The first obstacle was
time. It is really hard to negotiate the date, time and place with
participants. They have children and children have needs, sometimes unscheduled
needs. The second barrier was to build trust with participants. Sometimes the
themes are sensitive. It is family issues and I am asking questions about
challenges of students. Third issue was transcribing, I thought that it will
never end. However, I feel satisfied as I receive a lot of data to analyze.
After thinking about the interviews I came with the following ideas.
There are
some practical suggestions for future interviews:
- Pilot interview. Test your questions on three languages: English, Russian, Kazakh. It depends on topic and participants. BUT test all possible languages.
- Think about places where to take interviews. Make list of places, so you can suggest, at least TEN.
- Develop you questions, read them and learn them, you have to know exactly what you are going to ask.
- Dress comfortable clothes.
- Turn off your mobile phone; it may interrupt you and participant.
- Make sure that you hear and listen your participant.
I hope that
it will help to improve your interviews and your research in general. And you
are welcome to add some hints to mine, because each of us had an experience. I
am happy to read it.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
ReplyDeleteI agree with all your suggestions. For me, conducting the interviews was the valuable experience. However, I also have some challenges. For example, initially, I created interview questions in English. However, in the mock interview in thesis seminar I asked in Russian. To be honest, it sounds akwardly. I understood that translation should be accurate and logically organized. Also, during the interviews, it was difficult to be unbiased because I have almost the same experience as my participants. I recommend to the future researchers always think about the main research questions and think about the preliminary findings.
Great tips! The data collection stage is really important and it should be planned in advance. Having participated in thesis seminar of my supervisor, we found really useful to practice interviews or questionnaire questions on our peers. Another interesting technique is to use quantitative approach in order to escape boring and wordy style of qualitative study. Anyway, I believe that the ethics committee made a big work in order to prepare us for data collection. Having written ethics approval form I already knew what to do on another step.
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