Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences
Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences, 4th Ed. Irving Seidman
It is this process of selecting constitutive details of experience, reflecting on them, giving them order, and thereby making sense of them that makes telling stories a meaning-making experience.
At the root of in-depth interviewing is an interest in understanding the lived experience of other people and the meaning they make of that experience.
Interviewing research takes a great deal of time and, sometimes, money. The researcher has to conceptualize the project, establish access and make contact with participants, interview them, transcribe the data, and then work with the material and share what he or she has learned.
The word interviewing covers a wide range of practices. There are tightly structured, survey interviews with preset, standardized, normally closed questions. At the other end of the continuum are open-ended, apparently unstructured, anthropological interviews that might be seen almost, according to Spradley (1979), as friendly conversations.
A phenomenological approach to interviewing focuses on the experiences of participants and the meaning they make of that experience. While focusing on human experience and its meaning, phenomenology stresses the transitory nature of human experience.
We seek our participants’ point of view of their experience.
Through observation we can observe others’ experience from our point of view. In interviewing guided by phenomenology, we strive to understand a person’s experience from their point of view
We must be modest about our expectations.
It is never possible to understand another perfectly.
If we could do that, we would be that other person.
Lived experience is what we experience as it happens, but we can only get at what we experience after it happens through a reconstruction of that experience
“The aim of phenomenology is to transform lived experience into a textual expression of its essence”
the focus on lived experience accessed through language provides the rationale for taking the words our participants use seriously and following up on them when appropriate.
the meaning people make of their experience affects the way they carry out that experience
By asking participants to reconstruct their experience and then reflect on its meaning, interviewers encourage participants to engage in that “act of attention” that then allows them to consider the meaning of a lived experience.
As in language, context is crucial to understanding the meaning of participants’ experience from their point of view.
Interviewing allows us to put behavior in context and provides access to understanding their action.
we choose to interview participants if at all possible who are currently engaged in those experiences that are relevant to the study.
we take the time to establish a contextual history for the participants’ current experience.
exploring the meaning of peoples’ experiences in the context of their lives.
The first interview establishes the context of the participants’ experience. The second allows participants to reconstruct the details of their experience within the context in which it occurs. And the third encourages the participants to reflect on the meaning their experience holds for them.
We ask for stories about their experience in school as a way of eliciting details.
The three-interview structure works best, in my experience, when the researcher can space each interview from 3 days to a week apart.
the development of the relationship between the participants and the interviewers positively.
the fact is that interviewers are a part of the interviewing picture. They ask questions, respond to the participant, and at times even share their own experiences.
we recognize and affirm the role of the instrument, the human interviewer.
by interviewing a number of participants, we can connect their experiences and check the comments of one participant against those of others.
Internal consistency over a period of time leads one to trust that she is not lying to the interviewer.
Rather than seeking a “disinterested” position as a researcher, the interviewer needs to understand and affirm his or her interest in order to build on the energy that can come from it.
How will your work build on what has been done already?
What do they get out of participating? What do they risk?
