Abstract
Vera: Jean, in thinking about interviews, I often return to the study we engaged in alongside youth who left school early. It turned out to be a complex study. Jean: I remember how we talked often amongst the team about interviews and conversations. We were trying to balance many things: the diversity of experiences on the research team, the complexity of participants' lives, and seemingly easy things like deciding on the places where we could meet participants. Andrew: In my work, I am often asked at the beginning amidst the nervous waiting of participants, “so you have some questions for me?” Vera: It’s important to remember that participants often wonder what we will ask. I also remember how hard it was to imagine the questions to ask of participants. Thinking with participants’ lives really changes the kinds of questions we ask. Developing questions ahead of the conversations seemed, at times, like an imposition. Jean: I am glad we will think with this study, as we consider interviews in this paper.
In the early 2000’s Jean Clandinin and Vera Caine (Clandinin et al., 2013) were part of a research team interested in the phenomenon of youth who left high school prior to graduation. They, alongside other researchers, undertook a narrative inquiry with youth who left high school prior to graduating. While their interest was situated in the experiences of youth, that is, how their lives shaped their experiences of leaving and how leaving school influenced their lives, they also undertook an extensive literature review prior to the study. It was “quickly evident […] that various terms were used […] to describe children and youth who left school before obtaining a graduation certificate. Terms such as school leaver, dropout, disengagement/engagement, and push out carry clear labels” (p. 16). Each term made visible a different standpoint, a different way to understand the phenomenon under study. These different standpoints suggested that each interview might also reflect this - both intentionally and unintentionally. While the phenomenon of early school leaving received attention starting in the 1950’s, it was not until the 1960’s that the term “dropout” appeared carrying an at-risk label. Clandinin et al. (2013) pointed out that: “[i]n general, students at risk of early school leaving are viewed from either an individual deficit perspective that elaborates risk factors, or from disengagement perspectives, which take into account wider social inequities (Cassidy & Bates, 2005)” (p. 28).
In the literature review, it became evident that the terms used framed the research design, the criteria for inclusion, and the qualitative interviewing. For example, when a framework focused on individual risk factors, interview questions focused on what were seen as risk factors determined by the literature on child and youth risk factors. When a framework focused on contextual and school risk factors, interview questions focused on school and community programs that were present/not present and which were designed to ameliorate risk. Within either framework, structured or semi-structured interviews had been used. However, when the study frame was experiential and life-focused, as in the Clandinin, Caine and Steeves study, interviews took the form of conversations which allowed youth to share their experiences.
Situating the Paper
The preceding introductory writing shows our perspective as narrative inquirers. Narrative inquiry calls forth ontological and epistemological commitments to experience as a source of understanding (Caine et al., 2022), and we have written this paper on interviewing from this perspective. In our ongoing research lives, we wonder how we might compose ourselves as researchers amidst a landscape of competing stories about what research is, how research should be done, and how researchers ought to act.
In thinking
Situating Interviews
The desire to inquire and understand is one of the defining features of being human. Throughout recorded history, people have come together in conversation with the purpose of making sense of the world and the things that happen within it. It is perhaps not surprising then that, over time, interviews have become a key means to formalize conversations for the purpose of inquiry. Regardless of the context for an interview, there is one key reason that it might be selected to inquire with people: the collection of in-depth information about a topic or experience.
Like most ways of collecting data for research, interviewing has emerged and been developed within the transition from modernist ideals to more postmodern perspectives about what constitutes knowledge. Interviewing practices have thus ranged from standardized structured interviews to collect data in large-scale studies, to interviews that are more characteristic of a conversation that allows for a more expansive venture into an area of inquiry. The increasing value of accounts of experience as data has seen interviews adopted as a data collection method in a variety of qualitative and mixed methods designs. While there are times when ideas develop over time and one can see the evolution of this, this is not as clear with the ideas of interviewing. Instead what we see currently is that the kinds of interviews are shaped by different epistemological and ontological ideas that often run parallel. For example, within psychology, researchers engaged in clinical interviews where subjects (note the term used which implies the ontological commitment) were asked standardized questions to learn more about a specific disease/condition. At other times, interviews are designed for larger scale studies which utilize carefully standardized interview schedules with pilot-tested main questions, sub questions, and prompts or probes such as ‘say more about what happened’. At other times, interviews remain more flexible and are adopted as a research method within ethnography (see Spradley, 1979), phenomenology (see Giorgi, 1970) and sociology (see Mishler, 1991).
