Conducting Interviews

3.1 Initial considerations on interviews

In practice the bulk of the research and the data generated from it were derived from the interviews. Therefore the interview stage of the research is given greatest consideration in this Chapter. Before commencing these interviews a number of specific considerations needed to be addressed. Anticipating the analysis, a main requirement of the interviews was to provide a means of identifying common frames between policy actors. Therefore the interviews needed to be conducted in such a way that they could facilitate comparability. This requirement raised potential

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problems owing to the diversity of the interviewees in terms of their respective roles and backgrounds.

A rough classification of the twenty three interviewees illustrates this point. Eleven of the interviewees were non-Malaysian, originating from seven different countries. Of the twelve Malaysians, these represented several different ethnic groups and social backgrounds. The interviewees represented a range of different sectors, with nine coming from NGOs, five from the private sector, five from the governmental sector, two representing scientific organisations and two from local communities. The interviewees were generally well educated, with seven educated to doctoral level, though in contrast the community representatives had little formal education at all. Their roles in the empirical examples and the relevance they brought to the research were also highly variable. Six of the interviewees could be said to have a broad involvement across multiple aspects of forest restoration policy in Sabah as a whole. Seven were intensively involved in specific projects but had less involvement in a wider context. Seven had hands off roles as funding agents or experts and did not live in Sabah. Three had only a limited advisory role in the empirical examples, but because of their long standing experience of working in Sabah could provide highly relevant information about the broader institutional context of the empirical examples. Therefore the interview approach adopted had to strike a balance between consistency for the purposes of comparability and flexibility in order to accommodate the different roles and backgrounds of the interviewees.

There were three other issues that also had a bearing on the design and conduct of the interviews. Firstly, because in all cases the interviewees held positions of responsibility, and ten of them were the heads of their respective organisations, issues relating to elite or expert interviewing had to be considered. Kvale and Brinkmann highlight the nature of these issues. They observe that in interviewing leaders and experts in any given field there is parity between interviewer and interviewee not found in other types of interview because such interviewees come from a position of influence and are generally familiar with being asked questions in an interview setting. This means that some of the problems of power asymmetry associated with the interview process is reduced, particularly the danger that the interviewer will take advantage of their position to implicitly impose their own values on the interviewee. But on the other hand it does require the interviewer to be particularly careful that they are well informed on the subject at hand and adopt manners appropriate to the interviewee’s position in order not to lose credibility with the interviewee. In addition, because of their familiarity with the interview process, elite or expert interviewee may be better able to conceal their opinions or follow well-rehearsed party lines. These issues were dealt

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with by conducting extensive background research beforehand in order to establish my own credibility and to ensure that I had sufficient broader knowledge to be able to distinguish where interviewees were expressing their organisation’s or their own opinions. In these situations I also had to draw on my previous experience of conducting research in Asian contexts and working with senior policy figures in a prior career (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009: 147).

The second issue was that of cross-cultural interviewing. Kvale and Brinkmann observe that there are numerous potential problems that an interviewee can encounter when they have not fully considered the meaning that their questions or mannerisms might entail in a different cultural setting (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009: 144-145). In order to avoid the potential of drawing unexpected problems as a result of cross-cultural misunderstanding, it was necessary to draw on my past experience of research in Malaysia and other locations in Asia, my extensive experience of travel encountering varied cultures around the world and take advice from project partners about different cultural expectations in Sabah. This, for example, meant understanding the proper dress expected for different situations, understanding different cultural perception about confrontation and what is construed as confrontational and exercising caution in areas of discussion that might be considered politically or culturally sensitive. This particularly involved me being aware that there is a traditional reluctance to speak out against the government in Malaysia. While some interviewees were happy to criticise the government, I avoided trying to press interviewees into expressing such criticisms where they appeared more reluctant to speak out on potentially sensitive matters. Related to this, I had to consider the issue of my gender when interviewing women in a predominantly Muslim country. However given the position of prominence of the Malaysian women I did interview and the fact that Malaysia in general follows a more moderate approach to Islam, this issue did not prove to be a problem in practice.

The third issue to be considered was that of recording the interviews. While it was my preference to use a voice recorder, this was not possible in some circumstances for a number of reasons. Firstly, some interviewees preferred not to be recorded. This was particularly the case with Malaysian interviewees. Secondly, in one instance an interview was conducted by phone where recording was not possible. Thirdly, in some cases the physical circumstances of the interview made recording impractical. For instance one particularly busy interviewee was only able to spare time to speak to me whilst taking his regular afternoon exercise of hiking up a hill, a situation in which recording would not be feasible. Similarly, in another case I conducted an interview with a village head on a boat in the middle of a mangrove swamp, where I did not have a recorder available. In these

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situations outline notes were taken during the interview that were then expanded from memory afterwards.

