Magnitud del esfuerzo vertical o sobrecarga ( V)

The method used in any research ultimately depends on the purpose of the research and the questions being asked (Seidman, 2006). Seidman explains that, if the research is interested in people’s experience and what meaning those people make out of that experience or interested in their “subjective understanding” (p.11), interview is the best method to use. Interview is “a key to many forms of qualitative educational research” (Dilley, 2004, p.1) and offers “a basic mode of inquiry” (Seidman, 2006, p.8). According to Seidman, interviewing provides qualitative researchers access to the context and motives of people's behaviour and a way to understand the meaning participants give that behaviour. Interviewing allows qualitative researchers to put behaviour in context and provides access to understanding and reasoning from the interviewee’s perspective. Seidman outlines that the basic purpose of interviewing is not to get answers to questions, nor to test hypotheses, but to understand the lived experience of other people and to construe the meaning made of that experience.

Witzel and Reiter (2012) reviewed Kvale and Brinkmann’s (2009) classification of interviewers as either miner-interviewers or traveller-interviewers. The miner-interviewer “has a targeted and well-defined interest in specific information she considers valuable”; this type of interviewer knows what to look for and turns the research into a collection of “nuggets of knowledge” (Witzel & Reiter, 2012, p.1). Meanwhile the traveller-interviewer wanders across the landscape of the area under investigation, involves themselves in conversations, and encourages people to tell them about their experiences. With each conversation, traveller- interviewers may discover new aspects, develop and modify their opinion. Hence, together with the respondents, the traveller-interviewers interactively co-construct the knowledge. Witzel and Reiter, however, found disadvantages in this classification of interviewers. The former has a low chance of changing their assessment criteria and the latter might be overwhelmed by the many new impressions and perspectives they have encountered and “may even forget about their original interest” (p.2). Witzel and Reiter then add another metaphor to describe a third way of obtaining knowledge—the interviewer as a well-informed traveller. Well-informed interviewers have “certain priorities and expectations and start with the journey on the basis of background information obtained beforehand” (p.2). The

knowledge constructed will be based on the respondents they meet and on their insider knowledge. This type of interviewer constructs the problem-centred interview (PCI). Witzel and Reiter stress that the most appropriate meaning for the word ‘problem’ in that phrase is a specific research question. Centring the research problem in the interview means the PCI avoids respondents speaking off topic because of the focus on making meaning around aspects relevant to the problem.

The typology of interviewers results in different typology of interviews. Miner interviewers, who know what to look for and what is valuable, tend to use a structured interview. The traveller interviewers, who actively involves themselves to encourage people to tell their experiences and may find new aspects, is more likely to use an unstructured interview. Meanwhile, the well-informed traveller, who conducts the PCI, will use a semi-structured interview frame.

From the typology for a research interview, the well-informed traveller model has been applied in this thesis. Witzel and Reiter’s (2012) offer guidelines to the methodological and practical program of well-informed travellers:

 Interviewing is identified as the appropriate way of collecting information regarding a certain issue;

 The issue refers to a research question regarding the what, how, and why of actions, appraisal and opinions;

 The researcher has a clear idea about which people could provide first-hand insight into this topic;

 The research participants allow the researcher to collect their extensive knowledge in order to understand their perspective in as much detail as possible.

Semi-structured research questions helped me identify the relevant issues experienced by individuals, and retained my focus in the interviews. First, as I had identified a focus for my research, the questions were based on the themes I prepared. Second, the semi-structured interview enabled me to draw comparisons across a sample of research participants (Heath, Brooks, Cleaver, & Ireland, 2009). The order of the topics did not matter, though I had an optimal sequence in mind (Appendix B). Hence, by exploring similar themes with each participant, “patterns

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and trends are more readily identifiable” (Heath, Brooks, Cleaver, & Ireland, 2009, p.79). In addition, I involved participants more actively in the process of knowledge constitution by conducting well prepared but flexible interviews. In this case, I conducted the interview in a manner that enabled respondents to express their experiences freely while acknowledging the context of the interviewer-interviewee relationship.

The stages of an interview investigation outlined by Kvale (2004), and the structure of the interview developed by Seidman (2006), helped to structure the interview encounter. Kvale explains that interview research must be conducted systematically. The recommended stages include: the planning phase of an interview study (thematising and designing); the fieldwork phase (interviewing); and the phase after the data has been collected such as transcribing, analysing, verifying, and reporting. The interview itself is designed around the themes identified in this study and its research questions (see Appendix B).

Seidman’s (2006) three-interview model is used. According to Seidman (2006) each part of this model serves a purpose both by itself and within the series. In Part One, I asked the participant for an interesting story about their present work situation. In this study, the first phase of interview was used to gather the background story of their teaching career and their experience working in the current schools. Such questioning helped me to gather important information such as the teachers’ experience in several curricular reforms, professional learning, and the typical students they encounter. This information enabled me to compare and contrast the teachers as cases. In Part Two as recommended by Seidman, the questions concentrated on the concrete details of the participants’ present lived experience in the topic area of the study. In this phase, a semi-structured interview to gather information regarding issues and themes addressed in this study was performed. These first two phases were combined in Interview 1. Then, following Seidman, in Part Three, I asked the participant to reflect on the meanings behind their observed classroom actions. This phase constituted Interview 2, conducted after doing the three classroom observations. In this phase, teachers were asked to explain their meanings and reasons for their activities as observed in the classrooms. The questions prepared to guide the two semi-structured interviews are presented in Appendix B.