Coming to Terms
While we could imagine writing an account of interviewing constructed around key historical turning points starting with the first use of interviews in research, we find it more useful to construct a view of interviews with attention to standpoints around the ontological and epistemological commitments for the purposes of interviews. In some ways, the diversity of interviews reflects several parallel developments dependent on outlooks, beliefs, or standpoints. Over time, as new standpoints became recognized such as feminist standpoints, equity and diversity standpoints, relational standpoints, another parallel set of ontological and epistemological commitments around interviews appeared. These diverse uses of standpoints do not so much build on one another, as they are all now visible in the field. Surveying the fields where interviews are visible, we can see the presence of different forms of interviews.
As we reviewed the literature around youth leaving school prior to graduation, we saw the range of standpoints, resulting in different ontological and epistemological commitments. For example, in the studies of risk factors for early school leaving, the standpoint is a post positivist one, that is, to determine which risk factors are most highly predictive of students’ leaving. In the Clandinin et al. (2013) study, the standpoint was a relational one designed to inquire into each youth’s experience of leaving school in the context of his/her life. The whole life context in which the youth’s experience was situated needed to be the focus of the interviews. It is in this observation that we see the importance of alignment between the ontological and epistemological commitments of a study and the ways interviews are designed and conducted.
As interviews became increasingly taken up within qualitative research, the terms used to describe interviews shifted from structured interviews to semi-structured interviews to conversations. These shifting terms marked changes in the philosophical underpinnings of approaches to interviews, to ethics, to the ontological and epistemological claims and purposes of interviews. These shifting terms and understandings are not suggestive that one approach replaces another but that the approaches are all present and are seen to serve different epistemological ends. The criteria for the judgement of interviews are derived from the epistemological and ethical purposes.
As different standpoints from which interviews are undertaken are developed, ethical considerations remain present, although how we understand the ethics at work shift. For example, while ethics were initially concerned with informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality of data (the protection of interview data and subjects), within other standpoints, concerns of respect, reciprocity, trust, and vulnerability are also considered central ethical issues (Clandinin et al., 2018). In this paper, we return several times to the importance of continuing to work within a particular standpoint, that is, we cannot define our use of interviews from a post positivist standpoint and then choose to judge the quality of the interviews from another standpoint such as a feminist standpoint.
Current Tensions: Movement Across and Within
Philosophical and Contextual
As research interviews became a more accepted form of data collection, tensions became more apparent as they were taken up within different methodological and philosophical approaches. Used within positivist philosophies, there was an attempt to standardize research interviews in terms of precise questions and prompts, in terms of standardizing places where interviews were held, in terms of the length of interviews, and in terms of the relationship between researcher and subject. While the term
Since the 1990s, the semi-structured interview (SSI) has become widely used as it appeared to offer an affinity with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research. As McIntosh and Morse (2015) wrote “the SSI accommodates a multiplicity of philosophical assumptions that may reflect feminist, critical, phenomenological, and neo-positivist aims. The purpose of SSIs is to ascertain participants’ perspective regarding an experience pertaining to the research topic” (p. 1). With the development and use of SSIs, there was also a focus on standardizing questions, length of interviews, places of interviews and what was considered an objective distance between researcher and subject/participant.
As structured and semi-structured interviews gained increased usage, other kinds of interviews, those which Kvale (1996) termed interviews as conversation, and set within the philosophical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and oral histories, started to gain hold. These less structured forms, within the broad heading of interviews, attended differently to issues of ethics, generalization, and validity as well as relationships between researcher and participants. This shift away from a post-positivist philosophy allowed the development of post-structuralist and narrative understandings of interviews (Bhattacharya, 2017). Thinking about interviews as a conversation calls for attention to places of interviews, length of interviews, and questions asked. Conversation proceeded from a view that both researcher and participant were knowers. The participant was the knower of their experience and thus held the knowledge that was important to the research.