3.2 Interview guide and interview conduct

Bearing these considerations in mind, the interview approach that was devised was intended to be broad-based and flexible in order to account for the variations between the different interviewees, while also having sufficient focus to address the principle themes of the analytical framework. In order to do this it drew on Kvale and Brinkmann’s conception of the interviewer as craftsman and Flick’s concept of the episodic interview.

According to Kvale and Brinkmann, the interview “craft” is more a question of applying practical skills and personal judgement in focusing on the subject at hand rather than on following formalised methodological rules and techniques (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009: 87). Therefore the approach taken in the interviews was to work from a broad outline guide rather than following predefined questions. The intention was to create space for interviewees to have the flexibility to digress into unanticipated topics that might provide unexpected insights. Such a flexible approach does have the danger that interviews can lapse into formlessness and irrelevance. However in practice, given that all the interviewees held senior positions and were used to being interviewed, digressions became to a certain extent self-regulating, and the interviewees tended to keep to relevant issues without the need for my intervention. Given the seniority of the interviewees and the time pressures they faced, an approximate time period for each interview was generally set in advance, usually in the region of one to one and a half hours. I addition, because I outlined the areas I wanted discuss in advance, they were able to judge how much time to devote to these particular areas within the allotted timeframe. As a result, most interviewees were conscious of the need to keep their comments on particular issues relatively concise. That being said, one NGO chief executive was happy to talk for three hours and provided very useful in-depth insights, though this interview proved to be an exception.

The actual form of the interview guide broadly corresponded with Flick’s concept of the episodic interview (Flick 2002: 104-109). This method was adopted because it combines the strengths of narrative and semi-structured interviews, and is designed to facilitate thematic comparisons in analysis. Semi structured interviews use open questions that are predefined in an interview guide, and can provide a good source of thematically organised data that still allows a level of freedom to the interviewee not found in more structured questionnaire-based methods. However they are open to the danger that the content and sequence of the questions could be construed as leading and

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that they potentially involve imposing a particular interview style that may conflict with the answer style that the interviewee might be most comfortable with (Flick 2002: 91-93). This could be a particular problem in the case of interviewing elites and experts who, owing to their experience, are more likely to have preconceived ideas of how they think an interview should proceed. A narrative interview can eliminate these problems on the grounds that narratives provide a more natural cognitive medium of conveying information and they allow the interviewee more freedom to direct their answers. This therefore avoids some of the difficulties created by an interview structure based on more abstract criteria (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009). In addition, narratives are considered to be a better way of allowing interviewees to reconstruct the internal logic and meaning behind their statements in a more contextually rich way, something that fits with the objectives of the analytical framework. However, pure narrative methods raise the potential problems of generating a surfeit of highly contextualised data which may prove difficult to compare across interviews (Flick 2002: 103- 104).

The episodic interview seeks to draw from both methods, conducting interviews as narratives, but in a delineated form where such narratives are limited to particular episodes or themes. In this particular case, the thematic element would be the process of policy formation and implementation in the case of a particular forest policy initiative or initiatives in the empirical examples, which would be informed by the analytical framework. The narrative element would be the chronological story of the particular interviewee’s involvement with that initiative or initiatives. The rationale behind this approach is that interviewees organise their experience in both narrative and more abstract conceptual ways. Therefore the aim of this approach is to uncover a range of different ways of constructing knowledge rather than rely on a single epistemological focus (ibid: 104-109). Such a flexible method might have proved less successful in a situation where the researcher was in a privileged position of knowledge and the interviewees expected to be led in a more structured form though an unfamiliar situation. However given the extensive experience and relatively high status of the interviewees, this approach proved effective in allowing the interviews to develop into a co- productive two-way conversation.

The interviews were conducted in the following general form, which was based on a priori themes derived from the requirements of the analytical framework. At the beginning of each interview the interviewees were informed about the purposes and aims of the study. In narrative terms they were ask to recount the background of their organisation and their role in it, how they became involved in the particular policy initiatives under study and what happened during policy implementation. They were also asked their views about the future prospects of these initiatives in particular and

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conservation in Sabah in general. This proved particularly useful in providing information about institutional context and policy outcomes. But within this narrative framework the interviewees were also asked to focus on more conceptual areas relating to the second stage of the analytical framework dealing with the construction of policy frames. The interviewees were asked to focus particularly on how they perceived particular policy problems in their field, how they communicated and interacted with other policy actors in addressing these problems and their perceptions of the policy initiatives implemented to address these problems. How these two strands were combined depended on how each interview evolved and the application of my own judgement according to the particular circumstances of each case.

