common mistakes in interviewing

1. common mistakes in interviewing • Ignoring prime opportunities for probing • Interrupting • Unshakeable assumptions • Embedding answers in your questions • Asking more than one question at a time

2. analysing interviews • transcribing – tedious but necessary • how tedious? 1:3 ratio (interview:transcription time) • memory jog – making links between interviews • code as you go, but make transcript itself visually distinct from your codes

3. INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods Projective Interviewing

4. What is projective interviewing? • creative strategies for eliciting description, interpretation that incorporate materials (photos, objects, diagrams etc) into the interview process • …but can be distracting, time-consuming, intrusive

5. What is projective interviewing? • Photoelicitation • Photo diaries • Mapping Exercises • Spatial maps • Social maps • Tours • Sorting Tasks • Personal construct interviews • Technology/Cultural Probes

6. photoelicitation • “photographs are charged with psychological and highly emotional elements and symbols. In the depth study of culture it is often this very characteristic that allows people to express their ethos while reading the photographs.” [Collier and Collier] Family Photo Albums beyond photos: stories, skits

7. mapping exercises • geographical spaces • map of the home, neighborhood • social spaces (enumeration tasks) • social network mapping • hierarchical diagramming

8. hierarchical diagramming

9. touring spaces • home tours - to elicit responses to the material environment, comments on arrangement of space • tour of computer ‘interior’ • tour of a user interface • tour of a mobile phone – address book, text messages, call log

10. sorting activities • images of technologies, settings, advertisements, people • on what basis would you sort these images? • pick the odd one out of a group and explain. • e.g. personal construct interviews

11. Example 1:“The Meaning of Domestic Technologies: a personal construct analysis of familial gender relations” – Sonia Livingstone • Topic: Looking at how husbands and wives separately experience and account for their domestic technologies • Method: separate interviews with husband and wife, in home, for 45 minutes. Asked to sort technologies into groups and explain. • outcome: women emphasize domestic technologies as necessities, different notions of control over tech, the telephone as key difference

12. Example 2: cultural probes • Packets of information and tasks handed out to participants (w/ interviews before and/or after) • Topic: attitudes of widely dispersed European elderly towards their lives, cultural environs, and technology. • [Also: technology probes as a related interdisciplinary methodological approach] [Gaver et al.]

13. Projective Techniques: some benefits • Bridging the distance between lived experience and the artificiality of the interview event • Aiding memory (cognitive assistance) • Accessing the affective dimension of experience • Engagement and the research partnership -- keeping interviewees committed to the task

14. Summary: who creates the artifact?

15. Summary: when/where artifact is created

16. Expert/Elite Interviews and Focus Groups • Tuesdays class - Megan Finn, Bob Bell, Ashwin Mathew (PhD students in the iSchool) will reflect on their experiences conducting expert/elite interviews