PINTURA

A face-to-face interview has been defined as a social activity involving two or more people who are actively engaged in embodied talk, constructing knowledge about themselves and the social world as they interact over time, in a place, and through a range of senses (Sparkes & Smith, 2014). Most interviews focus on the individual and can afford a sensitive and powerful method for capturing experiences, and lived meanings (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009; Markula & Silk, 2011), both of which are important considerations in a phenomenologically-inspired approach as utilised in this study. Thus, the purpose of an interview is to create a conversation where participant(s) “tell stories, accounts, reports and/or descriptions about their perspectives, insights, experiences, feelings, emotions and/or behaviours in relation to the research questions” (Smith & Sparkes, 2016, p. 103).

101 My own approach to interviews was influenced by Kvale and Brinkmann (2009), who use the metaphors of the ‘miner’ and the ‘traveller’ to contrast two different types of interviewer, illustrating the different epistemological conceptions of interviewing as a process of knowledge collection or a process of knowledge construction. The ‘miner’

metaphor is more in line with positivistic epistemologies, viewing knowledge as an uncontaminated, buried, precious metal (objective data) waiting to be unearthed or extracted from participants. Alternatively, the ‘traveller’ metaphor aligns itself with interpretive epistemologies, viewing knowledge as co-constructed between interviewee and interviewer.

For me, having shared the participants’ lifeworld for several weeks before conducting interviews, and in keeping with the ethos of this project, adopting the traveller’s perspective from which to conduct my interviews made sense. My interviews, therefore, as Smith and Sparkes (2016, p. 103, emphasis in original) note were “always and inescapably shaped by numerous social factors”, including the motivations, memories, emotions, age, gender, class and degree of ability of myself as the interviewer and each individual interviewee, as well as the nonverbal interactions that occurred between us (Randall & Phoenix, 2009).

The next step was to select a style of interview that afforded me the opportunity to understand the embodied experiences of the swimmers and remain in tune with the phenomenological elements of this project. According to Smith and Sparkes (2016) there are four generic forms of interviewing, that differ in their structure and number of participants. At one end of this continuum is the highly standardised individual structured interview, where a researcher, using an interview schedule, asks a set of closed questions in the same order. This approach is very rarely used within qualitative research. The second approach is the individual semi-structured approach, where the researcher uses a pre-planned interview guide, employing relatively focused but open-ended questions. Thirdly, at the other end of the continuum is the individual unstructured interview, in which the researcher uses a few open-ended questions to facilitate the conversation. This form of interview gives the participant a greater degree of control over what is said and how.

Brinkmann (2013, p. 18) notes that the distinction between un- and semi-structured

102 interviews “should be thought of as a continuum ranging from relatively structured to relatively unstructured formats” as interviews ebb and flow between topics and themes.

The fourth format is the focus group. This approach is often semi-structured but differs from the individual format as it employs multiple participants at the same time, with a view to stimulate talk through interaction. The researcher thus takes on the role of facilitator or moderator, creating an atmosphere in which interaction is encouraged, resulting in multiple and often conflicting viewpoints emerging (Smith & Sparkes, 2016). A summary of these styles can be seen in Table 3.3.

Table 3.3 The characteristics of different interviews (Markula & Silk, 2011, pp. 100-101)

Type Structured Semi-Structured Un-structured

Setting Formal (In)-Formal In-formal

Interaction Face-to-face,

Participants Individual or Group Individual or Group Individual or Group Interviewer Objective,

Types of Questions Closed Open-ended Open-ended

conversational interviewing was selected as it is in keeping with the phenomenologically-sensitive ethnographic approach of this study, because as Kvale and Brinkmann (2009, p. 27) note

“a semi-structured life world interview attempts to understand themes of the lived everyday world from the subject’s own perspectives.” To do so it seeks to unearth detailed in-depth descriptions of the interviewee’s lived world. As a process, it resembles an everyday conversation but is semi-structured, conducted with the aid of an interview guide

103 that focuses on relevant topics or themes as defined by the overall research aim. This approach thus provided a balance between rigid, structured interview techniques and more spontaneous conversations, allowing the participants to recount their lived experience in their own language and terminology which is an important consideration in a phenomenologically-inspired approach (Dale, 1996; O’Halloran, Littlewood, Richardson, Tod, & Nesti, 2018).

As a further point, there are some sports psychologists (e.g. Dale, 1996; Nesti, 2004) who may argue that a more unstructured phenomenological interview that utilises the use of one question and a more naturalistic conversation, would have been better suited to this research project. I decided against this unstructured approach for a number of practical reasons, such as the participants’ ability to eloquently orate their descriptions within the interview settling and without prompts. With many of the participants aged between 18 and 22, it was felt that the demanding nature of an unstructured phenomenological interview, as well as other operational considerations such as the time required for an engaging encounter to take place, outweighed the more pragmatic approach of a semi-structured lifeworld interview. This latter approach still allowed the interview to remain open-ended and although initially researcher-led, participants were allowed to digress from initial questions and follow their own lines of thought thus foregrounding their voices.

The following sections outline the process of interviewing employed and the subsequent challenges that arose.