Place
As we turn back to the Clandinin et al. (2013) study alongside early school leavers, we see some important elements that relate to place, time, and context. While we had developed guiding questions for the interviews, we were also open to taking directions from participants as the interviews unfolded. While often the only focus when discussing interviews seems to be substantive choices about the kinds of questions one would ask, we also attended to place, time, and context. While Jean and Vera were in separate conversations with two participants, Christian and Truong, they came together for a school visit. During their youth, both Christian and Truong had spent time at a junior high school together, a school that carried great significance for each of them. In the narrative account of Christian, Vera wrote: Returning with Christian to this school, a school to which he felt a strong sense of belonging and ownership, opened up many backward and forward-looking stories for Christian and myself (Caine, 2013a, p.175).
The place of school itself, the size of the building, the organizing factors, such as classrooms, long hallways, washrooms with multiple stalls, and gyms, all called forth particular memories. As Jean and Vera prepared for spending the day alongside Christian and Truong, they did not know what to expect. They wondered, would they be able to enter classrooms after school hours, would they meet others, and what questions might surface? As we think about place as shaping interviews, we turn to our wonder if the place in and of itself would also carry the questions that could be asked at that moment. Vera had noted in her field notes: ...tomorrow we plan to meet at the school, your school, the school where some happy memories live. [...] A place your life mattered … I want to know where you have been, become aware of your memories and experiences, yet I, too, am hesitant. What will it be like for me to set foot into your memory box1? (Caine, 2013b, p. 181)
We wondered if we understand place as having agency, then new questions and conversations will be guided by being in different places. In thinking [i]n this way, our inquiries can be said to be ontologically generative - they create, not just represent, reality. However - and this is the primary difference between agential realism and more familiar social constructivist theories - it is not just humans involved in the generation” (p. 1152).
Being together in a place that mattered to Christian and Truong changed the relationships Vera and Jean held with them and shaped questions that opened up for them in unanticipated ways. Standing by a window in the stairwell of the school that overlooked the alleyway, it was the first time Christian started to talk about gangs, about protecting younger students, and the challenges his mother faced as she coped with mental health issues. While place could be thought of as only a reminder, the experiences called forth were also held
For example, when Truong and Christian asked us to return to the place where they last felt ‘at home’ in school, it felt like entering a memory box. As we looked out the second floor school window, Truong pointed out the street corners where gang members had threatened youth. As Truong and Christian walked in the hallways, they pointed out sports banners and team photographs that depicted them as champions and winners. These memories of their experiences came alive for them, and for us, in those moments and we came to see that being in the school was being inside a memory box and allowed them to remember other stories of themselves, stories when they were not early school leavers.
Time
Time is often connected to a sense of doing something at particular moments, moments that provide a chronological structure to experience. Yet, on many occasions, time can be understood from a different vantage point. As Rosiek and Snyder (2020) pointed out: Narratives are often used to represent the temporal unfolding of events on the assumption that narratives are more accurate portrayals of chronological chains of events. If time, however, is not understood as linear, but instead as the contingent product of spatial and material relations, then offering chronological narratives can become self-deceived naturalizations of a unified linear temporality. Stories can, in other words, become ways to convince ourselves that things are simpler than they are. (p. 1153)
This sense of time significantly shapes interviews and how one might understand not only their aim, but how they can impose a linearity and temporal unfolding that limits the views of complexities inherent in the experiences of participants.
