**Transcript of Cyberseminar**

**Timely Topics of Interest**

**Interviewing for Qualitative Data Collection: Eliciting Rich Descriptions (part 2)**

**Presenters: Jackie Grimesey Szarka, PhD; George Sayre, PsyD**

**April 29, 2013**

**Interviewing for Qualitative Data Collection: Eliciting Rich Descriptions (part 2)**

**April 29, 2013**

*This is an unedited transcript of this session. As such, it may contain omissions or errors due to sound quality or misinterpretation. For clarification or verification of any points in the transcript, please refer to the audio version posted at www.hsrd.research.va.gov/cyberseminars/catalog-archive.cfm or contact:**george.sayre@va.gov*

Moderator:We are now approaching 12:30p.m. Eastern. So at this time I would like to introduce our two speakers. Doing the majority of the presentation today will be Dr. Jackie Grimesey Szarka. She is the Project Coordinator at VA Puget Sound Health Care System and Research and Development Center of Excellence. Joining her today is Dr. George Sayre. He’s the Health Services Research and Qualitative Resources Coordinator at VA Puget Sound Health Care System, the HSR&D Center of Excellence, and also an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington. At this time I’d like to check in. Jackie, are you ready to share your screen?

Dr. Jackie Grimesey Szarka:Yes I am. Thank you.

Moderator:Your audio is a little quiet, so I’m going to ask that you step close to the phone and speak up.

Dr. Jackie Grimesey Szarka:Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for Part 2 of the cyber seminar, Qualitative Data Collection: Introduction and Conducting the Interview. This is Jackie Grimesey Szarka. I am a Project Coordinator at Health Services Research and Development at VA Puget Sound. One of the primary interests that Dr. Sayre and I have is helping investigators and researchers to learn more about qualitative methods, and how to enrich their work through the use of qualitative methods. This presentation in particular will focus on the interviewing aspect. Many of us might think, “I know how to talk to other people. I know how to conduct an interview.” But when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it and you start to conduct the research yourself or you start to supervise other people conducting research, you will find a wide variety of technique and skill level. Hopefully what we cover today will help you to improve the skill level not only of yourself, but of your team. Again, this is Part 2 of the workshop. I’m going to quickly go through the slide set that we used last week just to give you a recap of what we covered.

Last week we covered the goals and I will touch on those again. Different types of qualitative research were touched on, as well as were the different types of methods. And Dr. Sayre gave a separate cyber seminar on this subject. You may look that up if you’re interested in more information of that method. Types of interviews were also touched on. The main focus of today’s interviewing training will be on a semi-structured type of interview. That is the type where the interviewer has a set of questions, you have a guide, but within that you have the ability to be flexible and to follow the participant as it makes sense forward for your purpose. 

To begin, let’s again cover the goals of qualitative interviewing. What are we trying to do here when we’re talking to people about topics that may have been very meaningful in their lives? If we were doing a quantitative study, we might be interested in gathering facts or gathering information that could lead to couple relationships among things, perhaps descriptive data. For qualitative interviewing, we are looking to enrich what we can learn from the participant. We want to gather as much rich description as possible with all of the little nuances and all the details that they have to offer. These are things that are not going to be captured through a questionnaire with a couple of check boxes. This gives the participant more freedom to share with you. We want to facilitate exploration and unfolding. Exploration is getting into the experience with the participant. We’re exploring it with them as an object of doctrination. Unfolding refers to the fact that you may not know what you know about a topic until you start discussing it. The same is true for the participant who you will be interviewing. They may discover new information just in the course of talking to you of thoughts, feelings, and experiences that they may have forgotten about or that they haven’t paired together. The interview is to unfold what the participant knows and what they can tell you. It does not come around with fixed idea of what’s going to be shared. It’s very open. Discovery is another point that I think I’ve covered. We want to talk about their experiences, their perspectives, their opinions and views. We want to talk with them about their life world. What does this mean? This is a word used often in phenomenology. It’s a type of a qualitative research method in a philosophy. I like to think of a participant’s life world as if you were standing behind the person looking over their shoulder at how they perceive the world and how they perceive their experiences. You are not necessarily getting into their own eyes, but you are sharing with them their perceptions, their experiences, their thoughts, their life world. With qualitative interviewing you don’t just want the facts; you want the meaning of the experiences. The things that they tell you should not be taken at a surface level. They should be explored more deeply to get at the meaning of this experience. What does it mean for someone to be hospitalized? What does that mean to their life and to their family? Not just the facts of how many times they were admitted and who their doctor was. What does that mean to them? We are going to cover a series of characteristics that are important for good interviewing. As I said earlier, we all think we know how to talk to people. We may think we know how to interview. We may also think that anybody could be skillful with this. And what we find out is that’s true if you attend to some very important characteristics. We’ll cover each one of these in detail. 

