by bus. It’s hard for a kid, being 3 years old. . . . All of a sudden that big bus comes which is already scary. Your mom puts you

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on and off you go. You don’t know whether you’ll ever go home. Some of my kids were in foster care before coming to day care. They don’t know if they are going home or not. It’s really hard [when the kids leave family day care]. I try to tell parents to make sure the kid comes on the last day. Plus for a few days I tell the kids that one is going to leave for whatever reason. And then the kid doesn’t come back, I don’t feel it’s right for that child or for the others because nobody knows what’s really going on. It’s like you rip them out, put them somewhere else and forget about it. I think it’s important that the kids do know they are going someplace else. Also, maybe the kids think, “Maybe Betty didn’t want him anymore.” Maybe the day before I happened to say to him, “You can’t do those kinds of things!” And maybe those kids believe that he did something bad so he cannot come here again. I wish sometimes somebody would call me up and say, “Look, I’m going to kill that kid if I can’t talk to somebody.” . . . Even I had that feeling when my daughter was real small and was going through the thing where she couldn’t sleep at night. There were many times I remember sitting in bed having the pillow over my head saying, “Please God, help me. I can’t take it anymore.” I had the exact same feelings. But then you pull yourself together and you pick up your kid and if she cries 3 more hours you walk up and down the halls. I think everybody who has kids has had that feeling. Maybe because of my being adopted, maybe there is something there, that you try to . . . prevent them from getting hurt. . . . As a child it really does bother you. The only thing I could think of was, “What was the matter with me?” You see all those cute babies. Who doesn’t love a baby? What did I do? Did I scream too much? . . . When I met my real brother, he feels the same way. . . . He said all his life he has had kids around. . . . I tried other stuff. I went to hairdresser school. I even worked in a factory. I made great money. I’ve been doing this for the longest time now and I enjoy it. Maybe there is a time when you have to do something else for a while. I’m trying to do stuff after work. My husband has a different shift. He is glad when he comes home. He likes to stay at home. Me, I’m cooped up in the house. I want to get out. Now we do one weekend with the kids and one weekend we do something [together]. He works in a jail. We sit together. He tells me about the jail. I tell him about day care. We both look at each other and say, “We’re crazy. Let’s do something. Let’s get away.” (Sheehan, 1989)

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Index Abrahams, J., 106, 111 Abramson, P. R., 107 Abuse, mandated reporting requirements, 75, 80 Access to participants, 45–52 acquaintances, 46–47 children, 50–51 equitable interviewing relationship, 46 formal gatekeepers, 48–49 friends, 47 hierarchy and, 45–46, 52 informal gatekeepers, 49–50 in informed consent document, 71 multi-site locations and, 48–49 perils of easy access, 45–48 prisoners, 48, 49 students, 46, 49, 69 supervisees, 45–46 taking oneself seriously, 47–48 teachers, 45–46, 58–59, 71–72 Acquaintances, interviewer access to, 46–47 Adams-Hutcheson, G., 119 African Americans social group identities in interviews, 105–107 Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 62 Age. See also Children; Elderly legal age of consent, 78, 80–81 social group identities in interviews, 112 Al-Amer, R., 112 Albarran, J. W., 140–141, 145 Allen, Dwight, 3 American Anthropological Association, 74–75, 150 American Federation of Teachers (AFT), 59 Amerine, Mary Catherine, 76 Anderson, B. A., 107 Anderson, P. V., 62, 63 Annas, G. J., 62, 78 Appelbaum, P. S., 62

Appropriateness of language in informed consent form, 78 of participants for study, 54–55 Aries, Elizabeth, 143 Aristotle, 7, 147, 150–151 Asian Americans, social group identities in interviews, 106 Atkins, D, P., 138 Audience Dialogue, 138 Audio recordings after-the-fact conversations and, 26–27 benefits of using, 123 cultural considerations, 81 informed consent document and, 26–27, 67 labeling process and, 133–134, 141–142 ownership of research, 104–105, 123 participant right to review, 69–70, 104–105 privacy rights of participants, 26–27, 67, 69 recording interviews, 26–27, 67, 69, 123 studying, 109 transcriptions of. See Transcriptions Audit trails (Lincoln & Guba), 31 Augustine, Saint, 16–17 Autobiographical section, of proposal, 36–37 Avillion, A. E., 75 Bailyn, B., 7 Banner, D. J., 140–141, 145 Beall, J., 72 Beauchamp, T. L., 62 Becker, Howard, 10 Beckman, M., 113 Beedell, P., 106, 111 Behaviorism, 2, 7 Bell, L., 47 Belmont Report (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of

182

Index Biomedical and Behavioral Research), 62–63, 66 Bennett, A. M., 140, 145 Bernard, H. R., 115 Bernstein, B., 47–48 Bertaux, D., 8, 12, 14, 60, 61 Betty (profile), 132–133, 137–138, 160–163 Bilge, S., 106 Birch, M., 49 Birt, L., 69, 104 Black, A. M., 112 Blauner, B., 130 Bloom, H., 16–17 Blumer, H., 19 Bogdan, R., 47, 123 Borkowski, D., 35 Boushel, M., 105 Bowden, C., 118 Brannen, J., 12, 115 Brenner, M., 25, 112 Briggs, C. L., 14, 112, 123, 124 Brinkmann, Svend, 12, 14, 29, 31, 42, 91, 103, 115, 130, 149 Broken Image, The (Matson), 4 Bronowski, J., 138 Brown, D. H. K., 79, 119 Brown, J., 25, 112 Bruner, J., 128 Burke, K., 125 Bury, J. B., 152 Butcher, S. H., 7 Callaway, H., 108 Campbell, C., 69, 104 Campbell, D. T., 2, 28, 31, 41, 57 Cannell, C. F., 25, 115 Canter, D., 25, 112 Capron, A. M., 66 CAQDAS. See Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) Carvajal, D., 140–141, 143 Cassell, J., 66 Cavers, D., 69, 104 Censorship, self-, 103–104 Chang, T.-K., 105–106 Charmaz, Kathy, 8, 82, 83, 134, 136 Chen, P., 118 Children comprehension and communication skills, 10–11, 79

