When conducting qualitative research, In-depth Interviews (IDI), Key Informant Interviews (KII), and Focus Group Discussions (FGD) are staple tools that we use to elicit information from those we work with. The use of these tools has become a matter of reflex when thinking about using a qualitative methodology. As useful as they are, it is important to push ourselves and our toolbox to think of more exploratory ways to capture the rich data that add layers to our work.
The basic premise of IDIs is that they provide important and interesting insight from our interlocutors that cannot be captured with closed-ended surveys, where the response is presupposed and limited. Often when we conduct interviews for programmatic research, the relationship between the participant and the research is very shallow, as there is rarely pre-existing rapport. Rich interviews, on the other hand, require a level of trust, understanding, reflection, and critical engagement with the questions from both sides (Johnson & Rowlands, 2012). As a result, if time and budget permit, it is helpful to think of broadening our interview techniques and methodology to be able to really gain insight into what people think and believe, moving beyond shallow front-stage representation (Goffman, 2023).
Repeat interviews are a good way to build relationships that allow for a nuanced understanding of how people think about the issue at hand. Though more expensive, they are a useful tool for both the researcher and the participant to unpack issues that may have arisen in the first interview, but could not be explored due to time constraints. Following up with interlocutors to see if they have changed their thoughts and opinions, posing questions that may have come up in other interviews and that may contradict or coincide with what the respondent had said, are useful exercises we can undertake in our second or third interviews. This approach elicits critical engagement from those we work with, directly offering an additional layer of meaning-making that we can use in our analysis, one that incorporates deeper reflection from the participants.
There are of course different ways to do this:
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- Scheduling a second interview after a particular interval as a follow up conversation. This allows the interviewee to know that she can add to or change her responses. It also allows the interviewer the flexibility to clarify and probe further on topics she might have missed during the first interview.
- Asking the interviewee to keep a record of incidents related to the topic by making short descriptive notes. Later during the interview, she can explain her thoughts, experiences, and feelings regarding the incident, and how she navigated the situation in greater detail.
- Participatory games and decision-making exercises during interviews. This is an important tool for moving beyond simple verbal expression to gain an understanding of how people react to and behave in contextual situations.
Grounding the conversation in recently-lived reality, as facilitated by follow-up interviews, allows the interviewer to gain valuable insight into the gap between ‘what people say’ and ‘what people are able to or choose to do’ (Wilson, et al. 2016). This gap then allows us to explore how different people can navigate the how and why elements of human behaviour that qualitative research is so good at doing.
Record keeping can be broken into two forms: diary-keeping and calendar-marking. Diary-keeping prompts respondents to keep a detailed narrative diary of their actions, events in their lives, or whatever the specified topic may be (Cao & Henderson, 2021). With diary-keeping we ask for detailed narrative accounts from participants. With calendar-marking, only the date and the incident are recorded, without any additional details. The benefit of diary-keeping is that interlocutors record their experiences soon after they take place, as timely reflections tend to be richer. If we couple diary-keeping with interviews after the interviewer has had time to review the diaries and formulate questions, the combination of the two can produce rich data.
When using diaries however, we need to be mindful of interlocutors’ literacy and comfort with writing. There are technologically-mediated solutions to this challenge – due to the proliferation of mobile phones with audio recording facilities, it is possible to ask people to record their thoughts, an approach that can be useful when working with individuals who are not able to take time out of their busy lives to journal or keep a diary. An additional advantage of this method of digital diary-keeping is that it offers us a stream of consciousness of participants’ thoughts and feelings which they may not be as comfortable writing, owing to discomfort in writing, or the act of writing being more laborious. Both approaches have their pros and cons of course, as writing is a slower process and can enable a more reflective and intentional account.
A third tool that can complement our basic semi-structured interviews is introducing games and situational choices. Participants are given hypothetical scenarios or case studies and are asked to reflect on either what they would do, or the decision made by the fictional character (Gibson, et al. 2024). Used extensively in different fields, these participatory tools give us an opportunity to both ground an interlocutor’s thinking in ways that make it easier to demonstrate in tangible ways, and allow a participant to expand on her reasoning non-verbally. These approaches also create an additional common reference point between interviewees where we can explore the various points of similarities and differences. Qualitative research, after all, aims to explore and investigate complexity, and the greater the complexity we can capture in an interlocutor’s assessment of the subject of our research, the better our quality of work.
As an example, Triantafyllakos et al. (2010) employed the ‘design alter ego’ technique to create an online course. The students who were participating in the study were asked to create an ‘alter ego’ who had specific interests and needs, in addition to the students’ real interests and needs. The researchers found that by allowing the students to create alter egos, the students were able to share additional insights, were more introspective, and were more openly creative – they did not feel judged for sharing things because it was not technically them who thought these things. The idealised personas they created allowed the students to be freer and therefore more expressive and open, leading to richer insights.
At the heart of all qualitative research is the search to understand people’s lived reality through their own words and thoughts, and the better our rapport with those with whom we work, the more forthcoming they will be. Unfortunately, this requires time, as short interviews tend to lack the space to allow both the interviewer and the interviewee to reflect on what is being said. Tool selection must always be led by the research question, and broadening our toolkit beyond basic standard interviews allows us to dig a little deeper. Good research is not only about the sample size, it must also answer the question, ‘are we getting critical, reflective responses?’
Bibliography
Cao, X. and Henderson, E.F., 2021. The interweaving of diaries and lives: diary-keeping behaviour in a diary-interview study of international students’ employability management. Qualitative Research, 21(6), pp.829-845.
Gibson, F., Fern, L., Oulton, K., Stegenga, K. and Aldiss, S., 2024. Being participatory through interviews. In Being Participatory: Researching with Children and Young People: Co-constructing Knowledge Using Creative, Digital and Innovative Techniques (pp. 117-144). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Goffman, E., 2023. The presentation of self in everyday life. In Social theory re-wired (pp. 450-459). Routledge.
Johnson, J.M. and Rowlands, T., 2012. The interpersonal dynamics of in-depth interviewing. The SAGE handbook of interview research: The complexity of the craft, pp.99-113.
Mao, J. and Feldman, E., 2019. Class matters: Interviewing across social class boundaries. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 22(2), pp.125-137.
Triantafyllakos, G., Palaigeorgiou, G. and Tsoukalas, I.A., 2010. Fictional characters in participatory design sessions: Introducing the “design alter egos” technique. Interacting with Computers, 22(3), pp.165-175.
Wilson, A.D., Onwuegbuzie, A.J. and Manning, L.P., 2016. Using paired depth interviews to collect qualitative data. The Qualitative Report, 21(9), pp.1549-1573.