The first one is welcoming. Think about a time when you may have gone to a new environment, met with a new person in a new place, and they just walked in and they were all business. They didn’t chit chat with you. They may have not made eye contact with you. They just were all about the facts. Think about how that felt to you, and what type of information you may have shared with that person. Sometimes people think doing small talk and doing chit chat is just a waste of time and energy. That is not true for qualitative interviewing. It’s very important. Don’t start the interview cold. Don’t just walk in there and hit your questions. Say, “Hey, did you find us alright? How was the traffic? What’s the weather like out there? Is it raining?” We are in Seattle so I can use that example. Talk to them, put them at ease. You want to be warm. You want to establish a comfortable rapport as much as possible, and also be respectful. Your participants are there to help you. And in the vast majority of cases they are volunteers. They are sharing their time and their life experience with you. And it is critical that we are respectful of them throughout. Because not only are you going to get better information if you do that, they’re also going to be more willing to share with other researchers and join other research projects down the road. So really you’re an ambassador of research. Make sure they know they’re integral to your research project, and any answer or information they give you is appreciated. Often we’ll have the experience of talking with someone saying, “Hey, would you like to join our research study about your experience of hospitalization?” The participant may say, “You don’t want to talk to me. Why would you want to talk to me? You want to talk to the doctors. You want to talk to the nurses.” No, we want to talk to you, and we really, really want to know what you have to say. So express it that way to them, and also be thankful of what they share with you and thank them when you’re done.

One of the jobs of an interviewer is to structure the interaction. When you meet with the participant for the first time after you’ve welcomed them, it’s your job to let them know what to expect. What is going to happen in the hour or so that they sit with you? Is it going to be an hour or so? Tell them up front, “I expect this to take an hour. Is that going to work for your schedule?” Even if you think they know that, cover it again, “I’m going to ask you a series of questions. You have the ability to respond to any and all of them. Or if I ask you something you don’t want to talk about, that’s your choice.” Again, they are volunteers. Structuring lets them know what to expect and what their participation could look like. I think most of us will be doing “consent” when we interview our participants. So answering their questions is a part of this, but be sure that you do. Ask them, “Is there anything I can tell you right now? Do you have any questions for me before we start?” Make sure to cover that. 

The next important characteristic for a good interviewer is to be knowledgeable about your subject, and also to be knowledgeable about the interview you’re going to conduct. These participants are going to ask you questions that come up in the course of your interview. Let’s say that your interview is about post traumatic stress treatment in the VA. They’re going to start asking you questions about that. Do you need to be an expert on post traumatic stress? No. However, you need to be thoughtful about what they might want to know and what you could or should share with them. You need to know how to refer them to the correct place to get information. Think about that in advance. Don’t be caught stumbling around those types of questions. Also in a semi-structured interview it’s essential that you know your interview guide early. Let’s say you’re going to ask them thirty questions. In the interview guide they’re going to be numbered one through thirty. However, when you conduct the interview, it is almost always the case that you’re not going to flow in that order. Unless the questions are particularly hierarchial for some methodological reason, you are going to allow the interviewee to flow with you. You’re going to follow them. You’re not going to go question one, two, three, four, five. You are going to ask the questions as they make sense, as if you were having an everyday conversation with this person about the topic. If they start talking about something that really pertains to question ten, if it makes sense go with the question. If it doesn’t make sense quite yet to go there, you can say, “Gosh that’s so interesting. Let me come back to that in just a minute.” Track with them. It’s a conversation with them.