183 distress during interview, 51, 115 informed consent of parent or guardian, 50, 60, 75, 78–79 interviewer access to, 50–51 legal age of consent, 78, 80–81 mandated reporter requirements for abuse/neglect, 75, 80 obtaining assent of child, 60, 79 permissive reporters of child abuse/ neglect, 75 phenomenological approach with, 10–11, 60 Child Welfare Information Gateway (CWIG), 75 Chronology in profiles, 130 questions to clarify, 88 Class class consciousness, 34–35, 48, 110–111, 117 social group identities in interviews, 110–111 Classist attitudes and behavior, 34–35, 48, 117 Cleary, Linda Miller, 14, 42, 65, 107–108, 112 Cobb, J., 110 Cobb, W. J., 25, 44, 47, 54, 90, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110, 114, 123 Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, 74–75, 150 Code of Federal Regulations (45 CFR. 46), 48, 50, 63–65, 66, 78–79 Coding process, 130, 133–134, 141–144 Cohen, J., 107 Collected Wisdom (Cleary & Peacock), 108 Collins, P. H., 106 Colombini, M., 75 Colomer, S., 68 Commitment, in proposal writing, 34–35 Common Rule (45 CFR 46), 48, 50, 63–65, 66, 78–79 Compagnone, W., 14 Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS), 121–122, 138–145 cautions regarding, 140–145 coding trap and, 141–143 distancing interviewers from material and context, 135–137 functions of, 139–140, 142–143 institutional support for, 144–145

184 Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) (continued) learning curve for, 140, 142 misconceptions of use, 140–141 nature of, 138 program features and selection, 138–140 recommended early use in doctoral program, 140 working on screen versus paper, 134 Conceptualizing Qualitative Inquiry (Schram), 36 Concrete details, during interviews, 22–23, 95 Confidentiality of records, 73–75 confidentiality, as term, 73 dissemination of research results, 76–77 importance of, 73 informed consent and, 73–75, 78 limits to, 74–75 mandated reporter requirements, 75, 80 privacy rights of participants, 70–73. See also Privacy pseudonyms, 9n1, 71, 72, 73–74, 130–131 release to use interview material, 76 subpoena requirements, 74–75 Conkright, Sally Lynne, 112–113 Conquest of America, The (Todorov), 12 Contact information, 77 Contact with participants, 52–56 building the participant pool, 54–55 by email, 53–54, 56 follow-up. See Follow-up importance of first contact, 52, 54 individual versus group contact visits, 53 informed consent process and, 54, 67, 148 before interview, 52 logistical considerations, 55–56 in person, 52, 53–54 purpose of contact visit, 52, 53–54, 148 rapport and, 52, 53–54 scheduling, 55–56 “stars,” 60 by telephone, 53–54, 118–120 third parties and, 52 three-interview structure and. See Threeinterview structure Context asking questions to clarify, 88–89 for interview material, 143–144 in meaning-making, 19–20, 21, 24 of participants’ experience, 21–22

Index in proposal writing, 37–38 Contextual Realities of Being a Lesbian Physical Educator, The (Woods), 71–72 Cook, Jennifer S., 14, 119–120, 134n1 Coppens, Andrew D., 139, 142–145 Copyright law (1976), 76 Corbin, J., 54, 68 Co-researchers, 9n1 Cotter, P. R., 107 Coulter, P. B., 107 Cramer, Elizabeth P., 118 Crenshaw, K., 106 Critical social science, 38 Cross, J., 68 Cultural considerations cross-cultural settings, 65, 80–82, 105–108 interviewing abroad, 81–82 Daly, J., 47 Dana, N. F., 14, 58 Danielson, W. A., 105–106 Darwish, M., 112 Davidson, J., 140, 141–142, 144–145 Davis, J., 134 Deakin, H., 79, 119 Dean, J., 60 de Laine, M., 46, 102, 104–105, 115 Delane, D. C., 58 Denzin, N. K., 8, 11 Devault, M. L., 85, 110, 130 Devries, K., 75 Dexter, L. A., 54, 101, 105, 110, 113 Dey, Ian, 20, 128, 134, 137 Dialectical process with interview material (Rowan), 134 Dickmann, E., 68 Digital natives (Paulus & Bennett), 145 Dignity (Hicks), 151 di Gregorio, S., 140, 144–145 Discovering the extraordinary (van Manen), 23 Discovery of Grounded Theory, The (Glaser & Strauss), 144 Disputes, between participants and researchers, 70 Dissemination of research results, 76–77. See also Confidentiality of records extensive use of interview data, 76 joint ownership of research material, 76, 123

