NLP how?

Over the last few months I've spent several long weekends on a neuro linguistic programming (NLP) training course and am pleased to have successfully received the certificate today.

This NLP course was practical training about the structure of subjective experience, training I would have used when interviewing my case study participants because I would have used slightly different follow up questions. The most difficult question to answer is 'how?' which is capability and one of five logical levels of structuring behaviour. My research question is 'how' question, and I'm finding it really difficult to get the answers out of interview data. Perhaps with NLP practice I might have asked more eliciting questions.

Too bad - that's learning. And I do have a new certificate :)

Media training

I went on a media training day,a full day session organised and run by Janet Sumner in the Open Broadcast Unit (OBU) in Milton Keynes. Its purpose was to develop skills for on-line delivery of courses and research, such as podcasts and youtube videos.

It was the best training day I've been on for ages!

They started fast, within half an hour having us in front of a camera and asking us:

• Tell us about your research?
• What are your findings?
• How might we use your findings?

There were four trainees and three trainers, so one trainee would be in front of the camera man and the interviewer, while the third trainer briefed and rehearsed the other trainees. By coffee time we were back viewing the rushes (Rushes are the raw material which are cut down into show reels or final TV programmes) and assessing our performances.

1. we watched the rushes of each trainee in turn.
   
2. the trainers asked for the trainee's assessment,
3. each trainer gave their assessment

So we got a lot of feedback:
Avoid lists and jargon. Give examples - crowbar in your stories. Practise telling the stories you want to share. Make the point. Know what point you want to make. Pitch it at an intelligent fourteen year old. Weight the special words. Practise your one-minute piece to camera (PTC). Learn your script by heart.

Over the interviews in the morning we stumbled and stuttered, some more than others. By the end of the afternoon we'd worked with props, done a PTC and self shoots. The self shoots revealed how relaxed we could be when interviewing each other. So we'd got something to aim for.

I was fascinated by my fellow trainees' work who told us about:

• systems (Kevin Collins)
  
• recycling (Chris Thomas)
  
• Buddhist Finance (Mike Lucas)
  

I'm not expecting to be on television any time soon, though, if you want to see me, you should soon be able to find the edited clips on the Open University youtube channel. This training can help prepare for questions at the viva though, and I need every opportunity I can get to practise communicating verbally.

If anyone offers you the chance to do this training, grab it. It's brilliant.

Interview questions again

Sometimes people agree to give me half an hour of their time, for which I'm grateful, but it's not long. So I need to be efficient in eliciting information that tells me how they engage with people on an IT project, and how that relationship brings value. From a prompt sheet of 20 questions my minimum questions must cover:

1. What's your expertise?
2. What is/were the relationships like?
3. What has helped or hindered relationships?
4. What did you learn?
5. How is that (engaged) relationship valuable?
6. Where do the most value adding interactions happen?

My senior PG at the next desk tells me you get more skilled with practice. Good - give me practice!

Asking stupid questions

Recently, a world business radio 4 programme interviewed a couple of Icelandic women founders of a new Icelandic investment company called Audur. See Peter Day's comment here. They say that women in business are risk aware, rather than risk averse, so not afraid to ask stupid questions.

Stupid questions are what I think I'm asking sometimes when I'm talking with my research interviewees. Usually, it's a three letter acronym (TLA) that throws me, like:

• 'MOJ' - Ministry of Justice, which is a new government department so not an acronym that I've yet often come across.
• SRM - supplier relationship management. I've known about CRM - customer relationship management for a long time, so from the context I could work out what SRM was.
• Framework agreements - I'd just accepted the term, but when someone talked about 'corofs' I had to stop and ask, so was that a silly question? The interviewee spelled it out for me CALL-OFFs. The accent was different from mine, and I knew too little about procurement to have recognised the term. Once I'd learnt, I looked up call-offs and learnt much more about UK government framework agreements from here and here.
  

But I do feel embarrased and vulnerable when I don't know something or can't hear it. I hardly dare ask because perhaps my interviewee won't share more because I'm so ignorant. But that's why I'm asking people, so I can learn.

So yes, I'm risk aware and I must keep on asking the stupid questions.

Types of interview questions

Kvale elaborates on types of interview questions under the headings:

1. introducing questions: e.g. "can you tell about.." "do you remember an occasion when .."
2. follow-up questions: e.g. nod
3. probing questions: "could you say something more about that?"
4. specifying questions: e.g. "what did you think then?"
5. direct questions
6. indirect questions: e.g. "how do you think /believe other ... ?"
7. structuring questions: e.g. "I'd now like to introduce .."
8. silence
9. interpreting questions: e.g. "you mean that...?"

