Recording mistakes

I use a digital recorder when interviewing people. The department lent me one when I was doing my MRes and I liked it so much that I bought my own. It was a very reasonable price on Amazon.

However, interviews have potential for technical mistakes in recording:

• battery goes flat
• device is full

I now recognise the warning noises it gives me for these problems, but now I've added another; I didn't switch it on.

The recorder has two switches, one on the device and one on the microphone. I'd switched one on but the other overrode it. During the conversation, I wanted to make eye contact, so couldn't pick up the device and peer short sightedly at it to check it. I only realised as I went to switch it off. Bother!

Immediately I took extra time to think over and make notes on the meeting, switched on the recorder and spoke my thoughts. But my speaking took only six minutes and the meeting had been half an hour. What a pain!

High

On a high at the moment because I've been talking to people, or rather listening to them tell me what really happens, how they engage with each other. That would give me more of a high than sitting at a desk reading the academic literature. I read a phrase out loud to a Non-Academic Colleague:

"Developing new ways of dealing with materiality in organizational research is critical if we are to understand contemporary forms of organizing that are increasingly constituted by multiple, emergent, shifting, and interdependent technologies. "

Snore Zzz, was the response. It may be a very important sentence, but so many adjectives left my NAC confused and bored.

I enjoy watching, observing and finding out how how people do what they do. And the literature helps me make sense of what I see.

Ethical issues of interviews

On the whole, I don't think most interviews that I've done so far have changed any participant's life view, but there were some reactions and reflections on their work. Three young men particularly seemed reflective.

1. One participant talked openly and enthusiastically about his work, expressing his willingness to learn; he hoped to learn as much from me as I from him, though he talked more, which is what I needed. But he talked around all sorts of other topics away from my focus of interest. The way he talked was saying something about the perception he wanted other people to have of him, not just his perception of the project. A very outgoing man, he runs a couple of blogs, and twitters and electronically shares his technical expertise with any who want to know. He also follows up business ideas and notes their applications.
2. Another participant was quieter, renowned for his shyness, but he chatted and thoughtfully followed up all my questions with his own ideas. He even concluded, as if he'd hardly realised it before, that his experience of the project had brought out more in him, that he was less shy than he had been and perhaps now a more confident contributor.
   
3. A third participant as we talked seemed to change his perception of the role he had played, as if he hadn't realised what he'd done and what he'd learned. The conversation implied more changes in his life view, which is something that Kvale writes about.
   

That's where ethical issues arise. The interviewer's role may affect the participant. Kvale suggests different roles in relation to participants:

• exploiter,
• reformer
• advocate
• friend.

I could add teacher, counsellor, career adviser. Talking about relationships in a project constructs a perception of the relationships in both interviewer and interviewee. Should I do that? I can't not talk about relationships - that's the research.

The questions may change the participant's self-concept. I can't help that consequence, but must be aware of the ethics, do no harm.

Another issue Kvale draws attention to is the independence of the researcher. If a researcher identifies too closely with a group of participants, then the researcher might emphasis some findings rather than others. However, I think that's obviated when I speak to participants with different roles on a project. It's more likely to happen if I get to talk to only one person, or only one group of people playing similar roles.

These are ethical issues that didn't come to mind when I first proposed the research. They were never part of my application to the research ethics panel. Perhaps I'll raise them next time we have a seminar on ethics.

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Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing

Transcripts

For all the interviews on my first couple of case studies, I did the transcription. Some of the later interviews I get transcribed. However, there're issues about transcription.

In one case study, most of the interviews took place in an otherwise empty meeting room. sound was clear - or it was to me anyhow as I didn't have anything to compare when I came to transcribe. No interruptions happened. The table available to sit at together was short, so interviewer and interviewee could sit at a corner at right angle,s and usually the participant interviewee came in and chose a seat at the end of the table with his/ her back to the door.

Another interview was in a meeting room with a big table that took up most of the room. I had a helper who sat on one site, and the participant on the other opposite the helper. Acoustics were good, but the interviews were rushed because of circumstance. Another time, there were two participants together, squeezed into a corner of a room with me and my helper. Later my helper commented that perhaps her presence might have affected what was said - interesting. Again, that interview was rushed. But the acoustics were adequate.

I've done several interviews in what I thought was a quiet office with good acoustics and no interruptions but a transcriber has commented on unclear speech. I've done interviews in quite noisy rooms with lots of other people, yet the quality was good and the transcriber reported no problems.

Listening again to the interviews with problems, it seems there might be two issues.

1. the speaker was unclear,
   
2. the transcriber might have a different accent from the speaker

Having read Kvale on transcription, I now realise that in transcribing, I'm constructing something to model the conversation that took place so I'm now annotating transcriptions where I hear something different from what the transcriber put down. Not only are there differences in what people might hear from the recording, but the body language is missing, the action of sketching diagrams as we talked is missing, and I've gone through each transcription anonymising all identifiable information.

So I've created my own construction on what was discussed before I've even started any analysis.

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Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing

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