Getting creative with interview methods

Although qualitative interviews are massively used in qualitative studies all over the world, there is enormous variation in how interviews are conducted, and by what mode. Qualitative researchers have been exceptionally creative in how they elicit verbal accounts from participants of research studies.

For example, here are some of the numerous descriptors used in relation to qualitative interviews that you will see in methodological and empirical literature:

biographic, conversational, decolonizing, dialogic, dyadic, epistemic, ethnographic, feminist, focus group, go-along, graphic elicitation, group, joint, life history, long, narrative, nominal, object-elicitation, oral history, phenomenological, photo-elicitation, semi-structured, and walking…

I’m excited that my new edited book on interview methods, which explores some of these inventive methods has just been published. See:

Roulston, K. (ed.). (2023). Quests for questioners: Inventive approaches to qualitative interviews. Myers Education Press.

In this book, you’ll find chapters on how contemporary scholars:

1. generate verbal accounts from participants in culturally responsive ways;
2. think with new materialist theories when they use interview methods; and
3. integrate various sensory methods in interviewing – by including objects, graphic elicitation, photo elicitation, or walking and mobile methods.

The book is organized into three parts. Part One, “Being Culturally Responsive in Interview Research,” brings together scholars who have explored ways of working with research participants in culturally responsive ways. Lorien Jordan discusses methodological decisions that researchers can make to intentionally design and conduct studies that are culturally responsive. Tim San Pedro and Emma Elliott draw on the approach described by Jo-Ann Archibald (2008)—Indigenous Storywork—to conceptualize and model “synergistic conversations” as a way to connect with others through Indigenous storying. Jori Hall and Joseph-Emery Lyvan Kouaho discuss the central characteristics of culturally responsive focus groups (CRFG). Brigette Herron, Darci Bell, and Jung Sun Lee discuss how they quickly adapted during the COVID-pandemic from conducting in-person focus groups to online focus groups. They used feminist interviewing strategies, along with a trauma-informed approach to adapt focus group methods to respond to participants in ethical ways.

Part Two of the book, “Being Inventive in Theorizing Interviews,” explores how researchers have employed particular concepts and theories to bring innovation to interviews. Maureen Flint and Morgan Tate discuss their use of Rosi Braidotti’s (2019) concept of “cartography” in research design. Travis Marn and Jennifer Wolgemuth discuss how they used the concept of “intra-action” from Karen Barad’s (2007) work to explore their on-again, off-again love affair with interview methods. Susan Nordstrom traces how she has used Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of the assemblage and fold to think about object interviews in her research.

Part Three of the book, “Being Inventive in Eliciting Interview Accounts,” begins with Janie Copple’s exploration of how she used object interviews in a postqualitative study having to do with mothers’ encounters in preparing menstruating/soon-to-be menstruating children for menarche. Alison Bravington reviews how researchers can make use of graphic elicitation and drawing to discuss topics. With Maureen Flint, I review the history of walking interviews and mobile methods and describe examples of how researchers have used these approaches. The book concludes with an exploration of how Nuria Jaumot-Pascual, Tiffany Smith, Maria Ong, and Kathy DeerInWater used photo-elicitation as a method to explore Native American students’ experiences of STEM education.

I hope that these chapters provide inspiration to other scholars in how they might use qualitative interviews in creative ways to explore topics of interest and contribute to understanding research topics in their fields of interest. As mentioned above, there is no “one” way to do qualitative interviews – there are many approaches from which to select. This book examines a few of these ways.

Kathy Roulston

References

Archibald, J.-A. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit. UBC Press.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.