Conducting interviews

2.4.2. Conducting interviews

Altogether there were 14 audio recorded formal interviews that took place throughout the course of fieldwork. As detailed in Appendix 4, interviews 1-5 took place with friend-informants either individually or in small groups at the researcher’s or participants homes. Interviews 6 -12 took place with individuals or groups of young people in community settings (sometimes with community workers present). Interviews 13 and 14 took place with community professionals in Sutton in their place of work. All formal interviews, excluding interviews 11 and 12 are referred to in the thesis. The exclusion of data from interviews 11 and 12 was not

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intentional, but attributed to reaching a point of data saturation, whereby similar themes had already been discussed by other research participants in their interviews and were consequently utilised in the write-up of the data chapters following the data analyses. These formal interviews were in addition to the informal, non-recorded “unsolicited” interviews and oral accounts that took place in fieldwork with young people and community members (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007:99). Each interview lasted 60-90 minutes and were recorded using a Dictaphone. An interview schedule with topical areas was developed prior to the interviews which was unstructured to allow promote a more conversational nature in line with the grounded theoretical and feminist approaches which prioritise discussions to flow from the participants. To encourage autonomy, upon consent to being interviewed, participants had the choice to decide where, when and who they wanted to be interviewed with. However, for some young people in community settings this was governed by gatekeepers. Full transcriptions were undertaken so as facilitate robust grounded theoretical approaches. I also wrote notes during interviews to capture non-verbal cues and further contextualise fieldwork to enhance levels of thick description (Holliday, 2007).

Whilst I had anticipated in research design that I would most likely conduct formal interviews, I took on Hammersley and Atkinson’s (2007:147) point that, “No means of data recording should be simply adopted as a matter of routine: reflexive awareness is required here as much as anywhere else.” Thus, I began to question whether I would need to conduct interviews at all, particularly because I had gathered rich contextual data from fieldwork; but I decided that I would see what emerged during fieldwork. Subsequently, I reached a point where I decided that conducting carefully selected interviews with particular individuals and groups would be beneficial to the research. Moreover, the rationale for undertaking interviews was because I wanted to ensure that I had ‘saturated’ concepts according to my grounded theoretical approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Therefore, when there were areas that I felt still required more definite ‘triangulation’ I used interviews to address this (Denzin, 1989). Other rationales for conducting interviews which emerged during fieldwork are explained in the forthcoming sections.

Interviewing young people in community settings

During fieldwork with young people in community settings including local schools, The Rafters, the Sparrow Youth Club and the Sutton Youth Bus; I encountered challenging moments constrained by circumstances in fieldwork. This included how gatekeepers intentionally and unintentionally altered ways in which I interacted with young people and the research environment. As a result of these constraints, I decided in some circumstances that conducting

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interviews could overcome these challenges and “amplify the voices of those on the social margins” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007:97).

During my time at The Rafters, the Sparrow Youth Club and the Sutton Youth Bus, I had explained to the adult community members who worked with these young people (including:

Jo, Lizzy, Lacey and Steven) that ideally, I would join young people outside of formal communal settings to explore their drinking in-situ. As some participants were under the legal drinking age, I explained that I would avoid conducting research with underage drinkers, nor those involved in illegal drug use to prevent placing myself and participants in any vulnerable situation(s). However, individuals like Lizzy instructed me that I could not, “under any circumstances” conduct fieldwork with young people outside of the Sparrow Youth Club or join young people outside of the youth club in the young peoples’ leisure time. When I previously suggested to some young people that I would have liked to have joined them in their drinking activities, they agreed that it would be good for the research and consented for me to join them. However, I felt ethically obliged not to defy the wishes of community gatekeepers (some of who like Lacey was also a family acquaintance) who had provided me access to work with these young people in the first place. Without these individuals I probably would not have had the opportunity to engage with these young people at all. Additionally, from a pragmatic perspective, I knew that gatekeepers from the Sparrow Youth Club (Lizzy), The Rafters (Steven), The Sycamore School (Lacey), and the Sutton Youth Bus (Jackie) all spoke to one each other; so, if I broke the trust of one individual, I had no doubt that word would spread to others which would have been detrimental to fieldwork.

On reflection, one of the dangers of using a ‘snowballing’ technique was that gatekeepers were linked to one another, which can hinder research access and activities because they can be protective of research participants (Atkinson and Flint, 2001). After deliberation, I decided that conducting interviews with certain young people in community settings would be the most appropriate action to find more about their drinking cultures whilst retaining respect for community gatekeepers. Whilst not my desired option, this allowed me to “use what people say as evidence about their perspectives, and perhaps about the larger subcultures and cultures in which they belong” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007:98).

Conducting interviews in community settings was also challenging due to the environment.