Bracketing is another piece of jargon from qualitative research and phenomenology. We’ll talk about jargon later. But bracketing is the idea that you as a researcher need to be very aware of your own experiences with the topic at hand. You need to be very aware of your own biases, your own view points, and where you’re coming from in conducting the research. The importance of doing that is not to remove yourself as a human being from the process. You want to be there present as a person, but you need to establish what is phrased as “cultural ignorance.” You need to come to the interview trying to learn. Let your preconceived notions sit on the shelf for two minutes. In order to put them on the shelf, you need to know what they are. And this is also important when you get to the stage of data analysis. You’re going to say, “Hey, are these my preconceived notions that I’m pulling out of this interview? Or is this really what that participant meant to tell me?” 

Another important characteristic of an interviewer is to be clear. The question should be clear, simple, easy and short. Do not ask an interviewee a three-part question and expect them to hold it in their heads and respond to it. Break it up and keep them short. Keep them clear and keep them simple. I’m sure that many of you have had the experience yourself of being asked a very lengthy, detailed, multi-part question, and stumbling all over yourself trying to answer it. And then they could say, “Did I answer your question?” A minute ago I used some jargon. I used the terms “bracketing” and “life world.” We do that as researchers. However, be aware that with your participant they may not know what you’re talking about. You may like to use those words, but they may or may not be interested in your jargon. So try and keep it out of there. We don’t want to talk down to them, but we definitely want to be clear and direct. 

The next characteristic is to be gentle. We are all going to be under time constraints when we conduct our interview. We may have an hour, or maybe someone else is coming into the room right on our heels. We all live in this world in that manner, especially in the hospital system. However, it’s so important to be gentle with the participant and not to rush them through what they’re trying to say. If you rush them through, not only will they get frustrated, they’ll also curtail the information that they’re going to share with you. So a better approach might be to prioritize what you’re going to ask them. So that if it seems that they’re taking longer to answer than you might have expected, you might prioritize what you’re going to cover. Get to the lesser important questions if you have time. That’s so much better than trying to rush them through. So think about that in advance. Let them proceed at their own pace as much as possible, and remember that they’ve got to think about their answers. They may not just pop the answers off the top of their heads. They may need a few minutes to collect their thoughts and to integrate the question with their experience before they share with you. So give them that time. Give them some pauses. Many of you will be conducting phone interviews and that in and of itself is a tricky thing to do. Keep the gentle approach in mind, especially if you’re on the phone, because you don’t have the non-verbal’s to go by. You may not know if they’re still thinking about the answer. So just push through and ask them, “Do you need some more time?” Communicate with them, and maybe even set up in advance some queues you can give each other, “Are you ready? Okay? Do you need more time?”

Another characteristic is to be sensitive. It’s your job as the interviewer to actively listen to what they are telling you. They have many nuances of meaning in the answer to give, and it’s your job to pick those up and to explore them more fully. Flush that out with the interviewee. Pay attention to what they say to how they say it, how they stress what they tell you. And pay attention to what they don’t say, which can be as equally important. The next point here again is you’re a human being. You’re a human person. Be yourself. Give natural responses if they say something sad, then look sad. If they say something funny, then smile. It’s perfectly okay. A part of the beauty of qualitative research is you have an interaction between human beings going on here. Otherwise we’d just do all of this on the computer. So that would be horrifying. Be yourself. Having said that, you want to be careful to not approve or disapprove what they’re telling you. So if in your prompts you’re saying, “Right. Good,” what’s that doing? We may think on the surface level that it is just prompting them to continue or encouraging them to continue. But really it may be telling them on a subtle level, “That’s what I wanted to hear. Keep telling me more stuff like that.” Or if you look away or you don’t respond, they may say, “Oh, they didn’t want to hear that from me.” You don’t want to approve or disapprove, but you want to remain yourself and be human. 