In the conversations with Christian, Vera recognizes that early school leaving is not a chronological unfolding of events. Rather, it is an entanglement of events and parallel stories that intersect. Asking Christian “what happens next?’ only led to profound silences, or a lack of words that could string together events. Instead, when Vera asked about Christian’s tattoo images, a sense of time developed that connected to his life stories - the times his dad had left, the times his mother was overwhelmed by her mental health issues, or the times of being in love. Different images carried symbolic value that were linked to life events. These were different markers of time; markers that also spoke of the disruption of causal relationships that time so often sets up. How one sees and experiences time shapes the interview - how the interview is anticipated and how it is lived in the field. An imposed structure of time silenced Christian - Christian did not think of himself as one day being a student and the next day having left school. There were more complicated, and complicating, storylines woven through his experience of leaving school.
What is interesting is that for both Truong and Christian, one could ask: “Does the story reemerge even when the community discourse in which it circulates is disrupted? Does the story have an identifiable being in the future - a purpose - that organizes its movement and activity?” (Rosiek & Snyder, 2020, p. 1156). Even within this sense of time, the future for Christian and Truong is as much in the past as it is ahead. Time in this way becomes a conceptual problem or possibility to disrupt the linearity imposed on experience. This in turn shapes the interview questions.
Context
The contexts in which interviews are situated are critical. The study from which we have drawn in this paper “emerged from an increasing concern about the experiences of youth who leave school early, that is, leave without a high school completion certificate. Early school leaving is, we believe, one of the most complex and persistent social and educational occurrences, and one of the least understood” (Clandinin et al., 2013, p. 1).
While we began to conceptualize our study we were often reminded that the consequences of early school leaving were both social and fiscal in nature. While we understood this, we could not construct our interviews from this limited vantage point. Instead we followed the traditions of other feminist researchers and saw our work as also having the purpose of social and political reform (Reinharz, 1992, p. 22). We felt an ethical obligation that the kinds of questions we were asking would call forth a way of thinking with, and about, experiences more in tune with the complexities experienced by youth. We wanted to understand the issues that the youth themselves talked about, that disrupted the typical discourse of the low achiever, the yearning towards money, or the irresponsible student.
What we showed here was a reconceptualization of context that we need to stay wakeful as researchers to not frame interview questions that affirm deficit perspectives of early school leavers, or that do not see the lives of young people as complex. We also need to understand that early school leaving is not a single event, but often occurs over a lifetime. If this is the context of the phenomenon under study then time also becomes a much more pragmatic issue - it takes time to tell and reflect on years of living. Time then needs to be allocated to engage with participants, potentially over months or years - something that is often more visible in ethnographic studies or narrative studies, including life history work.
Significance of Interviews
Issues of Power
Vera recalls her encounter with Ben, who was part of the early school leaving study. She writes: Ben and I only met once at an urban shopping mall – a perhaps somewhat stereotypical North American meeting place – as well as we had a few very brief telephone conversations; scattered among these were fragments of sentences with his mother and who I assumed was his older sister. These conversations happened when I was trying to connect and stay connected with Ben. Ben and I lived some 300 kilometers apart in the same Canadian province and while we managed to meet once, our lives became too busy and complex it seemed to meet again ... after many attempts, I called Ben one last time and while he finds it challenging to meet again to negotiate his narrative account, he wants his story told. [...] We end with a promise that perhaps one day we will have a chance to meet again. (Caine, 2013a, p. 146)
Interviews, as such, are not neutral or value free, which makes issues of power a significant aspect of interviewing. Sometimes issues of power play out in subtle ways – participants might decline to answer questions – at other times, issues of power are due to structural vulnerabilities that are shaped by issues of gender, race, age, or social positioning (Gluck & Patai, 1991). It is important to both anticipate the role power plays in how data collection is conceptualized and enacted, as well as to be attentive during the interview process of unanticipated ways in which power plays out. Most importantly it is necessary to position participants not simply as subjects to be mined for data, but rather as people who actively engage in the joint production of knowledge and meaning. Ben, who had arrived in Canada via several other countries as a refugee from Burma, was shy and withdrawn when Vera first met him. His story was striking and his life filled with a commitment to his familial obligations and responsibilities. The ontological and ethical commitments of narrative inquiry meant it was important for Vera to position Ben in their work as holding knowledge, as someone who had insights into his experiences.