For example, at the Sparrow Youth Club it was difficult to conduct interviews because of noise and activity. Each session took place in a main hall where lots of social activities took place simultaneously like: arts and crafts tables, people playing pool; cooking activities; youth worker-led discussion activities about issues like sexual health or drug/alcohol use; young people running around and chasing each other; playing of television and/or computer games;

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noise young people playing basketball in the sports hall adjacent to the main hall; vibrations from the music room; and always, without fail, loud music playing that filled the entire hall (including a mixture of rock, rap, grime, hop-hop, heavy metal, indie and pop music). This created a cacophony of sound that made interviews difficult to conduct and transcribing even more challenging. Moreover, there were interruptions from youth workers and other young people for the duration of many interviews. Other interviews that took place in community settings (e.g. schools and the Sutton Youth Bus) were much easier in comparison. Despite the challenges, I captured vital data from formal interviews using a quality Dictaphone.

Although built good relationships with some young Alternative people at the Sparrow Youth Club, I wanted to give something back for sharing experiences with me during their leisure time that I was intruding upon. Inspired by Cara Robinson’s (2009a), as an added incentive to participate in interviews and as a small gesture of thanks, I bought drinks and snacks based upon participants requests for each interview. The young people were excited about this and gratefully tucked in during interviews. Having regularly observed some young people in the youth club reception struggling to pay the 50p entry fee, I hoped that this small offering was of some value. Establishing rapport with young people in this way in community settings helped build trust and reciprocation which contributed to more in-depth and rich discussions about their drinking cultures which formed valuable data for this study.

Interviewing young adults from the NTE

When conducting interviews with young adult drinkers there was more freedom in organising interviews compared to those young people I had encountered in community settings. These interviews either took place in the home of the participants or at my own home (participants were given a choice about the location). Participants were invited to attend interviews in their friendship groups, individually and/or by gender. Interviewing young adults in friendship groups (where possible) and in gendered groups generated in-depth and honest accounts through positive group dynamics whereby participants discussed their values and practices openly without imbalanced gender power relations coming into play (McNamara; 2009). The rationale for conducting interviews in groups was through a desire to mirror ‘pre-drinking’

environments that young people valued and engaged in extensive storytelling amongst friends. I wanted to recreate this context because they were insightful about young people’s drinking practices and values as shown in the findings of Chapters Four and Five. This made the interview setting a resource rather than a barrier (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007).

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During pre-drinking, participants tended to share intimate stories prior to going out and so by creating a similar type of environment, I believed that this would help build rapport and create a conducive to make the participants feel more at ease. To create this environment, I either cooked or ordered take-away food and provided a small number of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages for participants to consume with food. This offered a way to ‘give something back’

to the participants as well as create an environment similar to that of ‘pre-drinking’ (Skeggs, 2001a). The ethical considerations of providing alcohol to participants will be discussed further in the ‘Ethical Considerations’ section of this chapter. It is worth noting that participants were offered a token amount of alcohol in an attempt to recognise daily recommended drinking guidelines (i.e. 3-4 units for men, and 2-3 units for women) as suggested by the Government’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO) (HM Government, 2010b).¹⁶ If participants chose to drink during interviews, I chose not to drink but instead ate with them to sustain rapport without compromising my ability to conduct the interviews. This seemed to be a successful technique because participants appeared to ‘let go’, shown by the way that they engaged in jokes, banter, uncontrolled laughter and discussed drinking values and practices that mirrored ‘pre -drinking’.

Interviewing community professionals

As this thesis has prioritised the voices and experiences of young people, I critically selected a small number of community professionals to be formally interviewed. The purpose of this was to provide more holistic accounts about youth drinking in Sutton. This included Lacey from the Sycamore School and the Sparrow Youth Club, and Steven from The Rafters who was accompanied by his colleague Darren a community outreach worker. Organising these interviews were straightforward. Firstly, community professionals made themselves available at their workplace on their own territory; surroundings of which provided me with insight into their world and how they make sense of what is going on around them (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). Secondly, community professionals agreed to be interviewed because they perceived that my research had the potential to support young people whom they worked with and were emotionally and professionally invested in. Lastly, they were keen to be interviewed because they wanted me to disseminate research findings with the wider community anticipating that the research to support their own services and provisions. Whilst I agreed

16 Since interviews have taken place, guidelines by the CMO have been updated to suggest that weekly unit recommendations are in place of daily units. Advice about single drinking occasions suggest to:

limit alcohol in one drinking occasion, alternate alcohol with water/soft beverages and plan your drinking safely to avoid harm/risk (DoH, 2016:6).

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that findings could be shared, I informed community professionals that findings would be shared selectively in ways that did not conflict with the Doctorate.