Methods Matter Podcast – Qualitative Interviews

Leah Fullegar:

Hello and welcome to the Methods Matter podcast from Dementia Researcher and the National Center for Research Methods, the show that tries to unpick the unfathomable mysterious world of research methods to help me and you to understand them. In this series, we’ll be looking at five different research methods with an expert from the field and a dementia researcher that has put that method into practice.

Leah Fullegar:

My name is Leah Fullegar. I’m a PhD student at the University of Southampton and I research dementia care and fecal incontinence. As a rule, I’m much more comfortable talking about poo and the things that come out of your body than I am talking about research methods. So as expected, when I got to my methodology section of my thesis, I panicked and went, “This is harder than I thought it’s going to be.” So together we’re going to go on a voyage of discovery through the fascinating world of research methods.

Leah Fullegar:

Today, we are packing our Dictaphones and putting the kettle on as we explore a qualitative researcher’s favorite method, interviewing. Joining me as we journey into this method are two very special guests. In the expert corner is Dr. Kahryn Hughes from the University of Leeds. Kahryn is the director of the Timescapes Archive, editor in chief of Sociological Research Online, convenor of the MA Qualitative Research Methods and a senior fellow for the NCRM. Hello to Kahryn. How are you?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I’m good. Thank you. And thank you for that lovely introduction. I really appreciate it.

Leah Fullegar:

It’s quite the CV.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

It is, yes. It’s quite a busy workload as well.

Leah Fullegar:

I can imagine. Our drop-in researcher for today is conversation analyst, qualitative researcher and NIHR School for Primary Care research fellow from the University of Bristol, Dr. Jemima Dooley. I feel like a round of applause is needed there. Jemima has recently taken up surfing and skateboarding, I hear, but seems to be all in one piece. Hello Jemima. Welcome to the show.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

Hello. Thank you for having me. Yes, I have to admit I’ve taken the skateboarding since having my baby because I didn’t really want to give birth with a broken ankle.

Leah Fullegar:

No.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

My skateboarding abilities were not great.

Leah Fullegar:

I’ve only ever tried skateboarding once and I couldn’t even stand up on it. So you probably got further than that.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

It’s so hard. No, surfing’s more fun. When you fall off, you’re just in water. So that’s…

Leah Fullegar:

Well, we’re delighted to have you here. Kahryn, have you taken up any hobbies recently?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Yeah. Scuba diving.

Leah Fullegar:

Oh, really.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Yeah, but I’m still on the fence with it. It’s pretty scary, actually. So I don’t mind shallow dives, but when you go into depth and it gets very cold and dark, I’m not keen. So I think I might be a fair weather diver.

Leah Fullegar:

You do it in the UK?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Yeah. Off the coast of north Wales. Yeah. Yeah.

Leah Fullegar:

That must be absolutely freezing.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Yeah. Actually, this summer it’s been fantastic. Water’s been wonderfully warm and I’ve swum with seals and seeing dolphins and things like that. So it’s been pretty special.

Leah Fullegar:

So what do I know? We’re going to begin each podcast with me giving a summary of what I understand to be the interviewing research method, which I hope our listeners will relate to.

Leah Fullegar:

So when I think of interviewing, I’m imagining asking a series of open-ended questions to someone living with dementia, asking them about their life, their symptoms, and how they feel as required by the study. I imagine interviewing to be more of an explorative method. So you’re sort of looking for a wide range of data rather than specific points, and then analyzing the results. Oxford bibliographies say the interviewing methodology is perhaps the oldest of all social science methodologies. Asking interview participants a series of informal questions to obtain knowledge has been commonplace among anthropologists and sociology since the inception of these disciplines. Although sociologists have been carrying out interview based research for some time, it was the work of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss from Chicago that pioneered the integration of qualitative interviews into their field studies and subsequently developed the grounded theory approach to qualitative data analysis.

