Learning Outcomes
Understand
- being open to new, surprising findings is important – a study is not a failure if you don’t find what you set out to find
Remember
- active listening
- interviewing techniques: structured, unstructured, semi-structured
- thematic analysis
Apply
use thematic analysis to analyse interview data
Interviewing
The UK Data service has a great overview of different approaches to interviewing.
To summarise the external resource.
- Structured interviewing involves asking each interviewee the same set of standardised questions.
- Semi-structured interviewing has established key questions and topics, but provides scope for going off track and pursuing new pathways
- Unstructured interviews let the interviewee tell their own story about the topic of the interview. It’s possible to go in depth about how the interviewee constructs meanings, about values. The interviewee can lead, and it is far more of a conversation.
A key technique here is active listening. This means to fully concentrate on what the other person is saying, to seek to understand, and to respond with empathy and interest. Active listening is an important soft skill.
PsychCentral has some great tips about the techniques of active listening, in particular about what to say and what not to say.
Data Analysis
A good starting point for analysis of interviews is thematic analysis, where you systematically extract insights from the data. The linked page provides a good introduction to the process. Note that every step of the interpretation is grounded in the data, and that it is possible to track how you arrived at your insights. This level of documentation is essential if you want to make your work methodologically robust.