Index possible uses of interview data, 76 remuneration of participants, 70, 77, 151 Dissertation proposals. See Proposal writing Doctoral committees, 33–34 Dogra, N., 50, 60, 115 Dohrenwend, B. S., 9n1, 14, 25, 48–50, 53, 60, 91–93, 96, 106, 111 Dolbeare, Kenneth, 4, 21 Dollard, J., 105 Douglas, J. D., 61, 83 Drabble, Laurie, 118–119 Drew, S. E., 67 Drug sales, subpoena requirements, 74–75 Du Bois, W. E. B., 7 Duncan, R. E., 67 Duncombe, J., 103 Dyson, Freeman, 22–23 “Echo” approach (Richardson et al.), 92–93 Edmondson, C., 110 Education Sciences Reform Act (2002), 12 Edwards, R., 110 Elbow, Peter, 35–36 Elderly, mandated reporting requirements for abuse/neglect, 75, 80 Elias, N. M., 109 Elites, social group identities in interviews, 82–83, 112–113 Ellen, R. F., 9n1, 14 Elliott-Johns, S. E., 15 Email contact with participants via, 53–54, 56, 118 follow-up, 53–54, 56 interviewing by, 118 Emergent research design (Lincoln & Guba), 40 Epistemological differences, 7–8 Equity in interviewing relationship, 46, 56, 83–84, 116–117, 149–150 nature of, 116–117 social group identities in interviews, 48, 105–113 Erdil-Moody, Z., 68 Esnard, A.-M., 140, 141 Esposito, N., 112 Essays in Radical Empiricism (James), 4 Essence derivation of, 17 and “is” of lived experiences, 17–19

185 Ethics, 147–152 Belmont Report and human welfare issues, 62–63, 66 Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, 74–75, 150 of doing good work, 147–151 ethical mindfulness (Guillemin & Heggen), 114 formal gatekeepers and, 48–49 informed consent. See Informed consent/ informed consent document Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). See Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) interviewing as exploitation and, 12–13, 77, 151 Nuremberg Code, 62, 66 Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 62 Ethnicity purposeful sampling and, 58–59 social group identities in interviews, 105–108 EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 80 Evans, N., 75 Experimentalism, 1–2, 7, 11 Experimental mortality (Campbell & Stanley), 31 Exploitation, interviewing as, 12–13, 77, 151 Exploring questions, probing questions versus, 90 Exxon Corporation grant, 4–5 FaceTime interviewing, 79–80, 118 Faden, R. R., 62 Fahie, D., 114 Fausto-Sterling, A., 109 Fay, B., 12, 38, 117, 137, 152 Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (45 CFR 46), 48, 50, 63–65, 66, 78–79 Feldman, J. J., 25, 44, 47, 54, 90, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110, 114, 123 Ferguson, K. E., 106 Ferrarotti, F., 9, 27, 29 Fischetti, J. C., 137 Fish, S., 126 Flexible research design (Rubin & Rubin), 40 Focus, during interviews, 95 Focused free-writing, 36

186 Follow-up asking questions when you do not understand, 88–89 asking to hear more about a subject, 89–90 exploring versus probing, 90 after in-person contact, 53–54, 56 interrupting versus, 92–93 participant right to review interview material, 69–70, 104–105 Formal gatekeepers, 48–49 Forman, G., 51 Frank, N., 15 Freewriting, 36 Frenzy at UMass (Time), 3 Friends, interviewer access to, 47 Frisch, Michael, 144 Fuderich, Toon, 39, 131–133, 153–159 adaptation of three-interview structure, 39 Nanda (profile), 131–133, 137–138, 153–159 Gabriel, J., 15 Gage, Nathan L., 2, 7–8, 11, 12, 31 Galindo-Gonzalez, S., 118 Galvan, S., 58 Garman, N., 129 Gatekeepers for children, 50–51 formal, 48–49 informal, 49–50 interviewer access to participants through, 48–50 power relationships and, 33–34, 48–51 proposal writing and, 33–34 self-appointed, 50 Geer, Blanche, 10 Gender LGBTQ community, 71–72, 109–110 sexist attitudes and behavior, 34, 48, 108–109, 117 social group identities in interviews, 108–110 Generalizability, of participants, 57–58 George, P., 58 Gergen, K. J., 22 Giardina, M. G., 8 Gitlin, T., 7 Glaser, Barney G., 41–42, 61, 125–126, 136, 137, 144

Index Glew, P., 112 Goldman, S., 75 Goldstein, T., 112 Gonzalez, A., 15 Google Hangouts interviewing, 118 Google Scholar, 10–11 Gorden, R. L., 99 GoToMeeting interviewing, 118 Gove, P. B., 43 “Grand tour/mini-tour” questions, 91–92 Greene, S., 115 Griffin, P., 102, 104, 115 Grimes, W., 149 Grodin, M. A., 62 Grommon, Alfred, 2 Grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss), 137, 144 Group contact visits, 53 Guardian, informed consent for child, 50, 60, 75, 78–79 Guassora, A. D., 61 Guba, E. G., 8, 9n1, 11, 14, 28, 31, 40, 41, 48, 52, 57, 59–61, 69, 90, 104, 122, 123 Guillemin, M., 114 Hahn, C., 138 Hall, R., 113 Handbook of Research on Teaching (Gage), 2 Hardin, C. L., 15 Hart, C. W., 25, 44, 47, 54, 90, 101, 103, 105, 108–110, 114, 123 Hart, S. N., 50 Hauser, C., 72 Heggen, K., 114 Heidegger, Martin, 16 Heikes, E. J., 110 Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy, 31, 137–138 Heller, J., 62 Herod, A., 110 Heron, J., 8 Hertz, R., 113 Hick, L., 73 Hicks, Donna, 151 Hierarchy/status. See also Power relationships interviewer access to participants and, 45–46, 52. See also Access to participants social group identities in interviews, 110–111