Leah Fullegar:

So Kahryn, with the history lesson dealt with and my vague attempt to describe the technique, would you like to give us a slightly more formal introduction to this method?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Less a formal introduction, more of a snapshot. So I absolutely agree about interviewing being one of the oldest methodologies because it is based in a very human form of communication and interaction. This is what we do with each other all of the time. So you get up in the morning and you say, “How was your night? How did you sleep?” “I’m feeling like this because…” So it just is in conversation, we ask each other questions and we provide explanations. And that is, if you like, at the heart of what an interview is.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I think in the social sciences and in sociology in particular, which is obviously my background, there was a moment and it coincided with a whole series of socio-political developments in sociology and in sociology itself. So it was this move from large scale, say social mobility studies or those large scale forms of investigation to understand social trends and social change, to beginning to engage with the questions of, “Well, why are these trends occurring? Why are people doing the things that they’re doing?” And for me, one of the most brilliant people who formulated what we now use very much as interview methodology in sociology is in the work of Ann Oakley.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Ann Oakley was interviewing. She was saying, “Well, okay. All of these things about social mobility, they’re always keeps taking men as the head of the household.” And they’re looking at would have these sorts of… They were seeing family works in these ways. And so when I said earlier about coinciding with various other sociopolitical trends, that this was with the rise of feminism and a more concerted engagement with the experiences of women. So how… What were women doing in ways that produced particular forms of social trend? So, Ann Oakley conducted interviews about experiences of motherhood, about the experiences of housework and things like that.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

And of course, what she was doing was engaging with these big sociological questions around reproduction of labor and the reproduction of families and the reproduction of society in and of itself. And her position was these had been treated as very much marginal sorts of questions. And she was like, “No.” And one of the points that she made was that actually women very much appreciated talking about their experiences. So Jennifer Mason, whose work I draw on and she’s written seminal texts on the research methodology and I recommend her to my students all the time. She talked about research interviews as conversations with a purpose. That was her pithy summary of what is an interview.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

But she also went on to talk about qualitative research methodology more generally. And obviously we’re talking about qualitative, and I’m talking about qualitative interviews here, as conversations with a purpose in ways that matter about things that matter.

Leah Fullegar:

So it’s interesting that it’s traditionally feminist or female method.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Yeah. So, Henry Mayhew, he wrote London Labor and the London Poor, and for me, I think it’s one of the first very rich ethnography in the social studies canon, but he also, prior to that, his breakthrough texts and research was on cholera districts. So districts in London that had experienced cholera outbreaks and epidemics and he produced a whole series of leaflets. So that was what he was focused on doing. And he interviewed people in that research and he interviewed those people again. And that was in, I don’t know, the 1850s or something like that. So when we’re talking about interviews somehow emerging from a feminist sensibility, I don’t think that that’s the case.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

This would go back to your introduction. I think the interviews were absolutely very much about profound characteristics of human communication, but there has been this very long tradition in the social sciences, in that social sciences canon of interviewing people. And one of the things that I think is so amazing about London Labor and the London Poor or that piece on cholera districts, he went into Bermondsey, and he reproduces the voices of those people that were living at the time and in the introduction to London Labor and London Poor… I’m sorry. I don’t quite remember who wrote that, but the comment that was made was the Henry Mayhew elevated the voices of people into print who had never formally been dignified in that way. So for me, one of the most powerful aspects of qualitative methodology is this ability to allow people to some degree, speak for themselves. And those voices bring, I think, research very much alive.

Leah Fullegar:

That’s really fascinating, especially in the context of dementia research, wherever a lot of people with dementia are often ignored and not given the chance to speak for themselves. Jemima, I’ll bring you into the conversation. Can you tell us how this has this appeared in your research and in your experience?

Dr Jemima Dooley:

Yeah, no, definitely. So I’ve used interviews instead of various different ways, in terms of exploring how people with dementia experience care. And so I mastered in post-diagnosis care and particularly communication aspects of care. So I’ve used interviews alongside other methods to explore people’s experiences of communication with people with dementia and carers. And I’ve also done several other kinds of interview studies with clinicians and other types of patients as well. It’s just such a powerful [inaudible 00:11:22] exactly what you’re saying and exactly what you were saying there in terms of giving the voice to people. And even not that long ago in dementia research, interviews were always conducted with the carers, always conducted with informants that were seen as the… able to get the voice to people with dementia. But I think we’re starting to realize more and more that by adapting methodologies, we can include people with dementia even when their condition gets more severe.

Leah Fullegar:

How do you prepare for that? It sounds impossible.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

I think that’s the key. Sort of learning that I’ve had through all the different projects that I’ve worked on is that you obviously, in research, you have a research question that you want to answer. And I think it’s very, especially in arbitrary research, you do all the reading and you think, “This is how I’m going to answer it. This is my plan. I’m going to go in and it’s going to be like this. I have a script. I have what I’m going to do. This is my topic guide. I’m going to put the audio recorder down. We’re going to sit opposite a table and bash out these topics.” And actually that’s not reality. And you have to think, “Well, I can prepare as much as I can prepare, but then I’m going to go with the flow and see what happens.”

