Last week I went to the beautiful campus
of Loyola Marymount University for IRDL 2017. I’m glad that this wonderful
research methods training program received funding to continue for another
three years – more academic librarians will benefit from it and gain important
skills to become more competent and confident practitioner researchers. I had
great conversations with the participants this year. They were all working on
interesting projects – e.g. how ARL libraries design their fundraising page on
the library website, how students understand or misunderstand library jargon,
how students’ interpretation of research differs from faculty’s expectation and
observation of their research behavior, just to name a few. I can’t wait to
read more about these great projects in journal publications.
In the past week, I taught during the
day, and worked on other projects at night (yes, it’s a productive week for
me!). Particularly, I took full advantage of LMU library’s subscription to SAGE
Research Methods, and read a number of articles about the research method –
interview. There are different ways to use interview in gathering qualitative
data. Here’s a summary of them from the SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative
Research:
- Convergent
interviewing – a technique that aims to collect, analyze, and interpret
people’s experiences, opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge that converge
around a set of interviews. It was created primarily to address issues in under-researched
areas. It permits in-depth interviewing by promoting a cyclical research
process that requires ongoing analysis as part of the overall strategy. Interviewers
engage in a constant comparative reflexive process that permits detailed rich
content and theoretical sampling as researchers seek to continuously test
emerging interpretations from early interviews in subsequent interviews. - Cognitive
interviewing – it encompasses a variety of approaches for eliciting qualitative
data on how participants interpret and respond to a wide variety of situations.
Cognitive interviewing increasingly is used in the evaluation of technology
interfaces such as websites and tools for informatics. It is used in education
to understand how students think about content and respond to test items and in
marketing to understand how to evaluate products better. - Conversational
interviewing – an approach used by research interviewers to generate verbal data
through talking about specified topics with research participants in an
informal and conversational way. Interviewers and interviewees rely on
taken-for-granted assumptions about how everyday talk occurs and how speakers
make meaning of one another’s utterances. In emphasizing features of mundane conversation,
conversational interviewers strive to facilitate a research environment in
which participants feel free to participate in extended discussions of research
topics in a less hierarchical environment than that convened in structured
interview settings. - Narrative interview
– an interview that is organized to facilitate the development of a text that can
be interpreted through narrative analysis. Narrative analysis is guided by a
theory of narrative, and these theories of narrative vary in the influence of
the reader, the text, and the intent of the author on interpretation. For this
reason, the content and structure of a narrative interview will depend both on
the theory of narrative being used in the analysis and on the research
question. - Interactive interviewing
– an interpretive practice for getting
an in-depth and intimate understanding of people’s experiences with emotionally
charged and sensitive topics such as childbirth, illness, loss, and eating
disorders. Emphasizing the communicative and joint sense-making that occurs in
interviewing, this approach involves the sharing of personal and social
experiences of both respondents and researchers, who tell (and sometimes write)
their stories in the context of a developing relationship. - The critical
incident technique (CIT) – originally, it refers to a set of procedures to
collect direct observations of human behaviors in a way that facilitates their
use in solving practical problems and developing broad psychological
principles. Over the years, it has been increasingly applied to studying psychological
states or experiences, and emphasis has shifted from direct observation by
experts to retrospective self-report in interviews. - Co-constructed
narratives – this refers to stories jointly constructed by relational partners
about epiphanies in their lives. This approach offers a way for participants to
actively construct a version of a relational event that provides insight,
understanding, and an in-depth and complex reflection on what occurred. As
such, this mode of doing research provides an alternative to traditional interviewing,
especially when the topic under consideration is emotionally charged, personal,
and sensitive.
Formalized Curiosity 