Index Hill, M., 75 Hinton, S. M., 118 Hitlin, P., 120 Hodgson, J., 67 Hogan, D., 115 Hooser, A., 15 Horrocks, Christine, 119 Hsu, H.-L., 105–106 Huang, X., 51 Hubbell, L. D., 65 Huberman, A. M., 122, 125–128, 135 Human Rights Campaign, 109 Humble, A. M., 138, 140–141, 143 Hunches, following, 97–98 Hyman, H. H., 25, 44, 47, 54, 90, 101, 103, 105, 108–110, 114, 123 Imber, J. B., 113 Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The (Skloot), 62 In a Pluralistic Universe (James), 4 In-depth interviewing. See Phenomenological interviewing In-Depth Interviewing and Issues in Qualitative Research seminar, 5, 103–104, 132 Inductive approach, 125–126, 137, 142 Informal gatekeepers, 49–50 Informants, 9n1. See also Participants Informed consent/informed consent document, 65–84 after-the-fact conversations and, 26–27 appropriate language, 78 for audio recordings, 26–27, 67 children and, 50, 60, 75, 78–79 complexities of affirming review process, 82–84 confidentiality of records, 73–75, 78 contact information, 77 copies of the signed consent form, 78 dissemination of results, 76–77 example of consent document, 71–72 invitation to participate, 54, 67, 148 legal age of consent, 78, 80–81 oral consent procedure, 79–80 of parent or guardian of child, 50, 60, 75, 78–79 possible benefits of study, 73 process of securing, 65–66 purpose of research and description of study, 54, 67–68

187 rights of participants, 68–73 risks to participants, 66, 67, 68, 70, 78, 83–84, 130–131 technology use in interview, 79–80, 118–120 waiver of documentation/signature, 26–27, 67, 69, 78, 79, 81, 83 Ingram, N., 106, 111 Inner voice, in interview process, 85–86 Instincts, following, 97–98 Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), 63–84 application format, 65 complexities of affirming review process, 82–84 contact with children, 50–51 establishing local, 63–65 “exempt” versus “expedited” interviews, 64 informed consent. See Informed consent/ informed consent document membership, 64–65 proposal writing and, 33–34, 35 research abroad and, 65, 80–81 review process, 64–65 revised regulations (2019), 64 Instrument decay (Campbell & Stanley), 31 Intentional gaze (Schutz), 19 International Compilation of Human Research Standards (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), 65 International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy (1995), 109 Interpreting interview material, 136–138 Interrupting, avoiding, 92–93 Intersectionality theory, x, 106 Interviewees, 9n1. See also Participants Interview guides, 98–99 Interviewing doing “good work” in, 147–151 as exploitation, 12–13, 77, 151 interviewee/respondent/subject, 9n1 material from. See Interview material objectivity in, 95, 96, 102, 104 phenomenological. See Phenomenological interviewing purpose of, 9 qualitative, 7–8, 11–12, 28 quantitative, 7–8, 11–12, 28 range of approaches to, 9–11, 14 reasons to avoid, 11–13

188 Interviewing (continued) relationship in. See Interviewing relationship as research method, 7–11 technique. See Interviewing technique as “the” method versus “a” method, 9–11 Interviewing relationship, 101–120 access to participants. See Access to participants age, 112 avoiding therapeutic relationship, 114–115 class consciousness, 34–35, 48, 110–111, 117 contact with participants and. See Contact with participants cross-cultural interviewing, 65, 80–82, 105–108 elites, 82–83, 112–113 equity, 46, 56, 83–84, 116–117, 149–150 exploitation and, 12–13, 77, 151 gender, 108–110 hierarchy/status, 45–46, 52, 110–111 “I-Thou” versus “We” in, 101–102, 105 linguistic differences, 78, 111–112 long-distance interviewing, 118–120 participant selection and, 20, 39–40, 56–60 private/personal/public experiences, 93–94, 113–114 race and ethnicity, 105–108 rapport in. See Rapport reciprocity, 96, 103, 116, 151 social group identities, 105–113 Interviewing technique, 85–100 asking for concrete details, 22–23, 95 asking open-ended questions, 91–92 asking participants to reconstruct, not remember, 94–95 asking participants to talk as if you were someone else, 93 asking questions for clarification, 88–89 asking questions for more information, 89–90 avoiding interruptions, 92–93 avoiding leading questions, 91, 149 ebb and flow of process, 95 exploring laughter, 96–97 exploring versus probing, 90 focus and, 95 following hunches, 97–98

Index following up on what participant says, 88–90 interview guide use, 98–99 limiting interaction, 96 listening in. See Listening nature of effective questions, 100 nonverbal cues, 86, 97–98, 113, 125 notetaking, 86, 92–93, 99 recording interviews, 26–27, 67, 69, 123 silence and, 97, 99 spacing interviews, 23–24, 25, 27 storytelling in, 93–94, 96 studying, 99 three-interview structure. See Threeinterview structure transcriptions. See Transcriptions Interview material, 121–146 coding, 130, 133–134, 141–144 Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS), 121–122, 138–145 data management, 121–122 interpreting, 136–138 labeling process, 133–134, 141–142 marking sections of interest, 126–127 notes, 86, 92–93, 99 ownership issues, 70, 76, 104–105, 123 participant right to review, 69–70, 104–105 profiles. See Profiles recording interviews, 26–27, 67, 69, 123 separating interviewing from analysis, 122–123 sharing interview data, 127–133. See also Profiles studying/reducing/analyzing text, 125–127 thematic connections, 127–136 transcribing interviews. See Transcriptions In Their Own Words (film), 49 In the Words of the Faculty (Seidman), 5, 72 Intuition, following, 97–98 IRBs. See Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) “I-Thou” relationship, 101–102, 105 Jackson, A. Y., 134 Jackson, D., 47 Jackson, Shirley, 23 Jacobs, C., 140 James, William, 4, 8, 41

