Course Instructor: Dr.

Bachiri

Academic Year: 2021/2022

Track: Electrical Engineering

Semester: I

Lesson Plan Objectives

 To understand how to use qualitative interviewing as a social science research method.

 To be more familiar with and alert to the ethical guidelines involved in interviewing.

Conducting an Interview: Techniques and Constraints

I- Introduction

Needless to say, research methods in social science research are an essential part of any research
project as they determine its success, validity and reliability. Stemming from an interest in
thorough understanding of human behavior, social scientists tend to use qualitative research
aiming to accumulate a detailed account of human behavior and beliefs within the contexts they
occur in (Rubin & Rubin, 2005). Furthermore, with the use of non-numerical data, this line of
research seeks to explore and describe the ‘quality’ and ‘nature’ of how people behave,
experience and understand. Further to linking people's actions to their beliefs, Brown (2005: 485)
adds that “one of the great strengths often cited for qualitative research is its potential for forming
hypotheses”.
As noted by Dörnyei, (2007: 132), qualitative data are ‘most often’ collected by researchers
through interviews and questionnaires. However, interviews, compared to questionnaires, are
more powerful in eliciting narrative data that allows researchers to investigate people's views in
greater depth (Kvale, 1996; 2003). In a similar vein, Cohen et al (2007: 29) add that interviewing
is “a valuable method for exploring the construction and negotiation of meanings in a natural
setting”.
In the field of social science research, the usefulness of interviews has long been recognized.
That is, as qualitative researchers tend to provide detailed descriptions of individuals and events
in their natural settings, interviewing has ‘usually’ been thought of as a key factor in research
design (Weiss, 1994). In a similar vein, Kvale (1996) interestingly points out that, as such events

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are not often directly ‘observable’; talking to people would be one of the most effective methods
for attaining and exploring such constructs. More specifically, as interviews are interactive,
interviewers can press for complete, clear answers and can probe into any emerging topics.
Hence, interviewing is expected to broaden the scope of understanding investigated phenomena,
as it is a more naturalistic and less structured data collection tool.

According to Kvale (1996: 174), an interview is “a conversation, whose purpose is to gather

descriptions of the [life-world] of the interviewee” with respect to interpretation of the meanings
of the ‘described phenomena’. In a similar vein, Schostak, (2006: 54) adds that an interview is
an extendable conversation between partners that aims at having an ‘in-depth information’ about
a certain topic or subject, and through which a phenomenon could be interpreted in terms of the
meanings interviewees bring to it. Accumulating such meanings can be done in various ways, of
which one-on-one interviews are the most common. Besides one-on-one interviews, focus groups
interviewing is also popular (Marshall & Rossman, 2006). Additionally, research has shown that
four types of interviews are frequently employed in social sciences. The first is the structured
interview, whose key feature is that it is mostly organized around a set of predetermined direct
questions that require immediate, mostly ‘yes’ or ‘no’ type, responses. Thus, in such an interview,
the interviewer and interviewees would have very little freedom (Berg, 2007). Accordingly, it
can be argued, that this type of interviews is similar to the ‘self-administered’ quantitative
questionnaire in both its form and underlying assumptions.

II- Conducting Interviews

According to Dörnyei (2007), a ‘good’ qualitative interview has two key features: “(a) it flows
naturally, and (b) it is rich in detail” (p. 140). To attain this, it is therefore necessary for
researchers to remember that they are there to ‘listen’ not just speak. In addition, researchers
should not only be neutral, but also at the same time, they should take Richards's (2003) ‘golden
advice’ which addresses all types of interviewing: interviewers should “always seek the
particular”. In doing so, the interviewer should establish an appropriate atmosphere through
which his/her interviewees would feel more at ease and thus talk freely. Besides, Barbour and
Schostak (2005: 42-43) identify the following key concepts that researchers should also take into
consideration when using interviews as a tool for data collection:
Power relation: this refers to the interrelated power within the interview. Such power may
(intentionally or unintentionally), but not necessarily, emerge from the interviewer's side towards
his/her interviewees. Extending the interview, therefore, would help balancing this relationship.
Value: this refers to the value of the interview itself, and the value of the interviewees’ words.

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 Trust: this refers to the extent to which the research guarantees objectivity, accuracy and
honesty.
Meaning: this refers to the meaning the interviewer intends to convey. This process might
sometimes be incorrectly done, and therefore an alternative truth or reality might be declared.
Wording: this refers to the wording of questions asked in the interview. Barbour and Schostak
(2005: 43) justly remark that “the shorter the interviewer’s questions and the longer the subject’s
answers, the better an interview is”.

III- Analyzing Interview Data

Overwhelming some researchers, qualitative interviews tend to generate large amounts of data
(Neuman, 2007). That is, as Dörnyei (2007) indicates, a one-hour interview may approximately
take up to six to seven hours to transcribe, and around fifty pages of transcript. However, to begin
with, analysis can be done through coding. Two steps of coding have widely been discussed in
social science research: a) generating meaningful data units; and b) classifying and ordering these
units. Accordingly, such a process is expected to deliberately reduce the amount of data collected.
Creswell (2009) notes that the analysis process should also be reflexive, i.e. including the
researcher's interactional experience with interviews. In sum, there is no fixed method of
analyzing interview data in the literature, yet, researchers should cautiously deal with it as it
affects not only the quality of an interview, but the validity, reliability of the whole research.

IV-Ethical Considerations

When it comes to dealing with human participants, research projects should rigorously follow
ethical considerations. According to Cohen et al. (2007), as interviews are considered an
intrusion into respondents' private lives with regard to time allotted and level of sensitivity of
questions asked; a high standard of ethical considerations should be maintained. Therefore,
ethical issues should be considered at all stages of the interview process. That is, participants
should provide their informed consent before participating in the interview: a key step that
researchers should adhere to throughout the whole research project. Therefore, to protect the
participants' rights and to avoid causing them any harm, researchers should assure that the
collected data will be strictly confidential and anonymous. More importantly, however,
participants should be told that their participation in the interview is entirely voluntary, and that
they can withdraw at any time.

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V-Reporting an Interview

It is a major step that eventually has to be done; however, the nature of the reporting is
somewhat decided by the nature of the interviewing (Bell, 1987). For instance, a structured
interview, which may yield numerical data, can be reported succinctly in tables and graphs, whilst
an open-ended interview which would yield word-based accounts, may take up considerably
more space. Kvale (1996:263) suggests several elements of an interview report:
an introduction that includes the main themes and contents
an outline of the methodology and methods (from designing to interviewing, transcription
and analysis)
the results (the data analysis, interpretation and verification)
a discussion.

VI- Conclusion
Researchers should, however, choose the method that answers their research questions best,
taking into consideration that the more accurate the researchers are when conducting and
analyzing the data, the more accurate the findings would be.

Listening Activity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YhxerkkHUs&ab_channel=AssafKintzer

NB: Please, listen to the video, using the link provided above, for more understanding. Thank
you.