Although the research interview may seem, on the surface, to be a straightforward endeavour, the relationship between participant and researcher is complex, something to which Vera became very wakeful. The questions researchers need to ask about power extend beyond who is powerful in an interview. Our identities and positions can shift in relation to one another in a single interview or across many (Mason-Bish, 2018). Who we are and how we are located interacts with the situation of the interview (Vähäsantanen & Saarinen, 2013) meaning that power shifts in research relationships, in different research spaces, and over the course of a whole inquiry. Paying attention to the way power moves through the research encounter is a way to attend to relational ethics as well as to explore meaning and deepen understanding: the reason the interview is being conducted in the first place.
When researchers think about questions of power in interviews, it is necessary to balance obligations to the participant with obligations to the topic or field under study. Without this balance, one or the other can be neglected in ways that compromise ethical integrity and the goodness of the research. Another balance that is important to strike is to think about the presence of both power and vulnerability in the research interview. Researchers possess knowledge and characteristics that can confer power, but researchers are also vulnerable in ways that shape how they interact with research participants. Similarly, participants may experience vulnerabilities, but to assume vulnerability is an exercise of power that potentially forecloses participants’ identities and expressions of experience.
Paying attention to how power might work within a research interview, or larger study, can transform it into a resource for inquiry. Researchers who take a feminist standpoint, for example, might consider an interview to be an opportunity to locate and redistribute power (Reinharz, 1992). This implies that power is present in regards to participant’s expertise; that it is critical to talk with and hear participants differently. Concerns around power do not mean that the researcher should not exercise power to make decisions about a research interview. For example, knowing how to guide a research interview, ask good questions, and act upon knowledge, can help participants to perform.
Considerations around the ways that technological mediation can shape power in interviews is also important. One way we see the importance of interviews conducted by telephone, and video platforms means that there may be more access for participants in rural or other inaccessible locations to be included. However, there are special skills that are required to develop relationships with participants that ensure comfort for them and quality and content of the interviews can be impacted (Davies et al., 2020).
Attention to Difference
Attention to power is often accompanied by an attention to difference. It is important to attend to notions of difference through all aspects of the study, but particularly as researchers think alongside participants Before I ever met Ben, I knew he was an immigrant from Burma who had left high school and was now working for many hours each week. My attempt to piece together an initial story was marked by my struggle to understand a life I knew little about. I lacked the social-political, historical, and cultural context of his life. I recall my anxiety and worry, my franticness in attempting to find friends who could help me ... as I struggled I began to wonder about my franticness, about my futile attempts to compose a storyline. Amidst this I began to wonder: would I be able to hear Ben’s story as he told it? Would I be able to retell his life story? Who was he? What would he think was important for me to know? Where would he begin to tell? Would it be OK to ask personal questions that revealed my not knowing, yet were questions that didn’t position him? (Caine, 2013b, p. 146)
This attention to difference is, in many ways, marked by an attention to positionality in relation to experience. It is an attention that both researchers and participants need to keep in mind. Participants sometimes need to know who they are in relation to us - this knowing helps locate and anchor the questions and wonders we raise amidst relationships. Vera’s ability to think with the questions she asked Ben was important to understand, her lack of knowledge shaped the questions she was able to ask. Some researchers have called for a map of one’s social identity (Jacobson & Mustafa, 2019) as a way to explore and attend to differences. I remember my sweating hands. I arrived several hours before our planned meeting and I wandered the mall. The mall was a meeting place Ben had chosen, because it was close to his home and a place he had been many times. I remember walking in endless circles, looking into people’s faces and wondering if Ben too would pace like I did. How would I recognize him? Getting closer to the meeting time I wandered to the agreed upon place and each time someone unknown to me would pass, I would smile. (Caine, 2013b, p. 147)
In thinking with these experiences, we can see how much Vera’s initial engagement with Ben was shaped by seeking the familiar, something, even an outward appearance, that would help her recognize who Ben was. Vera struggled to attend to differences in ways that embraced uncertainty. Some of this was misguided by a fear of asking the wrong questions, of making assumptions, and erasing differences that she neither recognized nor understood.