Index Jenoure, T., 15 Jessop, J., 103 Johnson, J. M., 11, 41 Johnson, R. L., 109 Johnston, Lynne, 140, 141, 144 Kaanta, T., 68 Kahn, R. L., 25, 115 Kant, Immanuel, 149–150 Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, 97, 105, 127 Ke, L.-S., 51 Keairns, Y., 15, 19–20, 78 Kelman, H. C., 66, 68 Kimber, M., 75 King, Nigel, 119 Kirsch, G., 69, 95 Kitzinger, C., 131 Kitzinger, J., 131 Klein, D., 9n1, 14, 25, 48–50, 53, 60, 91–93, 96, 106, 111 Kohnen, Angela M., 15, 143–144, 150 Korcha, R. A., 118–119 Kuhn, Thomas S., 3 Kvale, Steinar, 9, 14, 16, 27, 29, 31, 40, 42, 91, 115, 124–125, 130, 135, 145 Labeling process, 133–134, 141–142 Labov, W., 105, 111, 112 Lancaster, K., 113 Language appropriateness for informed consent form, 78 comprehension and communication skills of children, 10–11, 79 cross-cultural settings, 65, 80–82, 105–108 inner voice/outer voice, 85–86 linguistic differences, 78, 111–112 in meaning-making process, 24 nonverbal cues, 86, 97–98, 113, 125 in proposal writing. See Proposal writing questions to clarify vague words, 88–89 social group identities in interviews, 111–112 in storytelling. See Stories/storytelling in understanding human behavior, 8 Lather, P., 12 Latinos, social group identities in interviews, 106 Laughter in interviews, exploring, 96–97 Lave, Jean, 145 Leading questions, avoiding, 91, 149

189 Lee, R. M., 95, 104, 114, 131 Lee, S., 51 Legal considerations. See also Ethics Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (45 CFR 46), 48, 50, 63–65, 66, 78–79 informed consent. See Informed consent/ informed consent document interviewing abroad, 65, 80–81 mandated reporting requirements for abuse/neglect, 75, 80 subpoena requirements for drug sales, 74–75 Lerman, L. M., 74 Letters, follow-up, 56 LGBTQ community, 71–72, 109–110 Liberman, Kenneth, 34 Lidz, C. W., 62 Lightfoot, S. L., 70, 105, 126 Lincoln, Y. S., 8, 9n1, 11, 14, 28, 31, 40, 41, 48, 52, 57, 59–61, 69, 90, 104, 122, 123 Listening, 85–93 active, 86–87 avoiding reinforcing participant responses, 96 importance of, 85–86, 115, 148 for inner voice/outer voice, 85–86 notetaking in, 86, 92–93, 99 reciprocity in, 150–151 transcribing interviews to gauge, 86–87, 96 to what participant is saying, 86–87 Literature reviews, 38–39, 42–43 Littlefield, John E., 22–23 Lived experience (van Manen & Schutz), 18–19, 22–24 Location of study, 39–40, 48–49, 58–59 Locke, L. F., 10, 21, 33–34, 36–38, 43, 59, 129, 135, 147 Lofland, J., 121 Lo-Iacano, V., 79, 119 Long-distance interviewing, 118–120 Longhurst, R., 119 Lopez, G., 110 Lynch, D. J. S., 15 MacGregor, J. C. D., 75 Macklin, R., 138 Malterud, K., 61 Mandated reporter requirements, 75, 80 Mannheim, K., 8, 41 Marshall, C., 43, 54, 113, 116

190 Marshall, Judi, 126, 136 Marxist approach, 110 Matheson, J. L., 140–141, 143, 145 Matson, F. W., 4, 41 Matthews, John, 118 Mattingly, C., 94 Maximum variation sampling, 58–59 Maxwell, J. A., 31, 36–38, 43, 122, 136 May, R. A. B., 105, 106–107 McCracken, G., 25, 40, 47, 125 McDermid, F., 47 McDonald, H., 74 McKee, H., 84 McLuhan, M., 134 McMillan, H. L., 75 McTavish, J. R., 75 Meaning-making in phenomenological interviewing, 19–20, 21, 24 reliability and, 27–29 stories and storytelling in, 1–2, 5, 7, 8 validity and, 27–31 Meisel, A., 62 Mellor, J., 106, 111 Member-checking (Lincoln & Guba), 104–105, 126 Men and Women of the Corporation (Kanter), 97 Merriam, S. B., 11, 14, 31, 119, 125 Mestre, L., 122–123 Mielke, F., 62 Miles, M. B., 122, 125–128, 135 Miller, J. H., 15 Miller, T., 49 Mishler, E. G., 12, 14, 19, 21, 25, 27, 28, 72–73, 94, 101, 124–125, 128 Mitchell, Richard G., Jr., 82–83 Mitscherlich, A., 62 Mole, B., 74 Moral suasion, of informal gatekeepers, 49–50 Moreau, J., 110 Morse, J. M., 29, 46, 54, 68 Mostyn, B., 126, 135 Moustakas, Clark, 16, 37 Nagle, J. P., 15 Nanda (profile), 131–133, 137–138, 153–159 Nash, J., 15 National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation (Kenya), 80

Index National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 62–63, 66 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), 2 National Education Association (NEA), 59 National Institute of Education (NIE), 4–5 National Research Act (1974), 62–63 National Research Council, 11–12 Native Americans, social group identities in interviews, 106, 107–108 Nazione, S. A., 78 Neglect, mandated reporting requirements, 75, 80 Nejelski, P., 74 Neuenschwander, J. A., 76 New England Educational Research Organization (NEERO), 22 Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 147 Nonverbal cues, 86, 97–98, 113, 125 Notetaking, during interviews, 86, 92–93, 99 Nuremberg Code, 62, 66 Nutt, L., 47 Oakley, A., 96, 102, 104, 106, 110 Objectivity CAQDAS and, 135–137 importance of, 29 in interviewing process, 95, 96, 102, 104 O’Connor, M., 51 O’Donnell, J. F., 15, 21, 137 Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), 65 O’Neil, R. M., 74 Onyett, Lloyd C., 140–141, 143 Open-ended questions, 91–92 Opsal, T., 68 O’Reilly, M., 50, 60, 115 Outer/public voice, in interview process, 85–86 Ovando, D., 109 Ownership of research material joint ownership, 76, 123 rapport and, 70, 104–105, 123 responsibility for, 70 Oxford English Dictionary, 152 Paradigm wars (Gage), 7–8, 11–12 Parent, informed consent for child, 50, 60, 75, 78–79 Parker, D., 106