A qualitative interview is very open in nature. We want to hear which aspects of the interview topic are important for the participants. Now you have your own agenda, you’re a researcher. You’re going in there and you have things you want to hear and things you want to know about. The participant may also have an agenda. And it may surprise you the things you haven’t even thought about that may be critically important to your work. So try to be open. Listen to what’s important to them. In the same vein, you don’t to hear everything they’ve ever done in their entire lives. You don’t want to hear about all their relatives and all of their experiences with the topic. So you do have to focus, but within that to remain open to being surprised. 

The job of a qualitative interviewer is to steer the conversation. Not to direct the conversation per se, but to steer it. Where is it going? How is it unfolding? Your job is to steer. You have a general sense of what you want to learn. So while you’re being open, you are going to interrupt the participant if they start going off in an area that is not pertinent to the study. Think about how you might do that. You don’t want to offend them. But you don’t also want to listen to a half an hour of their experience that doesn’t pertain to what you need to know. That’s not good use of their time, and it’s not good use of your time. You can always say things like, “It’s my job to keep us on track. You’re giving me an hour today and I want to respect that. So if we start going off into areas that are off topic, I’m just going to bring you back to the question.” Have that conversation when you start. I had a little joke I used if they start going off on something when I was conducting an assessment for a dementia patient. I’d say, “Okay, I’m putting my researcher hat on now.” And that sounds kind of silly, but it was very effective. I’m putting my researcher hat on now and we’re moving onto the next question. Have some fun with it too. Find a way that works for you that can help keep the participant on topic. When we’re doing qualitative research we want to explore, we want to get rich descriptions. We don’t want yes/no answers. Hopefully you’ve been very thoughtful in how you have set up your interview questions so that you’re not going to get yes/no answers. But if you do, you want to probe further on those points, “Tell me more about that. When did that happen? How did your body feel then?” 

The next important characteristic is to be a little bit critical. You don’t have to believe everything they tell you. And you will encounter people that like to pull your leg. So if somebody gives you information that contradicts something they said earlier, you may have misunderstood, or perhaps there’s something else going on there that you could explore more. It’s perfectly okay to say, “A few minutes ago you told me that when you came into the hospital you were by yourself. But now you’re talking about your brother being with you. Can you tell me what’s going on with that? How did that happen?” You can point out contradictions in a gentle way that isn’t going to put the participant on edge. But don’t just take everything they say in.  You can ask about it. The next point here is to train your memory. You’re going to be writing things down. You may be audio recording the interview as well. But, this is a conversation. You want to remember what they told you well enough that you can say, “Hey, I remember a minute ago you said you came in the hospital alone. Now you’re talking about your brother.” You want to remember that. You don’t want to have to be digging through your notes to find that. It’s a conversation and be very attentive. That also shows respect.

As a qualitative researcher, one of the major jobs you have is to interpret the information that you’re given. A minute ago we talked about not being satisfied with yes/no answers. And in that same vein if they tell you something that you have a sense has a deeper shade of meaning, you really have to do some active listening there and probe further on that point. Encourage them to expand to give you as many details as possible. Ask them when it began, how it transpired, when it ended, how they felt, who was there, and what happened with as many details as you can. You’ll find out much more. And again you want not just the facts but the meaning, “What was that like for you? What did that remind you of?” Be wary of asking “why” questions. Avoid that if you can. We don’t want to know why, because that can put the interviewee on edge. And it also implies that there may be a correct response. That’s not what we’re looking for here. We’re looking for their experience and not just the correct response. It’s much better to ask, “What was that like? What happened next?” I didn’t have my interview guide down in my head, but I think I covered this earlier. I’m getting ahead of myself.  I’ve already covered this point about remembering, retaining what they said during the interview, recall earlier statements, and asking them to elaborate. Be respectful and attentive to what they have to say. 

