There was variation in the interview settings. For example, I met medical doctors in their lunchbreak rooms, lawyers in court cafés and businesspeople in directors’ suites on rooftops and sometimes even at participants’ homes. Being flexible with times, dates and locations
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enabled me to provide research participants with as comfortable an interview setting as possible.
Arguably, gaining access to elite individuals and surroundings is much more complex than studying non-elites (Pettigrew, 1992). Securing research access to elites is observed as particularly complicated as they, by their very nature, ‘establish barriers that set their members apart from the rest of society’ (Hertz and Imber, 1993, p. 3). Securing access to elites therefore requires far more persistence, meaning that the procedure can be more protracted, multifaceted and time-consuming than conducting research in the field of non- elites. Yet, as discussed in Section 3.3.5, I managed to gain access to some elite members, especially through networks and the snowball technique. However, the interview settings did raise concerns and possible limitations.
3.9.1 Power imbalance: ‘You don’t need to turn that thing on’ (ES, 39) The above quote was told to me before one of my interviews. In fact, I did not in this case have the chance to ask the participant whether I could record our interview, as he was simply faster to reach the subject than me. He dictated this to me, in the same way that he had decided the setting of the interview. He chose a room in his office where many other
employees were sitting as well. This would not have been my first choice of venue because of the volume of background noise, which made writing field notes and interviewing at the same time additionally challenging. He had slotted me in to his busy schedule. He makes the
guidelines. Indeed, both the interview participant and I use power, but in this respect I felt powerless. Through this empirical instance, I shall illustrate actions through which power was variously exercised during the interview stage, indicating ways in which I as a researcher had become less powerful within the interview process and therefore limited in fully questioning the scope of my interview schedule. I am aware that the association between me as a
researcher and the interview participants can be viewed as a power relation (Kvale, 2006), one that comprises developing togetherness and establishing differences (Ikonen and Ojala, 2007). When I mention power here I refer to undertakings of my interview participants which are directed towards controlling the situation and influencing my actions and enquiries. If, indeed, he does construct the guidelines, then the extent to which this is compatible with the research process, when I as a researcher must exercise some degree of control over the interview to obtain the quality of data that I require to draw valid conclusions must be established
(Vähäsantanen and Saarinen, 2013). Commonly, the researcher in social science is believed to be in the dominant position of power and so enjoys obvious advantages (Lipsig, 2006; Kvale
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2006), yet the issue of power played a key role throughout the entire interview process. In spite of everything, I set the agenda, wrote the schedule and, crucially, analysed the data. This unevenness of power raises more than a few practical and ethical issues for any research. The balance in favour of those being interviewed, aiming for a bond that is characterised by shared respect and devoid of any exploitation, is a concern in any project. However, the notion of exclusive power relating to my economic elite interview participants is only partly true. The concerns are therefore slightly different when the participants being studied are elites, and this raises its own set of particular issues. Elites are diverse for a number of reasons, and these individualities make them of interest to me as a researcher. Elites are powerful as they can claim to be intelligent knowledgeable and self-reliant (Stephens, 2007). According to Nader (1972), individuals holding such power can limit the researcher and present a unique set of challenges. Cochrane (1998) advises awareness of the danger that researchers can become reliant on research participants.