Impact of Interviews
While interviews are most commonly seen as methods for collecting information about phenomena from participants, they are more than sources of information. Interviews have an impact on participants and their lives, researchers and their lives, and the communities within which both researchers and participants are nested.
Personal and Practical Impact of Interviews on Participants
For many participants who are part of interview studies, this may be one of the first times they have had an opportunity to tell their stories, that is, to tell of their experiences to an outsider. As Hiroko Kubota showed with her study of men who are homeless in Japan, interviews can become a space of appearance in Arendt’s (1958) terms. As Ama, one participant in Kubota’s (2017) study, offered “this feeling of being listened to eases my mind.” We also saw this with the youth in the early school leavers study, as the interviews provided them with the opportunity to feel heard, and to be able to tell a story of themselves as people deserving to be interviewed. As Vera shared after her last brief phone interview with Ben, As I hear myself talking with him about the many insights I have gained from his telling and life I can sense his body straightening out, his voice becomes clear and has more tonal variance ... “yes, really?”, a mix of pride and disbelief. Caine, 2013a, p.146)
In the early school leavers study, there were ripple effects of participants’ involvement. These ripples extended into the families, friends, and communities within which participants, and others who had similar experiences, were embedded. As school and schooling policy makers and researchers read the accounts of the participants in the early leaving study, they spoke of the need for policy changes that would allow early school leavers to be able to more easily return to school when their lives permitted them to return. People, who were parents, spoke of understanding the experiences of their own children in schools as they contemplated leaving school.
Impacts on Researchers
Research interviews with participants can have immediate and longer term impact on researchers. Meeting and engaging with participants may influence researchers’ understandings of lives lived under very different circumstances or contexts. For example, Mickelson, a researcher in the early school leaving study, came to understand in new ways how some Indigenous youth experienced some places as too “white” (Mickelson, 2013). For Vera and Jean, their experiences in the two youth’s long ago school allowed them to understand the physical place of school differently and influenced our own understanding of the place of school in people’s lives. The impact on researchers also becomes evident as they try to represent the findings of their studies in ways that allow the richness of individuals’ experiences to become visible but do not construct them in ways that increase their vulnerability. As researchers publish their research findings there are ripples created by the ways that other researchers and policy makers respond to, and take up, their representations and findings.
Impacts on Communities
Participating in interviews offers participants an opportunity to see themselves as holders of important knowledge, knowledge that matters. For many study participants this may be the first time that they have seen themselves in this way. Often this extends to communities, many of whom do not see themselves represented in research. It was Lessard (2013), who worked with Indigenous participants in the early school leavers study, who drew our attention to the importance of thinking with community. Thinking with community shaped many things both as he engaged with participants in conversations, and as we wrote the narrative accounts. He wrote: Sometimes stories sit with me for a long time. I am not certain how to begin them. I don’t always know the right way to share them or how to take care of them in an honourable way. I am learning. Hearing stories holds great responsibility and, as I write about the experiences of youth, I try to remember the voices of those who shared their stories with me. I am cautious when I write the stories […]. I am aware that stories can be read in more than one way. [...] I sit down often with the older ones in the community and the Elders and ask them to help me in this way. I often think of history and my own community and the stories that come from this place. I try to form an image in my mind as I write, thinking about how life might have been for our Elders, and the sacrifices they made to help us on our current journeys. (p. 191) I chose to write this particular story because it is what lies at the base of Skye’s song, her story of school as I recall it. I wrote this specific story for Skye and her family and the wisdom that they continue to provide for me in the form of cultural teachings. As I share this story now, I ask those that choose to read it, to think deeply with the heart and the mind, and imagine the beat of many drums playing in the background ... as each of you begin to hear the sacred songs ... you will start to understand her story in a different way ... I would like to call it a “dance me home song.” (Lessard, 2013, p. 192)
Lessard (2013) shows us that the questions we ask and the stories we later tell are like a reciprocal or recursive relationship. Relational responsibilities should shape the interviews and conversations that we engage in. Questions in interviews and conversations often arise through particular viewpoints and experiences and there is a necessity to engage with communities and others, such as Indigenous knowledge keepers as a way to prepare. Wilson (2008) in Research as Ceremony helps us see the impact within community. The questions we then ask may be less about schools and more so about schools as institutional settings that shape lives, schools as nested within colonial histories, and schools as sites of racism and discrimination.