The interviews were conducted in Bahasa Indonesian, as the shared first language of participants and me. Following Kvale (2004), after the data has been collected, the interview data was transcribed, and then translated into English. In later sections, the processes of transcription, translation and analysis of data are further discussed.

To anticipate any problem that might arise in interviewing and analysing my interview data, I also considered the drawbacks of the interview method and addressed them in my design as far as possible. Interviews can be time consuming and demanding (Gubrium & Holstein, 2002) with the risk of a lack of comparability and reliability (Miller & Brewer, 2003). Also, from an objectivist ontological stance, when there is a change in the order of questions applied to different respondents, researchers may find it difficult to compare answers. Therefore, a well prepared but flexible interview, which Witzel and Reiter (2012) describe as a semi-structured interview, could address this consideration. Additionally, my study used NVIVO software for thematic coding as a way to overcome such comparative problems across a large corpus of interview data. In addition, Kvale (2004) argued that, as accuracy of the data and their interpretation is the leading principle for qualitative validity, researchers need to consider the challenge of interpreting the interview according to the theoretical frame of the study. This stage of building a cohesive design is discussed in Section 4.9.

More subtly, the issue of impression management must also be considered in research interviewing. In a research interview, there is the immediate social problem of coping with an interpersonal relationship and its complex interactions in a kind of non-routine situation, that is, the encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee (Qu & Dumay, 2011). Both interviewer and interviewee may be overly concerned with the impression they are giving the other party, which can distort the data garnered from the exchange. Impression management in this field can be related to the way the qualitative interviewer “dresses up” or “dresses down” (Myers & Newman, 2007, p.15) to gain the respondents’ trust and candid accounts of experience. Myers and Newman report that some qualitative researchers choose to “go native”, dressing and speaking in exactly the same way as the interviewee (p.15). In contrast, Dingwall (1997) noted that an interview is not a conversation between interviewer and interviewee, but is “a deliberately created opportunity to talk about

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something the interviewer is interested in and that may or may not be of interest to the respondent” (p.59). Therefore, Dingwall assumed that there is an inescapable constraint on face-to-face interaction. Interviewees mostly experience difficulties in responding to questions in the initial exchanges, and they will tend to seek to demonstrate their competence “as a member of whatever community is invoked by the interview topic” in the interview (p.59). For the interviewer, although they define an interview as “what parties are going to talk about and what will count as relevant” (p.59), Dingwall advises the researcher to minimise any reactions to any response given by the interviewees.

For this study, it was considered important not to create a false impression by acting, for example, as a “native”. Even when the interviewer and the interviewee seem to be speaking the same language, their words may carry different cultural meanings and different worldviews (Qu & Dumay, 2011). Hence, interviewers in such circumstances should work to suppress their own interpretations and evaluations, and seek to understand the interviewee’s meanings from the interviewee’s perspective. Meanwhile, there is also the risk of interviewer and interviewee sharing a common world, thus able to share meanings implicitly rather than explicitly in the interview, which reduces the quality of the data. Since communicating tends to become more difficult when people have different worldviews, done with care, a well-planned interview approach can provide a rich set of data (Qu & Dumay, 2011).

Since the research paradigm of this study is constructive-interpretative, the data relies on how both researcher and respondents build understanding together. Therefore, mutual trust and respect between interviewer and interviewees is crucial. In doing so, there must be evidence of “how power is shared by researcher and the researched” in terms of discussions, co-development of the research focus, and extensive member checks (Pillow, 2003, p. 185). Additionally, in contrast to the structured interview in which the interviewers retain tight control of topics and pacing, semi-structured interviews are a way to share power with the interviewee over what information is considered relevant to the topic.

To approach my teachers I did not adopt any special approach such as “dressing up” or “dressing down”, since the teachers and I already shared much in common. We spoke the same language and shared experience as language educators,

which helped reduce the social distance and power difference between researcher and researched. As the result, teachers could share their experiences comfortably. However, I realised that this common ground does not erase the power difference embedded in researching others. Therefore, I worked to deserve the trust the teachers placed in me by sharing their thoughts.

Further, a key point in interviewing, as method, is how to make the interviewee feel comfortable, and to minimise social dissonance (Myers & Newman, 2007). Given the setting and the population, the interviews were conducted in Indonesian. Though all my participants as EFL teachers could speak English, Indonesian was used rather than English to reduce any language barrier and to enable respondents to express themselves more freely. As a result, teachers could speak of their experience, dilemmas, and resolution regarding the curricular reforms. While I worked to maximise their comfort, I recognise that no interview setting is entirely free of constraints. For example, some teachers seemed to be nervous in Interview 1; they gave me short answers and full of hesitations. Sometimes their answers did not address my question. However, in Interview 2, conducted after I observed three classroom lessons with each teacher, the participants gave me more fluent and lengthy answers in response to my questions. In this way, I learnt to revisit my initial questions in Interview 2.

As the interview was conducted in Bahasa Indonesian and the EFL teachers could understand English, the member checking was conducted to seek participants’ feedback both to clarify possible moments of miscommunication and to confirm the accuracy of transcriptions and translations. Considerations around transcription and translation are elaborated in Section 4.12.