Perhaps the most dominant advantage of the interview over other research methods is its flexibility and ‘adaptability’ (Bell, 2009: 157). An interviewer can remodel and shape the interview to follow up leading ideas, ‘probe’ responses and explore emotions further, which a static, written questionnaire cannot do. The ‘unwitting’ evidence of interviews lies in the interviewer’s observations of how the interviewee’s responses are made, such as through the tone, body language, facial expression, or with pause and hesitation (Bell, 2009: 157), providing additional information that the ‘witting’ evidence of a written comment may not reveal. Where questionnaire responses are immobile, responses in interviews can be further moved on through further questioning, development and clarification.
Wiseman and Aron (1972) use the analogy of a fishing trip to reveal the need for the necessary skills and techniques required for successful interviewing. Cohen and Crabtree (2006) extend this analogy, highlighting that interviewing requires ‘careful preparation, much patience and considerable practice if the eventual reward it to be a worthwhile catch' (2006: 172). Bell (2009) concedes that interviews, particularly unstructured interviews, around a topic can provide a ‘wealth of valuable' data. To achieve this, the interviewer must have a ‘great deal of expertise' to control the interview and must spend a ‘great deal of time' on analysing the findings (Bell, 2009: 161), complementing Smith et al.'s IPA guidelines (2009) that considerable time must be devoted to the reading and re-reading of transcripts. A slight difference with IPA interviews, however, is to aim for the dialogue to be as participant-led as possible, with only prompting from the interviewer when necessary.
By staggering the interviews over a four-month period (see Appendix D for interview schedule), I was able to reflect on and evaluate each interview, and consider any issues I missed, or highlight issues I wished to pursue further in future interviews; these notes I made in my research diary. By the final interviews I was gaining a fuller picture of the participants’ fears, concerns, and main attractions to online communication, thus could question more deeply their feelings and experiences where necessary and consider how these lived experiences had impacted upon the participants’ identity development.
76 Having read widely around the issues of online communication, such as ‘trolling’, where strangers purposely write mean and hurtful comments on the posts of others, ‘cyber-
bullying’, and the often-tragic outcomes from these that are media-covered, I appreciate that there are disadvantages as well as benefits in the state of ‘knowing’ since the views of the researcher-interviews may not always be easily detached from the research investigation (Hammersley, 1992; Silverman, 1993). The research interview, however, can be described as a tool for providing access to what is
‘inside a person’s head, [the interview] makes it possible to measure what a person knows (knowledge or information); what a person likes or dislikes (values and preferences) and what a person thinks (attitudes and beliefs)’
(Tuckman, 2000: 268).
Since no situation will ever be viewed in the same way by all, the interview is the primary path through which to discern these multiple realities. Semi-structured interviews were adopted, not just as the IPA method of choice, but because this style of interview enables the interviewer to probe and expand on meaning once the respondent has answered initial basic questions (Hitchcock and Hughes, 1995). The six participants in this study were asked the same significant questions, but the opportunity was available to explore responses so that each interviewee had a unique experience. The aim was to enable participants to tell their own stories even though I had in mind a list of issues that I wished to raise, a technique proposed by Stake (1995).
The first round of interviews with the six participants was to gather their self-reported
experiences of using the Internet generally, to provide a context for their social media usage. As explored in Chapter 2, there may be several motivations for going online, and to help answer RQ1, I wished to learn more about the participants’ perceptions of their identities in light of their behaviours, both off and online. The second round of interviews aimed to dig deeper into the participants’ use of online communication tools such as private messaging, and the impacts of tools such as these on their behaviour. The third and final interviews, informed by previous interviews and research diary notes, were an opportunity to fill any gaps in data from each participant by collecting final valuable insight into the lived experiences- both online and offline- of each participant, and overall perceptions of themselves as young women. The interviews could also allow conversation around their hopes and fears for their future world intertwined with technology.
A point of critique to this method that must be acknowledged here, however, is both the possible restrictions, rigidity or power dynamic that may have been imposed through the tool
77 of semi-structured interviews. In defence of this, I found that as the participants were young children, the approach of a semi-structured interview allowed for a structure to guide the conversation but did not impose restrictions as I allowed participants to ‘talk-out’ ideas until they had no more to say on a point before I asked the next question. I balanced the power dynamic by considering the seating arrangement, side by side in the same room, providing refreshments for comfort, and with a clear introduction and icebreakers to put the
participants at ease.
These issues aside, the literature had shown me that there were wider points to consider when interviewing, and these are analysed further in Section 3.6.4 below.