More about field based interviews

return to the course schedule
 
 

Ed 714 Qualitative Research Methods in Education
Spring/Summer 2001
Copyright - Antonia D'Onofrio - 2000/2001
 
 
 

Introduction
 

Field based interviews are open ended. They are conducted person to person. They are deliberately designed to produce specific kinds of information, information that portrays the richness of individual experience, and particularly from a subjective point of view.

The field based interview places individual experience into a broader context of culture, connects individuals to
setting, and helps to explain how individuals attribute meaning to experience.

Field based interviews often resemble conversations. Statements can be used instead of questions in order to elicit the effect of a question. Interviewers can and often do reflect on their own personal experiences, and relate them to the experiences of a respondent.

As the interview progresses, the participant plays a more active role in shaping the dialog with the interviewer. The participant might also pose questions. Gradually the researcher's plan for questioning gives way to the respondent's story.
 

Field interviews need to focus on these kinds of questions.

What outcomes are ideally achieved?

These interviews are not intended to collect facts in isolation without the context of personal meaning. Field based interviews should be used to elicit the following kinds of information.
 

• Attitudes, beliefs and fears regarding social experience, as well as individual expectations, explanations,
• descriptions, and explorations of social experience
• Examples of important events in a life
• Explorations of biography and autobiography
• Definitions of cultural terms

What are the sources for interview content?

Sources are wide ranging. However, they should never come from the presuppositions of a
researcher. It is unhelpful to overly determine content for questions or to completely organize one's questioning
strategy. One's approach should be organized but loosely structured.

Thus productive questions focus on

• memories and events in the lives of participants,

• belief systems,

• activity systems (i.e., work, play, family life, religious practices, ceremonies, rituals, formal social encounters).

The questions that probe experience are referred to as descriptive questions

The characteristics of culture, setting and context are another source of valuable content. Social patterns that organize life and  are predictable organizers of individual life. These include, but are not
limited to:

• roles,
• indicators of status,
• institutions and institutionalized activity,
• formal and informal control of
• behavior,
• socialization,
• mobility and rootedness,
• norms of behavior,
• economic systems and arrangements,
• kinship and relationship patterns.

These practices, as found in context, are generally pervasive in the lives of respondents and are defined by culture. One explores social patterns and practices using structural questions-- i.e., you ask how things work, are related part to whole, who is important, who has credible information and can give insight, how behavior is controlled, how resources are acquired and shared, how conflicts are resolved, what formal and informal strategies exist in context for guiding human behavior, how people are related. How questions are often used in this genre of inquiry.
 

Interviewers may also explore how things might be different or reality altered if things changed suddenly and unpredictable.  Such questions are known as contrast questions.

Where do you look for evidence, clues, insights, etc.?

• Events and activities observed by the researcher
• The personal relationship between researcher and respondent
• Biography and the personal experiences of respondents,
• The setting and the connections that can be made between respondent and setting.

Helpful question strategies (Spradley, 1973)

• Asking for examples
• Giving examples
• Asking for detail and elaboration
• Asking for explanations
• Reflecting on an answer and asking for more information
• Asking about people and the importance they have in a respondent's experience
• Asking about the history of relationships and structures
• Asking what is important about an event, person, object, or relationship
• Asking what would happen if things were different, if a rule were disobeyed, or behavior violated the norms and values of a group

The organization of an ethnographic interview - Three part process

Greeting

Giving ethnographic explanations - about the project, the types of questions that will be asked, how answers will be recorded, how native language may need to be clarified, how the interview will be pursued
 
 

Frame your questions and use interview strategies that are true to the ethnographic approach
 

• Descriptive questions
• Structural questions
• Contrast questions
• Turn taking
• Expressing interest
• Expressing cultural ignorance
• Repeating
• Restating respondent's terms
• Incorporating respondent's terms
• Creating hypothetical situations

Taking leave

Validity and the field based interview.

Much of our current thinking about the field based interview was inspired by the ethnographer Malinowski.  According to Malinowski, ethnographic methods connote deep immersion and descriptive power. Validity rises from researcher persistent search for detail.

A goal of field research is to capture a sense of the culture of the respondent. Consequently field based interviewing requires a broad validity criterion; that is, to be sufficiently reflective in approach, to be  responsive and to be able to reproduce for one's readers a sense of the perspectives and experiences that describes the lives of respondents.
 

• A sense of broad validity is reached when the following is applied to one's work.

• Interview responses are understood within a larger cultural context. This should be evident in both questions and interpretation.

• Relationships between interviewer and respondent should be part of the evidence and should be interpreted

• The issue of perspective must be explicitly considered and explored.

• The rhetorical aspects of a report are used to capture perspective.

Accounting for ourselves in our role as researchers, should be part of the report.  Our report should include descriptions of problems of access, entree and approach, self presentation, developing rapport, defining our  role for ourselves, fitting in, discovering mistakes and handling surprises.

These interviews are open ended. They are conducted person to person. They are deliberately designed to produce specific kinds of information, information that portrays the richness of individual experience, and particularly from a subjective point of view.

The field based interview places individual experience into a broader context of culture, connects individual to setting, and helps to explain how individuals attribute meaning to experience.

Field based interviews often resemble conversations. Statements can be used instead of questions in order to elicit the effect of a question. Interviewers can and often do reflect on their own personal experiences, and relate them to the experiences of a respondent.

As the interview progresses, the participant plays a more active role in shaping the dialog with the interviewer. The participant might also pose questions. Gradually the researcher's plan for questioning gives way to the respondent's story.