“Remo a Ritmo”

The researcher’s role in qualitative research is a hard one because of the many pitfalls related to continuous interpretation and, as in the cases of interviewing, the degree of influence on informants. All qualitative research must be carried out with carefulness and concern at all stages of the process, and it is important to be aware of one’s role and the influence one has on the other party (the informant/interviewee).

Kvale and Brinkmann (2009) present six vital qualitative criteria for an interview, six criteria which were kept and served as basic guide lines for this research during the entire process of interviewing the informants. These criteria are:

1. The extent of spontaneous, rich, specific and relevant answers from the interviewee. 2. The shorter the interviewer’s questions and the longer the interviewee’s answer the

better.

3. The degree to which the interviewer follows up and clarifies the meanings of the relevant aspects of the answers.

4. The ideal interview is to a large extent interpreted throughout the interview.

5. The interviewer attempts to verify his or her interpretations of the subject’s answers in the course of the interview.

6. The interview is ‘self-communicating’ – it hardly requires much extra descriptions and explanations.

(Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009:175)

In the following section I will elaborate on a few of the criteria listed above. With regard to the first criterion, I think that answers elicited here were both spontaneous and at the same time specific enough. The informants had not been preparing for these interviews, at least not that I know of, because they had simply been asked to show up with an open mind, and that

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this was something they participated in based on their free will. The fact that the questions in the interview guide were open-ended, contributed to a production of more or less

comprehensive answers from the participants. To elaborate a bit further on this aspect, it must be underscored that the degree of specification varied greatly between the informants.

Employment of probes and pauses from the researcher’s side, might have given more detailed answers. As far as relevance is concerned, this also diverged throughout the interviews and although the answers and utterances from the interviewees were relevant most of the time, it occasionally happened that the informants’ responses deviated from the main clue, but it was possible to pose the question once more, politely. In retrospect I realize that I ought to have asked follow-up questions more frequently in order to obtain more nuanced and clear answers, this is something that must be subscribed to own inexperience in the role as the interviewer. What I think was carried out with more success, however, was the way the meaning of the informants’ responses were clarified. The continuous interpretation and evaluation of the interviewees’ responses throughout the interviews, allowed me to focus on meaning conveyance. Whenever there was doubt concerning the interpretation, I repeated my understanding of the informant’s statements. In this way, she could either confirm or disprove the actual interpretation. I was highly aware of this aspect, something that also enabled me to recall the interview situations later when I transcribed the interviews. According to the fourth criterion in Kvale’s list, the interviewer should ideally be able to interpret the interview in

progress. Consequently, that the interviewer herself carries out the transcribing of the

interviews may be an advantage. However, the quality of the interviews might improve with more experience from the researcher’s part, and many interesting and relevant utterances from the informants surely might have been investigated further, and in more detail.

In the qualitative research interview, the researcher herself is the research tool. This is a highly demanding role to maneuver, both being the doer and the instrument. Consequently, carrying out the interviews at the end of a long day of work or study was avoided, with the desired level of mindfulness and well-being of both interviewer and interviewee in mind. I planned the interviews in the best way I could, and clear arrangements were made with the informants on forehand. It was uttermost important to avoid situations where the informants would feel stressed or at unease because this was not what they had planned or that they felt like being somewhere else, because they had other arrangements planned.

The focus in the process of interviewing has been the research questions of this thesis, all along from the commencement. The research questions have been a guide during the planning

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and projection of the interview guides, as well as in the act of interviewing/collection of material. The purpose and the benefit of a clear scope is that the communication can become clear and transparent. I did not feel that my agenda was unclear, and I did not sense that the informants did so either.

Investigating and exploring the informants’ experiences with encounters with English literature is the core of this project. However, there were many challenges, and surely other means might have been employed in an attempt to find better solutions or to avoid fall pits and ‘mistakes’, such as asking leading questions or interrupting interviewees. Language came to be the biggest challenge, and not because of communicative problems directly, but because

concepts, such as ‘meaning’ or ‘meaningfulness’ in some cases turned out to be very hard to

communicate and/or explain directly. It was therefore not always easy to get access to the information that the interviewee possessed, and that was desired. Indirect questions16, I realize, should perhaps have been employed to a greater extent, but all in all I consider the quality of the interviews as satisfactory.