Dr Jemima Dooley:

And I think, especially with dementia and with older population, you’ve got to realize you’re slotting into someone’s life. You’re going to be there for half an hour, just talking to them. And there’s lots of other things that they’re experiencing and are going on. And you’ve got to capture that and you’ve got to capture what they’re… You could honor what their perspectives are. And it might come from what your original bullet-pointed plan of what you’re going to talk about was, but that’s how you adapt, really.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

And so I suppose that’s not helpful for people who like to plan. So I guess my way of planning is that I think, “Right, this is what I want to do. I’ll do a few interviews and see how it goes. And then maybe things that I might want to change.” As I’ve gone on and I’ve thought, “Well, it’s helpful for people with dementia…” For example, to have prompts, this might be something to talk about later, to help prompt people’s memory. So quite recently, for my fellowship, I thought, “Right, I’m going to take a video recorder to some consultations. I’m going to take it for the interviews. And I’ll be able to say that, ‘Look at this spot from Gordon. What did he feel here?'”

Dr Jemima Dooley:

And then the first three interviews, the people were like, “I don’t want to watch video. Why have you got your laptop out?” They all happen to be men in their eighties, nineties. They weren’t interested in laptops. They weren’t interested in recordings. They just wanted to chat. And I thought… I panicked. I thought, “Well, that’s what I’ve said I’d do. I said I’d do these video-assisted interviews.” And then I thought, “Actually, it doesn’t matter. I’m still capturing their experiences. I’m still having a conversation with a purpose, which is what I wanted to do.” And I think it’s to do with that. It’s to do with not panicking. It’s basically, you prepare as much as you can and don’t panic a bit, if it doesn’t happen according to plan.

Leah Fullegar:

That’s really interesting. And Kahryn, I wonder if you could weigh in on this because one of the things I read a lot about when I was writing about interviewing is the sort of power dynamic that often exists between the researcher and the participant, but in that situation where you’re having to your, as the researcher, just going with the flow and taking a bit of a backseat, that power dynamic changes quite a lot. Kahryn, I don’t know if you have any input on that. I know it’s a bit left field.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

No, no, no. It’s fine. I think that there were certain sorts of power asymmetries at play in interview situations. I think one of the most interesting ones is the one where the interviewee is the expert and the researcher is properly trying to get a sense of their view of things because they’re treating their view of things as a particular form of evidence that can inform on the social world in particular ways. So that’s really interesting and I think often in interview settings, trying to establish that from the outset, it can be quite challenging because people… the academic comes in and they seem to be the expert on Alzheimer’s. And so I’ve always found that to be a really interesting dynamic, to work through in encounters.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I think that all too often we focus… there’s an over-focus on the researcher-researched relationship when we’re thinking about power asymmetries. One of the things that I found in research or research that had been associated in is that participants… We’re very concerned with things like coercion and the idea that people can be coerced to say more than they want to say or that we’re taking their stories away from them and we’re appropriating them in order to serve our own ends. I think that these are important questions. I think that these important ethical concerns that we do absolutely have to address within the researcher-researched relationship.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

But I also think that we have to think more broadly than that and we have to understand what are the broader sets of relationships at play and how do they constrain or enable, how did they affect the relationships, the researcher-researched relationships, because we’re never one-on-one. We’re always okay in interpersonal encounters, but we’re always part of a much broader social relational networks. And you mentioned earlier, I think it was you, Jemima, you mentioned about people originally, it was only the carers that were interviewed and people with dementia seemed to be not having the capacity, for example, to talk about their own experience. And so it’s those broader sets of relationships that also form part of the research encounter.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So thinking through the power asymmetries, not only in the research-researched relationship, but also the actual doing of the research, which relationships when, through whom, how, what was needed, that not only allows us to engage with ethical reflection on power asymmetries, but that also provides additional empirical insight into the lived circumstances of the people with whom we are researching. And that’s quite… it’s easy to say. It’s sometimes quite complex for people to work through.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

The thing that I struggled with in one of my first big interview studies with people with dementia, which was… I’m in my PhD, where I was exploring how people were told that they had dementia. So I video recorded the diagnosis consultation and interviewed people under a week later about the experience. And they’d just been told they had dementia in a memory clinic, kind of hospital setting. And then I went to visit them at home four or five days later. I had met them for the first time in that hospital, said, “I’m a researcher from…” And then I went and visited them at home and a lot of the time they thought that I was there to help them with dementia, with their care, where they had questions about their diagnosis. And I had to sort of keep saying, “No, that’s not me. I’m not that person. You’ll get another appointment at some point.”