Considerations of Quality
How quality is defined emerges from the standpoint, with its associated epistemological and ontological commitments, of the research design. When interviews are part of a research design with post-positivist commitments, that is, with a theory of knowledge that one could prove or disprove by empirical studies, quality is determined differently from an interview in a, for example, study with a feminist standpoint. Interviewing within a post-positivist standpoint serves to provide empirical evidence that provides a stable knowledge base. Within this post-positivist view of knowledge, concern is drawn to ways to control research bias that a researcher and contexts could introduce. Considerable effort is made to standardize researcher behaviour, questions, subjects being studied, and contexts such as subject characteristics, and conditions under which interviews were conducted. The epistemological commitment is to generate certainty within a set of parameters. The goal of a post-positivist standpoint is to allow findings from the interview to be generalized to a larger population than the subjects under study.
As interviews began to be taken up from different standpoints such as feminist and equity standpoints that attend to the linguistic, cultural, and institutional contexts of human knowledge, the criteria for judging the quality of interview studies and interview data shifts. While there is still attention to understanding that researchers, and contexts of interviews, can influence what is learned through the interviews, quality is determined by how well, and how thoroughly, researchers made visible who they are through various means of self- disclosure and how well contexts and subjects are described. In order to attend to these different standpoints, interviews shift from being highly structured and standardized to being semi-structured interviews that allow knowledge to be co-constructed. Other criteria such as trustworthiness and verisimilitude are used as quality indicators.
In the study of the experiences of the youth who left school early, the research intention was not to develop findings from the interviews that could be generalized to populations of youth. The research intention was to inquire into the experiences of each youth within conversations that allowed insight into the ways life events shifted over time, place, and social relations. In order to judge the quality of the conversational data, we needed to understand how Truong’s life was shifted by his life circumstances, the ways he composed his life. We needed to understand Christian’s life in its particularity. Quality within, for example, this narrative standpoint is judged by different criteria than validity, reliability, and generalizability. As conversations are acknowledged as interviews within different standpoints, new ways to judge quality become visible. To consider the quality of interviews from a narrative standpoint, for example, we developed touchstones for assessing the quality of conversations within narrative inquiry that included an attentiveness to attending to lives in motion, not as something fixed in time, but as in movement, attention to the temporal, social, and place dimensions (Clandinin & Caine, 2013). These touchstones arise from close consideration of the ontological commitments of interviews from a narrative standpoint.
Considerations of Ways Forward
Being Explicit About One’s Standpoint
As we conceptualized this paper, we saw the importance of being explicit about the standpoint of the research and about the research design in order to understand the use of interviews. Each aspect of an interview study is shaped by an understanding of epistemological and ontological commitments that are embodied in a standpoint. This close analysis of a research standpoint at the outset of a study will allow a researcher to understand the ways that this shapes the purposes, form, and analysis of interviews.
Relational Ethics
As university researchers undertaking research, we are accountable to institutional review boards of universities, schools, hospitals and other institutions. In general, institutional review boards focus on what safeguards participants/subjects and researchers, as well as provides opportunities to think through the ethical ramifications of research. However, for some research undertaken within feminist, postmodern, and narrative standpoints, that is research that is more longitudinal, relational, and negotiated, it is important to also consider relational ethics as well as principle-based approaches such as frequently underpin institutional ethical review. Those concerned with relational ethics frequently draw on the work of Noddings (1983) who showed that relational work involves care. As Caine et al. (2019) pointed out, however, research relationships are not “characterized or underpinned by an agenda to
Community Involvement
One of the ways forward that we feel is significant in interviews is community involvement. Much of our learning comes from work alongside Indigenous colleagues in the fields of Health, particularly HIV researchers (Guta et al., 2017; Jackson & Masching, 2016). Often their work is framed around community-based research or participatory action research. Both approaches highlight the necessity to engage with and involve community members in all stages of a research project. In many ways the involvement of community members adds depth and complexity to our work as it opens up multiple ways to think about the work and, most importantly, it helps us live in ways that are marked by relational responsibilities. The questions we ask, and the conversations we engage in, can no longer be about the other, but they become about the relationships we are, or are not, part of.