The next segment that we’d like to cover today in conducting a qualitative interview has to do with what types of interview questions you might ask to gather different types of information. There are different types of questions listed here on the slide, and we’ll cover each one in order. The first type of question is an introducing question. This is pretty obvious I think. But introduce the topic, “Can you tell me more about that? Could you describe your experience with that in as much detail as possible?” Find a good way to introduce the question. One type of question you might ask is a very direct question. There may be some information that does border more on facts, and you want to get at that. Direct questions are just that. They are very direct and are often used later in an interview to clarify details of things. Later in the interview you may have gathered a whole bunch of wonderful, rich information. But you may need to clarify specific points. Or if there are specific points in the data that you need to capture for your study, you may need to clarify a few points that will give you that factual information, so direct questions do have a place here. The examples we have here, “Have you ever received money for achieving good grades?” That’s going to give you a yes or no response probably. It may be the first thing they tell you all about, but you do get factual information. And then, “When you mention competition, do you then think of a sportsman like or a destruction competition?” This is giving them two options to choose from. You may think that this is contrary to qualitative research, because you want to keep it open. Sometimes it’s useful if you want to steer the information they give you towards certain categories to just put those out there. And that probably has something to do with your research question.

It’s a very good idea for your research team to agree in advance on a series of probes you’re going to use for your study. The probes are all kinds of things like, “You mentioned that you used to ...? Could you say something more about ...? Tell me more about that? When did that happen? Can you give me an example of that?” Those are all probes that you can use to gather more information. It’s a good idea to have those laid out in advance, because then you’re not stumbling around trying to come up with them. And you’ll find that once you start conducting interviews, it will become second nature to follow with those probes that your team has agreed upon. The interviewer probes the content of the interviewee’s answers without giving away which parts of the answers are to be taken into account. You don’t want to lead the participant, and you don’t want to approve or disapprove what they’re trying to say. But you do want to probe deeper into the information.

Specifying questions are the next type. This will allow you to gain further information about a particular aspect of the interviewee’s answer specifying specific pieces of what they have told you. The examples here are, “What did you think then? How did your body react?” If the interviewee has given general answers that could apply to anything or any experience, this is a good time to use specifying questions, “Have you experienced this yourself?” Often, your interviewee will talk about their brother or their mother or their neighbor and what their experience was like. That’s interesting, but it’s not the same as if they talk about their own experience. So ask. 

Your job as an interviewer is to gather the data needed for your study. You have to steer the interviewer in such a manner to do that, and you have to structure your questioning in order to gather that information. You need to make sure that those areas relevant to your research questions are covered during the interview. A few minutes ago we talked about prioritizing an interview. It’s a good idea for the team to think about that in advance of which questions are most important to capture. They don’t necessarily need to be the first few questions, but you need to know which ones are really important. One more nuance for this is that the importance of certain questions may vary, depending on who the interviewee is with age, experience, and different variables. Certain questions may be more or less important. It’s not always going to be the same hierarchy. So be thoughtful of that as well. An example of structuring questions is, “I would now like to introduce a new topic.” You’re letting them know where you are going. Where is the interview flowing? Are you moving on? Are you done with what they were saying? Another good thing to do is to make sure they’re done with what they were saying by asking, “Is there anything else?” That’s one of my favorite probes. If you move on you may lose it. Maybe there was something that they were considering sharing with you and were not quite sure if they should. When you ask, “Is there anything else,” they may do that. If you don’t, it’ll be gone. The interviewer should also consider politely breaking up long answers if they become irrelevant to research questions. This will happen a lot, especially with certain populations. A few minutes ago I discussed doing an assessment for a dementia patient. This was just as a matter of course, we would get into these fascinating stories that I really loved to hear, but often they had nothing to do with what we were doing. Remind the participant that it’s your job to get them out on time, “You’ve given me an hour today. I’m going to get you out of here. Remember, your ride is waiting for you.” Be respectful.