I can plan some of these questions, like introducing, specifying and direct questions, but other types are where an interviewer has to be listening and reacting to the situation. It's quite reassuring to read these categories that someone else recognises as questions that you are likely to ask if you want to get more from an interview. Silence is interesting too. It doesn't show up much on my recordings because I've set the machine's variable control voice actuator, so that it only records when the volume is at the threshold level. But sometimes a participant needs silence while reflecting, and an interviewer mustn't interrupt, but allow that time to reflect. Anyhow, overtalking means the recording becomes difficult to hear afterwards, so silence is important.

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Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing

Interviewing

There is so much on interviewing that Kvale has written a whole book on it. Although it might have been useful to read earlier, reading it now with a little more experience of research interviewing means that it makes more sense to me. For example, chapter 7 has a table that matches research questions to interview questions. I have problems matching mine because I've let the social capital framework interfere. The social capital framework guides the interview questions. What I want is to relate the research questions and the social capital framework. So my interview structure is based round:

1. background (to project and to participant)
2. relationships
3. knowledge (or learning)
4. value

The background is important as a start to make sure I've got the context. The questions may sometimes elicit structural dimensions of social capital.
Relationships matter. That is the crux of my interest- how do the relationships create value? So the interview questions here concern social capital in the relationship and structural dimensions. But they don't elicit information about knowledge. I ask what's helped and hindered relationships. And specifically what challenges to relationships have there been and how have they been overcome. Another interview question address specificity by asking for an anecdote or story. the question sometimes falls on blank faces. perhaps I should reword it.
Knowledge I ask about learning - what have people learned from each other? And how do they use that knowledge. I can't see how these questions address engagement though.
Value Sometimes in asking about learning I get an answer that suggests qualitative value in the learning process through building shared meanings, which is part of the cognitive dimension of social capital, and probably the most valuable non-financial and immeasurable gain from the relationship. But the valuable relationships need not be client and consultant, but developer and user, perhaps, mediated by the outsider, i.e. the consultant. So the value is a value chain! A valuable learning comes from a valuable relationships mediated and catalyzed by a consultant intervention. I've drawn a diagram of it, starting from the left with the people creating the relationship and moving to the right where the outputs are learning and a new IT system.

So I've got somewhere in my thoughts but not arrived at what I set out to do - depict in a table the relationship between my research questions and my interview questions.

The diagram must also include the value added impact on the IT system being developed. It's the human element, the soft side that matters. Engagement is soft. Perhaps I should draw rich pictures for each case study, following Checkland's soft systems methodology.

And I don't have many why interview questions - it's my job (Kvale, p131) but one I did use once was quite revealing, when someone said "It's changed", and I asked "Why do you think it's changed?" The participant wondered if they were doing something different, and it was something do with using consultants.

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Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing

Methodology

Something's bugging me. It's how to match the research questions to the answers I got to my interview questions. But my interview questions were framed round the Nahapiet & Ghoshal paper, not around my research questions.

I happened to mention this niggle to my third party monitor. She asked questions about my approach, the methodology I'm using, or my research strategy for making sense of the data in order to work out where I am. She suggests I write the methodology chapter now, as a story of how I done it. She knows I'm interested in story telling and narrative analysis and suggested some reading, including looking at the methodology chapters of recent PhDs, especially from Lancaster where they stress methodology.

It was a really helpful discussion - beyond what a third party monitor's brief might be - and I'm grateful for the time and suggestions.

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Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) 'Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage', Academy of Management Review, 23 (2), pp. 242-266. 842
PS. The bug in the photo is a wood-louse spider.

Question bank

The ESRC provides access to a question bank. I’m looking for techniques that will elicit social networks in a semi structured interview. The ESRC link is a mine of survey information and an excellent resource – for someone else.

It’s for structured surveys, not my approach.

Interview structure

What words do you use in an interview to get the information you want?

I structured my interview questions round {Nahapiet & Ghoshal's framework with the three dimensions of social capital:

• structural
• cognitive
• relational

so I had questions about each of these, but the words were useless for interview purposes. Like you don't go and say to someone

"Tell me about your appropriable organisation."

They're going to go "What?!" And you can't bluntly ask

"Who do you get on with?"

Supervisors helped me write simpler questions like "Who do you spend most time with?" Also sup#2 says that we've got a couple of academics here who know techniques that help a researcher elicit people’s networks of contacts.

I've rewritten the interview schedule and drafted an agenda. I've tested them on a fellow student and seem to have elicited some information on structure in a job he once had. I'm not so sure yet about the cognitive and relational aspects. Slow progress.

Now, get access!

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Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) 'Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage', Academy of Management Review, 23 (2), pp. 242-266. 842