Dr Jemima Dooley:

And that was one of the big challenges I had in that study was that they didn’t see who I was. They saw me as a medical person because they met me in a hospital and that created a different power thing. I learnt as I went along to be very clear about who I was and how I wasn’t an expert and how I wanted to chat about how they felt, but you had to really think about that at the start. And I’m sure that that affected the answers they were giving me as well.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Yeah. So just to say on that point, Andrea Hollomotz has written some really interesting stuff about her experiences in research in people with the learning disabilities who are also sexual offenders and she’s interviewed them in that institutional setting and that has been something that she’s found repeatedly. [inaudible 00:19:56] that absolutely. And it’s very much about context as well.

Leah Fullegar:

That’s absolutely fascinating. So now we’ve had a good discussion about what this method is and the trials, tribulations and considerations that we need to have going into it. Let’s have a quick fire round with some straightforward questions to both guests to see how we put this method into practice.

Leah Fullegar:

Kahryn, the first ones are for you. How should someone prepare for interviews?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Through very exhaustive literature review, talking to gatekeepers, being very, very familiar with existing data in the area and existing findings and research.

Leah Fullegar:

Fantastic. Should someone take notes, record the conversation?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

There’ve been decades of debate around this. People writing down notes in an interview can be very off-putting, but equally, people don’t necessarily like being recorded. And I think every researcher has that horrible moment of listening back to their own voice for the first time, even the 10th time and thinking, “Oh, gosh, do I really sound like that?” So my personal preference is to record interviews because it allows you to focus entirely on what it is that somebody is saying, but it also captures ambient events in the interview context.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

We also tend to treat interview data, what people say, we try to repeat it verbatim in order to demonstrate the accuracy around our own meetings of those data. I think that’s highly problematic, but nevertheless, having transcripts that can persist and endure over time can be tremendously helpful for primary and secondary qualitative analysis.

Leah Fullegar:

And do you have any tips on how to actually undertake the interview?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I think that, as we’ve been discussing, the interviews are human encounters and human interactions. And I think that Jemima’s research absolutely demonstrates the need to negotiate and navigate carefully, both in order to act access a participant and to, if you like, persuade them to be part of your research study. I think that these are long processes. And so in terms of preparing an interview or preparing for an interview, I think this is very much dependent on who it is you’re interviewing.

Leah Fullegar:

How do you keep the participant on track and focused?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I personally only have about six questions and I don’t have many prompts either. I think that if people go off track, that’s important because I’ve brought questions to the interview in order to explore what it is that their experiences have been and if my questions don’t adequately reflect that or elicit accounts of that, then I think it’s really, really important to listen to what it is in fact that people want to tell you about. It might be something completely and utterly different. They don’t want to talk about their health condition. They want to talk about their pets or something like that, but there’ll be a reason. It will be really important why that is. So I think to be open in the interview is absolutely essential. Otherwise, it’s just sort of listened to yourself really.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

And I found that the worst interviews that I have done are the ones with the most questions. I will just say here that the best interviews that I’ve ever listened to in my life were by Professor Joanna Bornat in a study that she did under Timescapes, interviewing people that she and Bill, by the way, described as the oldest generation, people over the age of 75, and those interviews are in the Timescapes archive. And I think that they are an absolute masterclass in… Joanna’s ability to ask questions, listen to what it is that people say and then pull that together with something that that person says maybe 10, 15 minutes later, an hour later. She keeps the threads, multiple threads of an interview alive throughout. She’s an oral historian. So there’s obviously an additional layer of training in there and it absolutely shows. They’re just stunning, eye-wateringly brilliant interviews. I love them.