 Earlier we talked about direct questions and when you might ask that, there are also indirect questions. These are more projective questions where you’re really allowing the participant to think outside of the box. To give more nuances to the experience. When you do this you need to pay special attention that you are not imposing your own biases on their answer. The interpretation should be checked out with the participant. Just to pull an example out, if I’m looking at these pictures on our wall in the conference room with beautiful colors and I ask them what their experience with the color purple have been, and they’re thinking that’s kind of a crazy question, but they start talking about that and giving you responses. So, I’m going to go back and ask them again, “So what I heard you say is when you were a kid you had purple flowers in your yard, and that was a warm, positive feeling for you?” I’m going to check it out with him. I’m not just going to assume, especially with an indirect projective question so that I know what they’re talking about. So back to another question we used earlier, “How do you believe other pupils regard the competition for grades?” That’s asking them to project. They’re going to express what they think other people think about this topic. You have to be very careful in their answer. Are they really telling you what other people think as they understand it? Or, are they imposing their own bias on what they told you? Does it reflect to the attitudes of the other students, or is that just indirectly to their own attitude? Be clear with them about that.

We touched on this already a fair amount. But, interpreting questions, how or to what degree you interpret the question may involve rephrasing the answer and putting it to the interviewee or attempting to clarify their answer. A good standard interviewing skill is to know how to rephrase responses people give you, “Do you mean that it was like this for you? I heard you say that? Is that correct? Was it your first time doing this? Is it correct that you feel that?” Rephrase the response, give it back to them, and check it out. I think often we have the impulse as an interviewer to try to build rapport or to connect with our interviewee by putting words in their mouth essentially. Let’s say they were talking about their recent hospitalization that didn’t go so well for them, I could say, “You must have felt really angry.” What’s that doing? They may agree with me. They may say, “Yeah, I felt really angry.” But I put that word in their mouth. And as an interviewer I may have thought that I’m going to build rapport. I’m going to let them know that I share their outrage about this. Is that really going to help you? Is that going to do anything positive for the interviewee? Just be careful about your interpretation and approving or disproving what they say. 

I heard a statement the other day and I wish I knew where it was from. It said that, “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” And I thought that was really beautiful, but it really pertains to this piece. Practice sitting there and keeping your mouth closed. Let the participant think, ponder, and perhaps even become a little bit uncomfortable while they’re thinking and pondering. Wait for their response. Don’t feel like you need to fill up all the space with words. You aren’t doing a good service to your research if you do that, and you’re also being disrespectful to the participant. Silence can be a useful tool in furthering the interview. It allows an interviewee a chance to reflect on what has been discussed. They may then be able to offer more information. This is difficult to do. Practice this with each other with your team. Practice sitting there on a phone interview with silence. Think about some queues, “Do you need more time? Are you ready to move on?”

One more type of interview question you might have is a follow-up question. This is especially important if you have concluded your questions one through thirty and you still have five minutes. You might want to flag some responses as you’re going through with, “Hey, if I have five minutes I’m going to come back to this. If I don’t, I’m going to leave it.” Know in advance what you’re going to do with those five minutes. I would recommend that you don’t just let the interviewee walk out early. Use that time. It may be interesting for them and it may be interesting for you. You never know what you might learn. Extend the interviewee’s answers to previous questions. Attend to what’s important to the participant and to your research question. So if it seems that they were particularly emotional or particularly stressed with a certain response, you might go back to that. That might have been important to the participant. Or if they’re just glossing over something that you really wanted to know about for your research question, go back to that. Ask these follow-up questions, “Could you tell me more about that? You mentioned that...can you tell me about a specific time when that happened?” Get more details there. 

In today’s session we have completed Part 2 of Qualitative Data Collection: Introduction and Conducting the Interview. We have covered what characteristics are important for the interviewer, and we’ve also covered what types of questions you might want to think about asking and when you would ask them. At the end of last week’s session I suggested that everybody who was participating in this cyber seminar go onto YouTube and look at some famous interviews. I suggested a couple. Matt Lauer with Tom Cruise is a good one. And Michael Moore with Charlton Heston is another good one. There are many of them. But start looking at those interviews with a critical eye now. Use the knowledge you have and say, “Why are they doing what they’re doing? What’s working? What’s not working? What are they really trying to do here?” Now you have a new skill set, so you can critically evaluate all those types of interviews. In the cyber seminar format it’s difficult to have an open discussion about that, so I just ask you to do that on your own or with each other. Dr. Sayre, do you have anything to add?