Index Parker, T., 97 Participant information form, 55 Participants. See also Interviewing relationship access to. See Access to participants appropriateness for study, 54–55 building pool of, 54–55 contact with. See Contact with participants follow-up with. See Follow-up informed consent and. See Informed consent/informed consent document interviewer access to. See Access to participants logistical considerations, 55–56 number of, 60–61 ownership of research material, 70, 76, 104–105, 123 pseudonyms for, 9n1, 71, 72, 73–74, 130–131 purposeful sampling, 58–59, 60–61 random sampling, 57 remuneration of, 70, 77, 151 rights of. See Rights of participants risks to, 66, 67, 68, 70, 78, 83–84, 130–131 selecting, 20, 39–40, 56–60 “stars,” 60 storytelling by, 93–94 as term for interviewees, 9n1 Patai, Daphne, 9n1, 12–13, 77, 87, 104, 108, 110, 116, 151 Patton, M. Q., 9, 21, 28, 58, 60, 91, 93, 123 Paulus, T. M., 138, 140, 145 Peacock, Thomas D., 42, 108 Perrault, E. K., 78 Personal experiences, 93–94, 113–114 Peters, K., 47 Pew Research Center, Internet and the American Life Project, 120 Phenomenological interviewing, 14–32. See also Three-interview structure aim of phenomenology, 18–19 alternatives to structure and process, 25 characteristics of, 16 with children, 10–11, 60 experiencing process of, 18–19, 20 importance of, 20 In-Depth Interviewing and Issues in Qualitative Research seminar, 5, 103–104, 132

191 length of interviews, 26–27 lived experience and, 18–19, 20 meaning-making and, 19–20, 21, 24 nature of, 4, 14, 16, 18–19 peer practice project in using, 32 in proposal writing, 38–39 reliability of, 27–29 respect for structure of, 20, 24–25 spacing of interviews, 23–24, 25, 27 subjective understanding and, 10, 17–20, 92, 101 temporal/transitory nature of human experience and, 16–17 themes of, 16–20 topic range for, 14–15 validity of, 27–31 Phenomenological Research Methods (Moustakas), 16 Phenomenology of Practice (van Manen), 16 Phenomenology of the Social World, The (Schutz), 4 Phoenix, A., 105 Piaget, Jean, 51 Pilot studies, 43 Polanyi, M., 8, 31, 41, 138 Policy Analysis, Education, and Everyday Life (Schuman), 4, 21 Political considerations academic politics, 33–34, 60, 110 interviewing abroad, 81 qualitative versus quantitative research and, 7–8, 12 racial/ethnic politics, 105–108 Popkewitz, T. S., 12 Positivism, 2, 11, 40–41 Power relationships access and hierarchy, 45–46, 52 elites in interview process, 82–83, 112–113 gatekeepers and, 33–34, 48–51 interviewing as exploitation, 12–13, 77, 151 proposal writing and, 33–34, 38 social group identities in interviews and, 105–113 Prisoners, interviewer access to, 48, 49 Privacy. See also Confidentiality of records audio recordings of interviews, 26–27, 67, 69, 123 interviewing abroad, 80–82 pseudonym use, 9n1, 71, 72, 73–74, 130–131

192 Privacy (continued) as right of participants, 70–73 transcriptions of interviews, 71–72 waiver of documentation/signature on informed consent document, 26–27, 67, 69, 78, 79, 81, 83 Private experiences, 113–114 Probing questions, exploring questions versus, 90 Profiles, 127–133 of Betty (Marguerite Sheehan), 132–133, 137–138, 160–163 connections among, 132–133 interpreting material and, 136–138 labeling process, 133–134, 141–142 making and analyzing thematic connections, 133–136 of Nanda (Toon Fuderich), 131–133, 137–138, 153–159 rationale for, 128–129 risks to participants and, 130–131 steps in crafting, 129–131 themes of, 127–136 as way of knowing, 131–133 Proposals That Work (Locke et al.), 33, 36 Proposal writing, 33–44 autobiographical section, 36–37 commitment in, 34–35 description of study, 36–37 Elbow’s approach to, 35–36 literature reviews and, 38–39, 42–43 location of study, 39–40 methodology of study, 38–41 moving from thought to language in, 35 pilot studies, 43 proposals as rites of passage, 33–34, 35 questions to structure proposal, 36–40 rationale in, 34–35, 40–41 reasons for study, 37–38 resources for, 36 subjects of study, 39–40. See also Participants timing of study, 39–40 topic selection, 34–35, 36–37 working with the material in, 41–43 Protection of Human Subjects (45 CFR 46), 48, 50, 63–65, 66, 78–79 Psalm of David (Number 39), 16–17 Pseudonyms, 9n1, 71, 72, 73–74, 130–131 Psychotherapy avoiding therapeutic relationship, 114–115