Leah Fullegar:

We’ll have to give those a listen then. So you’ve ended the interviews, you’ve got hours of recordings and piles and piles and piles of transcriptions. This is definitely not giving me flashbacks. How do you best analyze the results? Are there tools or technology that help?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I do various bits. You talked about Jemima’s approach with conversation and analysis and then you mentioned grounded theory and part of my background, much earlier in my career was in discourse analysis and [inaudible 00:25:22] I think that you can read one paragraph in an interview transcript, looking at it thematically, looking at it in terms of its content, looking at it in terms of the discourses that were at play in that. At the moment, I’m going back and I’m looking at interviews that were conducted under a study called Intergenerational Exchange, which was looking at midlife grandparents in low-income contexts. And I’m looking for the men in the transcripts. So just whenever any man is mentioned in the transcripts for book that I’m writing with Dr. Anna Tarrant at the University of Lincoln, and I’m finding that I’m missing them, even though I’m going through line by line by line, there’ll be an uncle or a cousin or a brother or a nephew or something and I’m missing them.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So even if you’re looking at one very specific category, such as men in interviews, that can be really difficult to capture on your first read-through. So don’t expect to do your analysis on one read-through, even two, even 10, actually. Personally, I do a free-flow read-through on a transcript where I brainstorm and I’ll write that in a transcript. But I’ll use search and find, as well, on Word docs. And that helps me identify things. That’s conveniently really useful. And I also do use Nvivo, as well on occasion, but I think that that’s very tricky because I think the people then tend to use codes as proxies for evidence. And I would dispute that.

Leah Fullegar:

That’s probably a whole other book in itself, isn’t it? Fantastic. So Jemima, it’s your turn. Are you ready?

Dr Jemima Dooley:

I am. I’m unmuted.

Leah Fullegar:

So when you’re interviewing, do you have to change anything when you’re interviewing someone with dementia or their carer compared to younger people?

Dr Jemima Dooley:

Short answer, yes. I think that it’s not just to do… I think it’s to do with what we were talking about earlier in terms of making sure that you’re having a conversation rather than an interview and a conversation with a purpose, obviously, but a conversation. And I think that’s to do with making people comfortable. So it’s not about being like, “This person has dementia, so I’ll do it this way.” But you’ve got to read the situation, read the experience. There’s basic things with older people where you’ve got to think about whether they can hear you properly, especially I’ve got quite a soft high voice. That’s difficult. They’re going to fatigue easier. So just thinking about keeping things shorter or having breaks, but I think the main thing…

Dr Jemima Dooley:

So there’s a research project that my colleagues at Bristol did, so Dr. Joe Webb and a group of researchers with dementia called the Forget-me-nots. And they showed how you can really put… they did a lot of video recordings of different types of dementia interactions. And they showed that how you can really put pressure on people with dementia by asking very specific questions with very specific answers. And actually it might be better to create an environment where something else is going on. Maybe you’re going for a walk. Maybe you’re looking at a photo, maybe you’re doing some gardening or something and you can have a conversation that’s not putting crush on them in a question, answer format to respond, but just creating an environment where they feel comfortable talking. And then you can gently put in conversations that you want to talk about as part of your research question and aim.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

But yeah. It’s basically, I think, about making people feel as comfortable as possible and thinking of those factors. There’s a great report for the NIHR School for Social Care that was written by Samsi & Manthorpe, which is really detailed, brilliant about adopting qualitative methods to dementia and every step-in term of ethics, every step. So I really recommend reading that. Yeah.

Leah Fullegar:

So in the current context of this pandemic, how do you adapt doing interviews online versus face-to-face?

Dr Jemima Dooley:

I’m going to admit that I haven’t done that. I was on maternity leave for the first half of the pandemic. So I haven’t. Just where my project is at the moment, I’m not doing… But I’m a co-founder of a group called Deme Qual where we’re a group of researchers who are interested in the adapting qualitative methods for dementia. And we had a whole meeting on this couple of months ago, so I feel that I can report accurately.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

But I do think that lots of people are still working out in terms of how. I think there’s challenges that… Like we were talking about with fatigue and hearing. We all get tired of talking on Zoom than we do in person. It’s always harder to hear and see them than it is in person. So it’s thinking about that.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

Although I was talking to a clinician who was doing memory assessments on teens and he said that you can put subtitles on, which is quite good for people who find it hard of hearing. But lots of my colleagues who had done this stuff said that although there are challenges, there are also… they found that when it worked, it worked really well. And often the older people or people with dementia, they had potentially, they had needed help to set up a Zoom or something, but they actually felt a great sense of excitement and confidence that they’ve managed to do it and that created quite a nice atmosphere to engage with people in research in.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

And also, there was someone who had an idea about sending people biscuits with the interview invitation and then you’ve still got your mirroring, the idea of your sharing, having a cup of tea and a biscuit together, but you’re… even though you through the screen. So yeah, I think there’s challenges and there’s advantages.

