GRACIAS POR SU COLABORACIÓN

Some of the methodological literature has discussed difficulties and challenging situations in the process of conducting qualitative interviews. For example, Reissman (1987) and Owens (2006) considered interactional problems due to the interviewer’s inexperience and incompetence, whereas Adler & Adler (2001), Gorden (1987), Keats (2000), Koivunen (2010) and Lareau (2000) discussed problematic interview cases mainly deriving from uncooperative interviewees. The majority of such methodological writing in relation to problematic interview interactions constitute a form of advice-giving by suggesting potential ways of avoiding those problems. Most importantly, the literature is preoccupied with the notion that unsuccessful interviews are simply caused by either reluctant

interviewees or the interviewer’s lack of interviewing skills and insufficient planning/knowledge. Adler & Adler (2001) is a good example illustrating the spectrum of reluctance, such as secretive, sensitive, the advantaged and the disadvantaged participants. Then they proposed several guidelines to overcome such reluctance/resistance from interviewees. Owens (2006) is an example to show how the interviewer’s inattentiveness to the interviewee’s shame and

embarrassment produced seemingly unusable data in terms of silence/inaudibility. Owens conducted post hoc analysis of several problematic fragments in her interviews, for example the silence produced by one participant who was supposed to elaborate upon a sensitive topic such as marriage separation. By doing such reflective re-analysis of the unsuccessful interview, Owens discovered that the participants struggled with both linguistic and rhetorical problems as the

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story of her marriage and subsequent separation included some sensitive elements not readily told to an interviewer who is, after all, likely to be a stranger, even though confidentiality was assured. Most importantly, she found that her lack of attention to such problems ‘contributed to a failure of expanding conversational space’, which possibly enables the participant to articulate further about her intimate experience involving negative emotions such as shame (ibid: 1163). Based upon this observation, she put forward several suggestions how to renegotiate conversational space in which delicate and sensitive matters could emerge during an interview (ibid: 1176).

As such, the literature has claimed that uncooperative interviewees or incompetent interviewers may lead to unreliable findings and thus jeopardise the key objective of various kinds of research projects. In this sense, problematic interviews are readily labelled as failure by the literature, which cannot be developed as a main analytic focus of a study. Nevertheless, several researchers informed by the constructionist conception of interviewing have raised an important

methodological question for the label failure, along with its underlying assumptions about various kinds of problematic interview interactions (e.g.

‘inconsistent and contradictory information, lack of cooperation, question evasion, inarticulate accounts, difficulty in understanding of a question posed, disclosure of emotional status’ (Keats, 2000: 60-61)). With critical engagement with such interactions, the researchers have demonstrated how those problems can be revisited by researchers to achieve deeper insights and purposeful reflection of ‘seen but un-noticed’ (Garfinkel, 1967) elements in qualitative interview practices.

For example, Nairn et al. (2005) presented limited spoken data, which tends to be assumed as a failed interview. Again, Nairn et al. called into question the label failure by arguing that such interview cases can be reconsidered as rich data providing an effective prompt for a reflective process. In particular, they re- analysed the cases firstly categorised as noticeably different from other interviews in the corpus in terms of the participants’ constant production of laughter, silence and banter rather than verbal articulation for the posed questions. They noted that such embodiment appears to be a way to signal, manage and control

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uncomfortable situations, presumably due to both an interviewer who has a different age/ethnic background, and also the interview setting itself. With this observation, they emphasised that closely examining those failure cases can provide deeper insights in relation to the theory and practice of qualitative research. Similar to Nairn et al.’s study, the emphasis on revisiting unsuccessful cases, and how we could discover insights from them will be discussed in Chapter 6 and Chapter 8.

Roulston (2011a) also examined several interview excerpts where the interviewer proffers the following actions (i.e. assumed as problematic practices by qualitative research textbooks), such as: 1) using interview guide as a spoken survey; 2) asking closed questions; 3) providing possible responses in questions; 4) asking questions that include assumptions about participants’ life words (ibid: 81). By closely examining interactional features through line-by-line CA analysis of the relevant excerpts, Roulston asserted that the aforementioned question

formulations are rather contingent to the interactional contexts of each interview, especially the sequence that the questions are located in. Therefore, it is difficult to label them as a part of poor practices, unlike the advice literature which has uncritically advocated the dichotomy best versus poor skills. Furthermore, the four practices may only be problematic with respect to the theoretical approach (e.g. neo-positivist, romantist and constructionist) that the researcher chose for the research project, as discussed in section 2.2.1 in terms of how the theory is related to the practices and quality of interviews. The issues related to the interactional contingency will be highlighted throughout Chapter 6.