Index language and stories in, 4 Public experiences, 113–114 Purposeful samples, 58–59, 60–61 Qualitative Health Research Conference (2012), 103 Qualitative interviewing, 7–8, 11–12, 28. See also Phenomenological interviewing Qualitative Research Design (Maxwell), 36 Quantitative interviewing, 7–8, 11–12, 28 Questions avoiding interrupting with, 92–93 to clarify vague words, 88–89 difficult, 97, 103 effective, nature of, 100 exploring laughter, 96–97 exploring versus probing, 90 following hunches in, 97–98 follow-up, 88–90, 92–93 “grand tour/mini-tour,” 91–92 to hear more about a subject, 89–90 interview guide, 98–99 leading, avoiding, 91, 149 open-ended, 91–92 role-playing, 93 silence and, 97, 99 to structure research proposal, 36–40 for understanding during interviews, 88–90, 94–95 Race purposeful sampling and, 58–59 racist attitudes and behavior, 34, 103–104, 105, 117 social group identities in interviews, 105–108 Race and Class Matters at an Elite College (Arles), 143 Racist attitudes and behavior, 34, 103–104, 105, 117 Ramirez, J., 109 Ramjan, L., 112 Random samples, 57 Rapport asking difficult questions, 97, 103 initial contact with participants and, 52, 53–54 “I-Thou” versus “We” relationship, 101–102, 105 nature of, 102 need to control, 102–104

Index ownership of research material, 70, 104–105, 123 social group identities and, 105–113 spacing of interviews and, 27 Reason, Peter, 8, 9n1, 102 Reciprocity, in interviewing relationships, 96, 103, 116, 151 Reconstruction process, 94–95 Reese, S. D., 105–106 Reflection meaning-making and, 7, 23–24 in three-interview structure, 23–24 Reinforcement of responses, avoiding, 96 Reis, E., 109 Release, to use interview material, 76 Reliability, 2, 27–29 Remuneration of participants, 70, 77, 151 Representativeness, of participants, 57–58 Research Interviewing (Mishler), 19 Research methods adequacy, 10 interviewing as “the” method versus “a” method, 9–11 qualitative interviewing, 7–8, 11–12, 28 quantitative interviewing, 7–8, 11–12, 28 scientific standards and, 12 subjective understanding (Schutz) and, 10, 17–20, 92, 101 Resnik, D. B., 62–63, 65 Resnik, H. S., 3 Respondents, 9n1. See also Participants Reviews of literature, 38–39, 42–43 Reynolds, P. D., 62, 72, 74 Ribbens, J., 105, 110 Richardson, S. A., 9n1, 14, 25, 48–50, 53, 60, 91–93, 96, 106, 111 Riessman, C. K., 110 Rights of participants confidentiality. See Confidentiality of records informed consent. See Informed consent/ informed consent document privacy. See Privacy reviewing interview material, 69–70, 104–105 voluntary participation, 68–69 withdrawal from study, 69 withholding interview material, 69–70 Risks to participants, 66, 67, 68, 70, 78, 83–84, 130–131

193 Ritchie, D. A., 65 Roer-Strier, D., 111 Role-playing questions, 93 Rosenblatt, L. M., 126 Rosser, S. V., 110 Rossman, G. B., 43, 54, 113, 116 Rowan, John, 38, 114, 116, 126, 134, 135–136 Rowe, Mary-Budd, 99 Rubin, H. J., 14, 38, 40, 60, 61, 90 Rubin, I. S., 14, 38, 40, 60, 61, 90 S.A.F.E. Alternatives, 68 Saint Augustine, 16–17 Salamonson, Y., 112 Salcedo, B., 118–119 Salmons, J., 119 Sampling generalizability and, 57–58 maximum variation samples, 58–59 purposeful samples, 58–59, 60–61 random samples, 57 representativeness and, 57–58 sample size for participants, 60–61 Sandelowski, M., 112 Sands, R. G., 111 Santilli, S. A., 137 Santos, H. P. O., Jr., 112 Sapat, A., 140, 141 Sartre, Jean-Paul, ix, 4, 16 Saunders, B., 131 Sawyer, S. M., 67 Schaenen, I., 51, 112 Schatzkamer, Mary Bray, 4–5, 15, 59, 74, 89–90, 97, 107 Schneider, H., 21, 137 Schram, T. H., 36 Schuman, David, 3–4, 16, 21 Schutz, Alfred, 4, 7, 10, 16, 17–19, 92, 101 Schwandt, T. A., 69 Schwartz, L., 140, 141 Scott, S., 69, 104 Search for a Method (Sartre), 4 Secrecy and Fieldwork (Mitchell), 82–83 Seidman, Ethan, 4–5, 49, 57, 72, 89, 97, 107, 132 Seidman, Irving E., 21, 49, 137 Seitz, S., 118 Self-appointed gatekeepers, 50 Self-censorship, 103–104 Sennett, R., 110 Sewordor, E., 140, 141

194 Sexist attitudes and behavior, 34, 48, 108–109, 117 Shaker Legacy, The (film), 4 Shamoo, A. E., 62–63 Sharzer, L. A., 109, 110 Sheehan, Marguerite, 38–39, 132–133, 160–163 adaptation of three-interview structure, 38–39 Betty (profile), 132–133, 137–138, 160–163 Shils, E. A., 113 Shoemaker, P. J., 105–106 Siersma, V. D., 61 Silence, in interviews, 97, 99 Silver, B. D., 107 Silverman, S. J., 10, 21, 33–34, 36–38, 43, 59, 129, 135, 147 Simpson, Julie, ix–x, 78–82, 84 Skloot, Rebecca, 62 Skype interviewing, 79–80, 118–120 Smith, A., 120 Smith, L., 56, 66, 115 “Snowballing” approach, 60–61 Solsken, J., 38 Song, M., 106 Spacing, interview, 23–24, 25, 27 Speaking Fourth Grade (Schaenen), 51 Speidel, Judithe, 4 Spirduso, W. W., 10, 21, 33–34, 36–38, 43, 59, 129, 135, 147 Sponsorship of project (Lincoln & Guba), 52, 68 Spradley, J. P., 14, 47, 91, 93, 95 St. Pierre, E. A., 134 Stacey, Judy, 102, 103 Stack, L., 110 Stanley, J. C., 2, 28, 31, 41, 57 “Star” participants, 60 Status. See Hierarchy/status Steiner, George, 85 Stember, C. H., 25, 44, 47, 54, 90, 101, 103, 105, 108–110, 114, 123 Stories/storytelling by interviewers, 96 by participants, 93–94. See also Profiles personal experiences in, 93–94 as way of knowing, 1–2, 5, 7, 8 Strauss, Anselm S., 41–42, 61, 125–126, 136, 137, 144 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 3