Leah Fullegar:

I really liked the idea of being sent biscuits. So I’ll go for the last question, how do you decide how many people to interview?

Dr Jemima Dooley:

This is the question the qualitative researcher always has to… Anything. Try to be short. Traditionally, or not traditionally, even what is always used is a term called data saturation, which is this idea that you interview people until you’re not getting any new data. There’s various problems with that because it assumes that you’re doing the analysis perfectly alongside your interviews, which you might not be. It’s also based in commonly used theories of qualitative analysis, such as thematic analysis or grounded theory, which are looking at themes, which not all qualitative researcher approaches things in that way.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

There’s kind of a… I call it [inaudible 00:32:08] I don’t know, actually, exactly what I think. There’s an alternative idea called information power, which is where you do interviews basically until you feel that the research question is answered, but that’s something that you can think about in advance because you can think, “Well, what’s my research question? Who do I need to talk to answer it ideally?” So you could think, “I’m trying to find out what people’s experiences of a year post-diagnosis is. I want as part of my research to get a diverse group, so I want to talk to younger people with dementia, older people with dementia, people from different backgrounds.” And then you think, “Maybe I want five to ten. I’ll start off with five from each of these groups. So that’ll be the samples.” There’s things, you can work this out, I think.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

And then the other thing to think about, it’s, I think you’ve just got to be flexible and adaptable, like lots of qualitative research that is, but, you don’t want to say I’m definitely doing 20 qualitative interviews and then you find the first five tank. And then you think when I’ve only got 15 good ones. So you want to think, “Well, actually now I’ll keep going.” It’s a reflexive process and adaptive process. And luckily, people who understand qualitative research understand that so it’s not like quant where you’ve got to say, “I’m doing this exact number for this reason.” It’s just you’ve got to be aware of your research question, aware of your participants. You just want to make sure you’ve answered the question and honored people’s voices.

Leah Fullegar:

I genuinely am feeling so much better about my research. I really do wish I’d had this conversation three years ago.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

I’m sure you’re doing all the right things.

Leah Fullegar:

Kahryn, yeah?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

Can I come in on this as well?

Leah Fullegar:

Yeah.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I think that people really do get little bit wound up by this question of how many interviews is enough and Professor Roz Edwards, University of Southampton has written on this and a number of other people have as well. So it might be worth going and having a look at those. One of the things that I would say is that there’s quite a problematic assumption that’s built into those sorts of questions. And I think that does come from quite a quantsy perspective, which is that it’s only in the fieldwork that we’re going to find our answers. But we know that that’s not the only data that we’re using on or drawing upon.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So for me, I don’t think an interview is ever exhausted. I just don’t think so, but then you’ll expect to hear that from me as someone who’s very passionate about quality to secondary analysis and in terms of interviews being enough, I love your answer, Jemima, about how might our data help to support us address these sorts of questions. I hope that’s helpful. And I also want to reassure people that even if you only get one interview in your PhD and everything else fails, but I’ll tell you something and there will be other data out there. There will be some other way of researching it. Don’t worry.

Leah Fullegar:

I think that’s probably the best bit of advice for any PhD student. Just don’t panic.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

No, if you can’t get interviews for something, there’ll be some online forum. There’ll be data. There will be data in the UK data archive. They’ve got mountains of data. There will be data. There will be something that you can use in order to think through your research question.

Leah Fullegar:

Brilliant. So let’s think what have we learned so far. We’ve learned that we have a new favorite phrase, which is “a conversation with purpose.” What else have we learned? We’ve learned to, well, I think that the biggest thing I would take away from this actually is to relax a bit and the idea of being, like you say, being reflexive and you can plan for every eventuality, but in reality, you just have to go with the flow and take each minute and moment as it comes. And I think that’s quite an important takeaway from that. So in this final part of the show, we’re going to discuss the common pitfalls challenges and how to avoid them.

Leah Fullegar:

Despite your best efforts to prepare, you’re still going into a room with someone either online or in reality that you don’t fully know. And you never quite know what they’ll say. So Jemima, can you tell us what challenges did you come across in delivering your research and what might you do differently?