While the interviews remained consistent with these broad guidelines, in practice they varied considerably according to the role and background of each interviewee. For example, as previously mention, six interviewees were involved in all parts of the policy process across both empirical examples. These interviews were wide ranging in content and covered each of the institutional context, framing and policy outcome aspects of the analytical framework in relation to both empirical examples. In other cases the interviewees were primarily involved in smaller aspects of the policy process, either in funding or practical implementation, so these interviews were more narrowly focused towards these specific areas. In addition, some interviewees with long experience of working in Sabah were particularly useful in discussing the long term institutional context of forest policy in Sabah, therefore these interviews concentrated particularly in this area. The form of each interview was adapted throughout the research process in order to focus on where each interviewee’s knowledge was most relevant to building an overall multi-perspective story of each empirical example.

The interview stage of the research process took place in tandem with preliminary analysis, which will be addressed in more detail in the next section. This led to the identification of gaps in this multi-perspective story as it developed in the latter stages of research. Consequently, four follow up interviews were carried out during the third fieldtrip, which took place during in May and June 2012. These were undertaken with interviewees who had the broadest involvement and most extensive knowledge of both empirical examples and the wider institutional context. They gave me the opportunity both to ask specific questions to fill these gaps and also to investigate where new developments had taken place over the course of the research period. This meant that I was able to add an additional temporal dimension of data triangulation, and thus gave a further aspect of validation to the research. These follow up interviews also represented a form of communicative validation. During these interviews I was able to present my preliminary findings in order to test the

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extent that these findings corresponded with the interviewees own perspectives on the policy process observed in the empirical examples.

4. Analysis

As discussed in the first section of this Chapter, the analysis of the empirical data needed to address different functions according to the three stages of the analytical framework. The first was establishing the nature of the original institutional context from which policy frames were constructed. This involved a historical analysis of the way forest policy evolved both at state and international levels. Data for this came from secondary material, which is summarised in Chapters Five and Six, as well as documentary sources and additional insights provided in the interviews. The second was the process of constructing policy frames through the three aspects of problems definition, communication and persuasion, and policy action. In accordance with interpretive policy analysis, this involved the identification of the visible objects and activities that embody policy initiatives in the public domain as well as the interpretation of the motivations and meanings behind these objects and activities in the light of interview data (Fischer 2003, Yanow 2000). Data for the identification of visible objects and activities was found through a combination of documentary analysis, site visits and interviews. Data for interpreting the meanings and motivations of policy actors was derived exclusively from interview data. These two sets of data were then combined to analyse the way policy frames were constructed in each example. The third stage involved assessing the output of the policy initiatives in the empirical examples by referencing back to the data of institutional and material context derived from the first stage of the analytical framework. This stage was assessed through the combination of interview, documentary, secondary and observational data.

The bulk of the analysis involved the organisation of interview data. The first part of the analysis of the interviews was the transcription of recorded data, and the organisation of notes taken for the interviews not recorded, into a form that could be easily categorised. With the interview data converted into a text form, coding analysis could then take place. Coding involves, in the words of Strauss and Corbin, “breaking down, comparing, conceptualising and categorising data” (Strauss and Corbin 1990: 61). The way that this was done in this Thesis was according to predefined broad themes derived from the analytical framework, relating to institutional context, problem definition, communication and persuasion, and policy action. But within these broad themes, the identification

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of more fine grain categories that accorded to specific aspects of these themes was driven by the data itself.

The specific coding approach adopted was adapted from Flick’s method of thematic coding. This method is appropriate since it is specifically designed for situations where data sources have been defined in advance and the intention is to facilitate comparisons between these sources. It is also designed to complement the episodic interview approach outlined in the previous section, where interviews are guided by predefined themes to ensure comparability, but also leave room for the different interpretations that the interviewees expressed relating to these themes (Flick 2002: 185- 190). Drawing from this method, condensed summaries were produced for each interview with the intention of identifying particular categories in each instance according to the predefined themes. An example of one of these condensed summaries in shown in Appendix Two. These summaries allowed for the identification of different aspects of the four pre-defined themes in each interview. Following this, all of the condensed summaries were compared in order to find common finer grain categories between the interviews. The categorised data was then inputted into a thematic chart (Ritchie et al 2003).

The outline form of this thematic chart is shown in Appendix Three. Each interview is allotted a column. The sections of the condensed summaries have then been divided into cells that are organised according to the pre-defined themes of the analytical framework and sub-categories within these themes that were identified from comparing across the condensed interview summaries. These themes and categories are shown in the left hand column. In the case of the first theme, institutional context, the interview data led to the identification of five categories: economy, civil society, culture, government structure and the conservation sector. In the case of the second