Semi-structured telephone interviews
From Dar
Contents |
Technology
I used a very simple technological solution for conducting a series of semi-structured telephone interviews. I turned on the speaker on my landline phone and used the internal mike on my iBook to record them in a Quicktime Pro. I did this by selecting "new audio recording" from the Quicktime tool bar. The sound quality was excellent and certainly surpassed anything I had been able to achieve with Skype.
The Schedule of Questions
I set up a very simple template of questions to ask with supplementary questions to add if areas needed further expansion:
As I said Andy has been asked to write a report for his professional association about the financial model used by ukcider (i.e. free to use without any subscriptions, sponsorship or paid workers) so that they can include it in a comparison of various ways of running communities online. I would like you to mostly focus on the cider makers in the group rather than the whole group.
- First of all I'd like you explain a bit about the way people use the group.
- Can you give any examples of people using the group for learning or teaching?
If not already covered add:
- How do you mainly use it?
- In what ways do you think the use of the group is affected by the
financial model (free to use - no paid workers, subs or sponsorship)?
Be prepared to explain the financial model again here in more detail
- Can you think of any ways that being a free group interferes or
helps with people's learning?
Try to encourage specific citing of specific instances if possible
- Is there anything else you'd like to say about the group?
- In what ways would you like to see the group develop in the future? What would you like to see more of?
The interviews, changes made to the template and silences
After the first interview I added more detail to the initial explanation of the possible financial models to clarify things and improve the flow of the later sections.
I made very few other changes, simply adding one or two questions to follow up areas that emerged from participants.
I found as the series of interviews progressed that my confidence grew and it became easier to leave silences. These were very important and gave space for participants to think through and decide if they had more to add on a particular topic.
All the interviews remained quite focussed with considerable relevent data being given for the main and for subsiduary areas. However there may be slightly better quality data in the later interviews possibly because of my improving technique.
Transcribing Data
Listening back to the interviews as I typed was a slow process. I found it difficult to type more than one sentence or phrase as a time. I played the .mov files back and typed in this way for several sessions until all the interviews were transcribed. After each transcrpition session I listened to the interview again whilst reading the transcript. I found that this slow rhythm actually aided the reserach process. (I have observed this before in other projects.) This had three main outcomes:
- I became very familiar with the data
- I spotted a simple pronoun error in my transcript of one interview which changed the meaning of a whole paragraph.
- I was starting to spot emergent themes in the data prior to data analysis.
- I listened to one section of one interview multiple times to ensure I had the correct word (In one of the interviews a participants decribes how a lurking friend "mines" the posts in the group for information - using as a metaphor a term commonly in use in knowledge management)