Dr Jemima Dooley:

The challenges come when something happens that you don’t expect. Exactly what Kahryn was just saying, but actually I think the main way to get across these is by accepting that they’re learning points and especially in PhD stage and also accepting that when you come into research, you think there’s a research plan that you’ve got this protocol at the beginning. And every single thing of research that I’ve worked on, it’s changed. Things have happened differently. Things had to adapt and that’s what the wonders of qualitative research is that it embraces that. And I think that that’s… Yeah, there are cool challenges. Working with people with dementia is a very specific… As the common phrase is, “Once you’ve met one person with dementia, you’ve met one person with dementia.” Everyone’s different.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

But there [inaudible 00:37:35] challenge that comes with working with people who may have some impaired cognitive capacity and especially when you’re thinking about traditional interviewing methods, like I was saying earlier. But it is. I think it’s just rolling with the punches, being adaptive and taking everything as a learning experience and nothing ever goes wrong, as the saying…. You’re just learning from things.

Leah Fullegar:

So Kahryn, what would you say are the common pitfalls for interviewing and how would you avoid them?

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So I think common pitfalls are in qualitative research is to try and treat an interview as a method, something that is set of relationships that you form. And also, as I said earlier, the idea that somehow the only fieldwork data that you have is within that interview. Being very, very aware of keeping fieldwork diaries and log books and so on and so forth, I think is absolutely essential to qualitative research because that allows us to capture the production of the research, overall. That would be one of the pitfalls is trying to treat it as a one-off event or something that you do and that it has to be done in this way. And you asked me earlier, Leah, about people going off-piste and whatever. Don’t panic. Don’t panic before the interview. Don’t panic in the interview and don’t panic after. These are human interactions.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

These are human relations. These are part of the social world. This is not something that’s happening somehow external to real life or external. They’re unusual. They’re fabricated in very particular ways, but nevertheless, they are part of our ongoing lives. So don’t panic. That would be the second one.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I think the other one is assumptions about technology. Major pitfall. The biggest mistake or the biggest error that I’ve come across are interviews not recording and people absolutely, they just absolutely lose it. When that happens, again, don’t panic, sit down and make a record as detailed as you can of the interview. Don’t try and treat interview data as unproblematically data. Your recordings and your own notes about interviews are is important as what it is that people say. What people say isn’t just a direct form of evidence. You will always be treating it analytically in very particular ways.

Leah Fullegar:

That’s definitely…. hits a nerve with the recording technology not quite working. Whenever I’ve done interviews, I’ve had an almost compulsive need to test all of my equipment before we start and make sure it’s all recording perfectly. Oh, sound advice. So in this final segment, I’m going to give our expert, Kahryn one minute to tell our listeners what they should go away and read to further their knowledge on this method.

Leah Fullegar:

So Kahryn, over to you.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

So I mentioned Ann Oakley’s work. I would absolutely go away and just read all of it that you can get hold of. I would read the books by Jennifer Mason. Her work is immaculately written, absolutely brilliant. But I finally would encourage you to go away and read as many interviews as you can. Go and have a look at other people’s interviews. I think that I learned so much, for example, from Joanna Bornat’s interviews. The techniques are absolutely stellar. So go and have a look at some interviews.

Leah Fullegar:

This has been a really good and really interesting first episode. And I really thank you both for coming to this. I’ve learned so much and it’s just been fascinating. I hope you’ve both enjoyed it and I’m sure our listeners will, too.

Dr Jemima Dooley:

I have thank you.

Leah Fullegar:

Good.

Dr Kahryn Hughes:

I have. It’s been lovely to hear about your work. It’s been really great.

Leah Fullegar:

So if listeners want to know more about the interviewing method about the NCRM Dementia Researcher and our guests today, you will find all the links in the texts that came with the show. And remember, if you found this useful and learned some stuff, then please share this podcast with your friends or leave a review online.

Leah Fullegar:

Make sure to subscribe to the Dementia Researcher podcast in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. But all that’s left for me really, as I wrap up my interview… so again, a huge thank you to our guests. We’ve had the wonderfully helpful Dr. Jemima Dooley sharing her experiences. And in the expert corner, we’ve had the miraculous Dr. Kahryn Hughes. Thank you both. It has been an absolute pleasure. We will be back tomorrow, continuing our journey as part of the Research Methods Festival, where I will be joined by Dr David Griffiths and Dr. Anne-Nicole Casey, discussing social network analysis, which I would like to add, has nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter.

END