I was aware of the risk as I was paying attention not to suspend my judgement and challenge members of the economic elites. This allowed me to gain a truthful representation of their world, rather than only a limited and partial view. The power imbalance between the
researcher and the participants can also endanger their working relationship (Maclean et al., 2015; Welch et al., 2002). Often in the researcher–participant relationship, the researcher is of relatively privileged standing as an academic, while the research participant is often of a lower status. In such situations, the researcher often provides the main energy behind the interview, whereas research undertaken with elite participants is often diametrically opposed to this, with the research participant of significantly higher social status than the researcher. In such situations, elite members may simply dictate the dialogue process as skilled and
experienced interview participants (Maclean et al., 2012). In another interview setting, I acknowledged a situation in which the participants took charge, through instructing and questioning me. While the relationships between interview participants are contextually situated, it became apparent that they are nonetheless influenced by the identities and
positions of the researchers and participants as well as the interview settings. Thus, the degree of control implemented by interview participants can be linked to the type of interview
(Fontana and Frey, 2005). As I have chosen a semi-structured interview approach, I have intentionally given research participants more control over the course of the interview than they would have had in a structured interview setting (Vähäsantanen and Saarinen, 2013). The power asymmetry goes back to the access phase. Physical setting aspects such as sitting on a smaller chair while the interviewee sits at a big desk and being a guest on someone else’s
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‘territory’ can further emphasise the power imbalance between the research participant and the researcher. The researcher is therefore, from the point of the first handshake, a ‘requester’, having to adopt the demeanour of being respectfully appreciative to obtain an interview (Cochrane, 1998; Thomas, 1993). Desmond (2004, p. 265) states that ‘with elite interviewees, the [relationship] is inevitably asymmetrical regardless of the research strategies deployed’. According to England (2002), studying up is no different and the interactions will remain inevitably asymmetrical. In such cases, where physical power was present, I found that power-related events were often interwoven with the interview participants’ individualities. For instance, MA, a senior lawyer, continued to use his power by foregrounding his age and achievements, whereas he repeatedly highlighted my young age which he though is an age where individuals, including myself were unwise and should listen more instead of asking too many questions. I was hardly able to ask my questions as he repeatedly interrupted them. In these kinds of situations, interviewers are fairly powerless. However, when such occasions materialised, I responded passively, as I was aware of certain limitations that could happen during the research with elite professionals and acted to minimise it whenever possible, because, as I was undertaking a qualitative piece of research, it was obligatory for me to have constructive and positive interactions with my research participants.
3.9.2 Openness of elite research participants
The degree of openness of elite interview participants is another aspect of possible limitation to which the researcher needs to pay attention. According to Fitz and Halpin (1995), elite members exhibit significant differences in openness compared to regular interview
candidates, as they are often regarded as more practised in impression management and are at the same time strongly bound by organisational guidelines (Brown and Jones, 2000). The fact that only one fifth of the participants accepted that the interview be audio recorded certainly gives us an indication that openness and frankness have not always been fully granted. As the majority of the first research participants refused to be audio recorded, I was, at an early stage, prepared for participants not wanting to be recorded and aware of consequent potential
limitations of honesty and openness. Anxieties such as ‘would the respondents have replied in the same manner under different circumstances?’ or ‘are the views honest answers’ might form part of reasonable criticisms (Fidler, 1981). Yet, interviews are always an artificially created interaction that is deeply situational. Presumably, some of the answers and views given would have varied if the time and occasion had been different (Potter and Hepburn, 2012). According to Ostrander (1993), researchers should expect elite research participants to
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be talented in dealing with challenging and inquisitive questions and often welcome the opportunity to respond in a straightforward manner to any criticism that may have been made of their organisation or of themselves as individuals. Elites are in the habit of being the focus of attention. They have the ability to converse easily and enter into monologues instead of answering on inconvenient subjects. Moreover, elite members are often trained in how to represent and conform to their self-image and business before outsiders (Mikecz, 2012; Welch et al., 2002). However, I was not interested in the ‘public relations’ version of events but in the more deeply held personal accounts of events. The German-Turkish economic elites I spoke to were very articulate and intelligent, and thus easily presented themselves to me, the researcher, in a good light, though perhaps not entirely authentically at times. Cross-cultural differentiations in verbal and non-verbal dialogues, in manners, morals, ethics, norms and value systems, can without doubt lead to misinterpretations. The fact that both interviewer and interviewee were German-Turks in this case reduced such misinterpretations but did not eliminate them entirely, given the different backgrounds and experiences involved.
3.10 Conclusion
In summary, this chapter has described and justified the qualitative methodology chosen for the study. The chapter began by making explicit the philosophical underpinnings of this study and suggested that these have direct methodological implications. The chapter focused on the methodology used in this study. Furthermore, I highlighted the sample selection, described the procedure used in designing the instrument and collecting the data, and provided an explanation of the chosen methods. The literature review has assisted me in the choice of methodology type in the study. In this chapter, I attempted to show some of the issues, methodologies and limitations of my research. In the next chapter, I will explore the migratory process in the FRG. The following chapter will give the reader a better grasp of how it came about that the Turks became Gastarbeiter in Germany in the first place.
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