Index Stuckey, H., 125 Students, interviewer access to, 46, 49, 69 Subjective understanding/experience (Schutz), 10, 17–20, 92, 101 Subjects, 9n1. See also Participants Subpoena requirements, 74–75 Sullivan, J. R., 79 Sullivan, Patrick, 4–5, 21, 49, 60, 89, 97, 107, 151 Supervisees, interviewer access to, 45–46 Symonds, P., 119 Tagg, S. K., 58, 94, 135 Taylor, S. J., 47, 123 Teachers interviewer access to, 45–46, 58–59, 71–72 students as interview subjects, 46, 49, 69 Technique of interviewing. See Interviewing technique Technology. See also Audio recordings all-in-one transcription kits, 124, 125 Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS), 121–122, 138–145 contact with participants, 53–54 email, 53–54, 56, 118 informed consent/informed consent document, 79–80, 118–120 interviewing relationship and, 118–120 mobile phones, 119–120 telephone, 53–54, 118–120 video conferencing, 79–80, 118–120 Telephone contact with participants via, 53–54, 118–120 interviewing via, 118–120 Terkel, Studs, 97, 128, 149 Thelen, D., 95 Themes of phenomenological interviewing, 16–20 of profiles, 127–136 Therapeutic relationship, avoiding, 114–115 Third-person voice, 129–130 Thorne, B., 82 Three-interview structure, 21–32 adaptations of, 38–39 alternatives to, 25 contact with participants and, 52, 53–54, 56 details of lived experience, 22–23 focused life history, 21–22

Index labeling process and, 133–134, 141–142 length of interviews, 26–27 origins of, 21 peer practice project in using, 32 in proposal writing, 39 purpose of, 21 reflection on the meaning, 23–24 respect for structure, 20, 24–25 social group identities and, 106–107 spacing interviews, 23–24, 25, 27 Tilley, L., 72, 73, 131 Timing, of study, 39–40 Tingitana, A., 21, 137 Tisdell, E. J., 11, 14, 31, 119, 125 Todorov, T., 9, 12 Transcriptions all-in-one transcription kits, 124, 125 costs of, 11 in gauging listening skills, 86–87, 96 informed consent and, 71–72 ownership of research, 70, 76, 104–105, 123 participant right to review, 69–70, 104–105 privacy rights of participants, 71–72 profiles from. See Profiles punctuation of, 124–125 quality control and, 124–125 release to use interview material, 76 studying, 109 Tremblay, B., 86–87 Triangularization (Lincoln & Guba), 31 Trocki, K., 118–119 Trow, Martin, 10 Trustworthiness (Lincoln & Guba), 28 Tsangaridou, G., 119 Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 62 UNICEF, 51 United Nations, Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 51 U.S. Department of Health and Human Service (HHS), 62–63, 65, 80 University of Massachusetts, 3–4, 38–39 University of Minnesota, Duluth, 107–108 University of New Hampshire, 75, 139 University of Washington, 2–4

195 Vague words, questions to clarify, 88–89 Validity, 2, 27–31, 41 van den Hoonaard, D. K., 66, 72, 147 van den Hoonaard, W. C., 66, 72, 147 van Manen, Max, 9, 16, 18, 19, 23, 31, 56 Video conferencing, 79–80, 118–120 Voice inner, listening for, 85–86 outer/public, 85–86 third-person, 129–130 Voluntary participation, 68–69 Vygotsky, L., 7, 24, 35, 111, 112, 123, 127 Wakefield, K., 79, 119 Walker, P. C., 118–119 Walter, F., 69, 104 Wathen, C. N., 75 Watkins, C., 7 Weiss, R. S., 59, 61, 93, 99, 115, 123, 130 Weller, S., 119 “We” relationship, 101–102, 105 West, H., 62 Whites, social group identities in interviews, 105–108 Whiting, G. W., 15 Whyte, W., 60 Wideman, J. E., 7 Williams, C. L., 110 Williamson, K. M., 15 Winn, Maisha T., 152 Winzenburg, S., 119 Withdrawal from participation, 69 Withholding interview material, 69–70 Wolcott, H. F., 12, 31, 125, 127, 136 Wolgemuth, J., 68 Woodbury, Robert, 3 Woods, M., 138 Woods, S., 15, 71–72, 131 Woodthorpe, K., 72, 73, 131 Writing with Power (Elbow), 35–36 Yendol-Hoppey, D., 14 Young, E. H., 95, 114 Young, S. P., 15 Yow, Valerie Raleigh, 42, 75, 76, 92, 98, 99, 109, 110, 117, 123, 125 Zoom interviewing, 79–80 Zussman, R., 73

About the Author

Irving Seidman is a professor emeritus of qualitative research and secondary teacher education at the College of Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Oswald Tippo and the Early Promise of the University of Massachusetts (2002), The Essential Career Guide to Becoming a Middle and High School Teacher with Robert Maloy (1999), In the Words of the Faculty (1985), and articles published under the name Earl Seidman.

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