At the same time, thinking with communities can lead us to experience tensions. It can challenge researchers to make sense of the multiple and often conflicting viewpoints and experiences that exist within communities. Instead of turning away from these tensions, if we attend carefully and in humble ways, the tensions point us to places of wonder and inquiry, to places that might become part of the research and places that help us enlarge and challenge understanding. Lessard writes in a narrative account: I remember hearing them say “Come out and visit. You will learn all the kids’ stories. We invite you.” With these simple but powerful words I knew what had to be done. (Lessard, 2013, p. 196)
Long before Lessard could even ask a question or engage in a conversation, he knew that he needed to follow the invitation of Skye’s parents. He visited them during a powwow. I was here to reconnect with this family and to honor their request to attend this event before I began conversations with their daughter about her school stories. The protocol was different than what is typical, and far different than the way I have heard other school stories. However, I knew that I must follow the lead and do what Arnie asked me; it was the right way. (Lessard, 2013, p. 198)
At the end of the narrative account and after many conversations with Skye he wrote, I wonder when she and her family will help teach me the next steps in my “Dance Me Home” song. I am hoping that when I hear the drum and the voices singing in the background that I will continue to dance. I am hoping that I will be holding my little girl’s hand teaching her the right way to dance, always in a circle, only in a circle. (Lessard, 2013, p. 205)
It is here that we see the return to the communities, not just of the participants, but also our own. The questions and conversations become part of a larger journey in our lives and the communities we live within.
Summary of Key Considerations
The purpose of qualitative research is to deepen understanding and insight into human experience. As such, qualitative research is a form of social inquiry. Although depth of understanding is an outcome of analytic and interpretive research practices, analysis and interpretation are dependent upon the gathering of meaningful data. This means that the procedures associated with the research, such as interviewing, must be thought about and conducted with attention to relationships, context, and the unfolding of experiences across time and places. There exists a relationship, however brief, between researcher and participants that warrants care. Interviewing must attend to the complexity of the lives into which we seek to inquire, as well as the complexity of the lives of those who design and undertake the inquiry.
Many stories are at play in the conduct of research that involves interviews. In a research interview, a story is unfolding onto a page or in a recording that becomes pages of transcript. A story is also unfolding in the room, or in a place where researcher and participant meet. In composing a paper to bring research interviews to life, the experiences of Vera and Jean in the early school leavers study have sensitized us more acutely to the ways that research interviews act upon participants, researchers, and communities in ways that might be more or less easily anticipated. Insofar as research interviews have an effect on the conduct and findings of a study, their impact lives on in the ways they make possible a relational negotiated co-composition of knowledge and enduring connections between people and communities.
Stories and experiences require attention and care precisely because they are alive in people’s lives; they are carried forward from the rarified context of a research interview into the worlds of researchers, participants, and those with whom they interact. In this way the interview can not only shape stories on the page, but also the stories that become part of the world in which participants, researchers, and our research findings are embedded.
How to design and conduct a research interview, therefore, necessitates recognition of the ontological and epistemological commitments that shape research study design. A research interview cannot be crafted without attending to questions about: the purpose of the interview; the place it takes up alongside the needs, interests, and vulnerabilities of researchers and participants; the relationship between the intent for interviews and the places in which research interviews are conducted; how research interviews can open up as well as foreclose insight into experiences; and, how interviews are shaped by considerations of power and positionality. By attending to these questions, researchers can resist reducing interviews to a simplified ask-and-answer procedure.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
Funding
ORCID iD