Dr. George Sayre:No, I wanted to encourage you to look at the characteristics. I do want to mention that most of those are borrowed from a text by Steiner Kaval. It’s called, “*On Interviewing*.” It’s one of the best texts on the technique of interviewing and of the skills involved. I want to remind you again that because the research is important and the participants are giving them their time, it’s kind of onerous on us to go in there as competent and to have a really good skill set. As I mentioned last week, I think interviewing is every bit as much of a skill set as doing clinical work. 

Dr. Jackie Grimesey Szarka:Very good. With that we’ll conclude. Thank you again. Molly, we’re ready for any questions that might have come?

Dr. George Sayre:I want to remind folks that we have some folks here in Seattle who may have questions, and I’d like to let them go first if they have any questions. If they have any, we’ll repeat the questions for folks out in the internet so they’ll understand the answer. 

Moderator:Great. Go ahead.

Dr. Jackie Grimesey Szarka:The question from Margaret here in Seattle has to do with the idea of bracketing where you put your own assumptions, biases, and preconceptions on the shelf during the interview and you try to remain culturally naïve to the topic during the interview. The question is, “What do you do if you feel you have betrayed that during the interview?” That’s a very good question, because it’s going to happen. I have a couple of thoughts on that. The first thing is to practice with your teammates before you see a real participant, because much of that is going to come out. One thing about conducting interviews and the best way to get really good at it is to practice, practice, practice. In a major study that we conducted here at VA Puget Sound, I trained a group of five interviewers’. We role played and role played and role played before we started seeing participants. They might have gotten tired of that, but it really brought a lot of those biases and preconceptions out. So the best thing to do is to practice with each other, and also to do some peer supervision. Especially if you are audio recording, you should have somebody just checking that. Either you’re checking each other or your Coordinator is listening to some of those interviews to check for that. It’s an important thing to continue to be aware. And I know as a Coordinator myself I did that. There were several occasions where I talked to the staff about things that they showed during the interview that may have been more for them than for the interviewee. I think that if you stumble and you do that in the middle of an interview and you catch yourself, I would just correct it and move on. I wouldn’t spend time explaining it. I’d just say, “Okay. Let’s get back to the task that we have here.” I’d just go back without really detracting further by doing that.

Dr. George Sayre:The only thing I can add to that is that it will happen. One thing to do is to keep in mind depending on the nature of what you’ve done. So if you say, “That’s great. I love that too.” It’s not a big deal. Don’t do it again. If you’ve found something that is really affecting the data, and I’ll give you an example of a project we’re working on in reintegration when military come back. One of the complaints of the wife was, “He’s always across the street.” The interviewer said, “Have you ever been able to get him to come back?” That’s a real problematic question, because it’s framed that they’re responsible for getting him to come back. And then she went on in that vein for a long time, but I don’t know if she went on in that vein because it was important to her for the interview. She might as well said, “You’re responsible for bringing him back.” So if you do something like that, now it’s really affecting the data. Get away from a question like that. You don’t want them to go down that path. You don’t want that whole interview to now be able that. Jackie talked earlier about asking a participant who had a bad hospitalization experience, “Weren’t you angry?” Well they will now get in touch with some anger that they might not even have had prior. And if you catch yourself having done that, go back and get away from the discussion of anger and move on so that you don’t have a lot of unfolding of this thing that you brought into it. Is there anything else?

Unidentified Female:You were talking about interpreting questions earlier, “What I’m hearing you say is...” When I was trained I was told not to do that.

Dr. Jackie Grimesey Szarka:The question here is about interpreting questions. And some training stated that you are not to interpret as an interviewer. I’m not quite sure what the method was or where that came from, but certainly different methods are going to give you different amounts of leeway in how you can interpret. For a qualitative study like let’s say with a phenomenological study, you’re going to be doing a lot of interpreting. In fact, that’s where you’re going to get a lot of your findings. But that may be limited for a more structured type of study. Dr. Sayre?

Dr. George Sayre:I think sometimes people are crazy with the word interpretation. It depends on how close you are to the data.  

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