A Journey into the Lived Experience: A Review of Janet Salmon's Qualitative Online Interviews Strategies, Design, and Skills

This second edition of Janet Salmon's Qualitative Online Interviews Strategies, Design, and Skills (2014) offers options for conducting research in new and innovative ways using technology. Since publication of her first book Online Interviews in Real Time (2010), technology has continued to grow. In her first book, the focus was on synchronous interviews (interviews occurring at the same time; real time). Salmons introduced her reader to online research and interviews (p. 153). The second edition builds on the first adding the E-Interview Research Framework increasing the reasons for using online research (p. 57). In addition to these two books, Salmons published Cases in Online Interview Research (2012). In this second edition, interviews are synchronous, near-synchronous (synchronous and near-synchronous are conducted in a chat or online), and asynchronous (communication that involves a delay between message and response). Conducting interviews in this fashion can sometimes be open to misinterpretation. "The researcher needs to be clear about expectations and gain agreement from the participants" (Salmons, 2012, p. 182). A professional and caring researcher understands their responsibility to the people they are interviewing. Some of the methods used by the researcher are through emails and social media. Chapter 8 addresses the ethical issues of the risks and benefits of online interviews. At the end of the chapter Salmons uses three stories of online inquiry and asks if they are ethical or not. These stories were particularly helpful to justify their work to the Institutional Review Boards (IRB). The author accomplishes exactly what she intended it to do. On the back cover of the book one writer says "This book is ahead of its time. It tackles the complicated matter of merging technology with research in a lucid manner." I don't believe Salmon's book is ahead of its time it is right on time for the issues we are dealing with in the present time. So often, as in my case it is not possible to stay for long periods of time conducting interviews in person. Years ago when I did the research in my undergraduate program I spent countless hours in the library. Modern technology makes research more easily accessible. A scholarly article and dissertation can be researched from the comfort of one's home by accessing websites, libraries for articles and books, and anything else we need. When I saw the title was about online qualitative interviews I became excited, just as I am on any book on the topic of qualitative research. As a PhD student writing my dissertation this book has proven to be invaluable to me. My research originated in Ecuador, South America. Once the interviews were completed and the fieldwork finished I continued to communicate with the people in the community through emails and social media. Because of the distance, and the short time in the field much of the research, and some of the interviews were done online. While other books provided me with the tools for the type of data analysis to use for my dissertation, this book helped to look for ways to be creative and experiment to collect the data. As a qualitative researcher I set aside any preconceived notions about the author to understand what the Salmons is trying to convey in her writing. Before I began reading this book I wrote in my journal what my expectations were from this book and the biases I had about the information I learned about the author and the topic. As I read each chapter I stopped to check my understanding of Salmons work. Soon after I began reading and journaling I realized how valuable this book is as a resource for me. This book has been a constant resource for me while writing my dissertation. One of the many reasons I embraced this book was the E-interview Research Framework presented in the beginning. The eight categories in the framework are explained in-depth in the first eight chapters. …