Rouslston (2014) is another example providing detailed analyses of problematic interview interactions but focusing on the interviewees’ actions, including: 1) when an interviewee pursues the interviewer for an account including further information; 2) when an interviewee declines to articulate further responses; 3) when an interviewee omits details of her/his response relating to a sensitive topic. All of these problematic elements were discussed in the previous advice literature; however, Roulston’s approach is rather different from them as it sheds light on the multi-layered aspect of the interviewee’s problematic actions. For instance, the excerpt in relation to omitting details presented how the interviewee declined to

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elaborate upon details not only due to the delicacy of the topic (i.e. complaining about the faculty), but also the sensitivity and implications that are attached to ‘going on record’ (ibid: 288) albeit with ensured confidentiality. Moreover, any possible solution to the problem was giving up the recording, except asking the same question off the record, which she could have done or should have done. As such, the detailed analyses not only disclose gaps in the interviewer’s practices, but also allow researchers to reflect on what might have been done or what could have been followed up.

Roulston (2016) expanded the discussion on how to reflect interactional challenges, focusing especially on how to convince non-CA audiences of the importance and power of detailed analyses of interview interaction. In addressing this issue, she highlighted that such detailed analyses require researchers to

subject their own talk to the same level of analyses that they employ to investigate the talk of the interviewees (ibid: 73). This practice might be disconcerting for researchers; however, it also enables them to ‘recognise features and

characteristics of their own talk’ (ibid: 71), thereby catalysing researcher

reflexivity. The importance of detailed transcripts including both the interviewer and interviewee will be discussed in Chapter 8 (see section 8.3.2).

The aforementioned studies by Rouston all emphasised that the importance of revisiting interactional contexts surrounding the problematic moments and how such reflective CA analysis of the segments can allow the interviewers to excavate insights into their own practices. In line with the Roulston’s study, Prior (2014) is another detailed CA study analysing the so-called failed L2 qualitative interview. This case study is particularly relevant to this study’s research context in terms of its interactional nature as L2 immigrants’ discourse. Prior opened this study by questioning the prevailing non-treatment of failed interviews in academia, mainly revealed through the exclusion/deletion of unsuccessful cases of qualitative interviews in published resources. He pointed out such absences in

discussing/disseminating failure examples restrains reflective learning for researchers, as ‘readers may never learn of materials not included in a published research study’ (ibid: 496). Therefore, ‘the illusion of interviewing as a relatively uncomplicated means of data collection’ has been perpetuated in the social

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sciences (ibid). Additionally, Prior suggested that the unsuccessful cases may be recognised when ‘activity-as-assumed’ (i.e. question-answer) is not corresponding to ‘activity-as-accomplished’; however, such a binary distinction fails to view L2 interviews as a multi-dimensional social action where two social actors who do not share linguistic and cultural co-membership engage in ‘the local negotiation and construction of specific activities and goals’ (ibid: 506). In this sense, problematic interviews are not simply derived from uncooperative/reluctant interviewees or the interviewer’s lack of preparation, as the methodological advice literature asserts. Rather, it is inextricably bound up with both speakers’ (possibly different) perspectives on interview activities such as what to do and how to do in situ.

The presented interview segments in this article are rarely seen in published research literature, as they show how both speakers orient to seemingly irrelevant and unproductive activities going beyond the conventional boundary of

interviewing (e.g. the interviewee turned on a DVD; the interviewee tried to teach his first language to the interviewer). This, in turn, illuminates a new dimension of analysis with respect to what was actually shared, understood and achieved by the interviewer and interviewee. By dismantling the preconceptions of what to do and how to do in research interviews, Prior highlighted the importance of

‘contextually embedded inspection of the interview process’ as a part of self- reflexive and mindful interview practices (ibid: 497). Prior’s notion of

contextually embedded engagement with the interview data is highly relevant throughout the forthcoming analysis chapters, and Chapter 6 in particular will exemplify the cases in which activity-as-assumed is not synchronised with activity-as-accomplished. In doing this, how the interviewer’s self-disclosure is naturally brought off in such sequences will be presented, primarily to discuss how the interviewer attempts to achieve progressivity and intersubjectivity by deploying self-revealing talk. In addition, the interviewer’s overlapping talk, which go beyond the normative expectation/goal assigned to research interviews will be discussed in Chapter 8 (see section 8.2.1).

As such, CA research has contributed to discussion of how to view problems and challenges occurring in research interviews from a constructionist perspective,

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and how to re-engage with those challenges as a topic of analysis. This approach, in turn, has provided fruitful discussions on how researchers could improve the quality of interviewing through mindful reflection on their own practices. The next section will document literature regarding the salient parts of the thesis, identity, focusing in particular on the findings related to identity work in research interview processes.