Yin claims that interviews can be particularly useful in case study research to answer questions of why and how, and especially so for insights into “participants’
relativist perspectives,” such as their values (2018: 117/322). In the second phase, in-depth interviews were conducted with 11 Momentum-funded musicians and 14 in-depth interviews were conducted with artist managers between January and December 2016. Appendix A lists the participants of this study and the locations,
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method of interview, and interview lengths. Brinkmann and Kvale present seven stages of designing and executing interviews (2015: 136):
1. Thematizing 2. Designing 3. Interviewing 4. Transcribing 5. Analysing 6. Verifying 7. Reporting
This study sought to follow these seven stages loosely while remaining open to discovery. Decisions about the interviews and the draft interview schedules were composed and submitted to the university ethics committee prior to completion of fieldwork. This is in line with Brinkmann and Kvale’s (2015) view that the
interviewer should have an overview of the entire process in mind, even at the early stages of the study. In studies involving interviews, researchers must decide whether to incorporate what they learn as they undertake research into the
questioning process or to keep the questions consistent for comparative analysis purposes. Brinkmann and Kvale declare that:
The interview brings forth new and unexpected aspects of the phenomena studied, and during analysis of the transcribed interviews new distinctions may be discovered […] Thus in exploratory studies the questioning may continually improve as the researcher learns more about the topic, ideally resulting in a sophisticated form of interviewing receptive to the nuances and complexities of the topic explored. (2015: 139)
I took the adaptive approach when completing the interviews with artist managers and with musicians, as I sought to bring the knowledge I gained in the interviewing process to inform the interview questions going forward. For artist managers, taking a learning and adaptive approach to questions was particularly necessary since they had not originally been included in the research design and the nature and extent of their involvement was largely unknown. The sample size for
interviews from staff was only two from ACE and two from PRSF, due to the
limited number of staff with knowledge of the programme and limitations of gaining access. Therefore, questions were not adapted for these participants.
Artist managers were added to the research design in August 2015, which I explain later in this chapter, and they were interviewed before musicians, partly
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because it was easier to contact them. One artist manager was informally interviewed prior to the beginning of the main phase of interviews to test the interview questions. Artist managers were interviewed depending on their availability, and this meant some had only half an hour to speak. In these
instances, key questions of interest were chosen to focus on in the interview. The sample interview schedule is in the Appendix C.2.
For the musicians, I made the decision to focus on funded musicians because my questions related more to the value of the funding, as perceived by those musicians who received it. Considering musicians who had applied and not received funding was beyond the scope of this project. Those who were
unsuccessful were, I thought, unlikely to reply, and discussing applying for funding they did not receive might be a sensitive subject. My research, therefore, cannot address the ways un-funded musicians, whose applications were unsuccessful, value public funding. In future, I would include the views of musicians unable to obtain funding, as speaking to unfunded musicians would help build on this study’s findings and better define what success means for different musicians. Including their views could also provide a comparative element to the findings from the funded musicians. A pilot interview was carried out informally in late 2015 to test the interview questions. Interviews sought to discuss musicians’ music, funding, support, their careers and what success as a musician means to them. The
interviews were loosely structured and flexible so that musicians could raise issues important to them and discussion could emerge naturally. An example interview guide is included in Appendix C. Kvale views “discursive interviewing” as a
process that “focus[es] on variation and diversity and on the active participation of the interviewer in the discourse” (2007: 114). The aim of this study to adopt the language of the participants to describe their evaluation of the Momentum funding meant that flexibility during interviews in the types of questions was important. I did not want to lead the participant nor speak for them. The interviews did seek to ascertain demographic information in line with my research questions about inequality, but questions of ethnicity and socio-economic status were not posed directly. Instead, I adopted an ethnographic interview approach to draw these aspects out naturally through questions of how they got into music, whether their families supported their music career and whether they studied a degree.
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Musicians and managers were both contacted primarily through email. Some were contacted via Twitter in an attempt to broaden the sample, but this proved
unsuccessful. Due to the multi-genre nature of Momentum, the sample aimed to include musicians creating music within a mix of subgenres falling under rock, pop, hip-hop, urban, metal and electronic. A breakdown of the characteristics of the musicians in the study is presented in Chapter 7. Next, I discuss the
semi-structured interviews I conducted with organisational staff working on Momentum.