Conducting the interviews

I carried out interviews with these twenty-five people in convenient and relaxed settings, choosing cafes, bars and restaurants and occasionally informants’ own homes or offices, replicating what is common professional practice for an informal meeting. I provided the respondents with a letter of introduction explaining the nature and purpose of the research, and all signed a form explaining the research ethics. I offered, and in some instances, people asked to see, the transcripts of the interviews. Nobody refused to participate in the research, though one email to a former colleague requesting an interview went unanswered.

I encouraged respondents to talk about their experience and involvement in the planning and regeneration process. I sought out knowledge, insight, data, nuance and perspective using a semi-structured conversational approach between interviewer and respondent, in which informants were encouraged to tell stories of what happened in their own words (Wengraf, 2001).

I began with a briefing about the research project, ethical considerations, the form and recording of the interview and the proposed use of data. The data I gathered through the interviews was generated through an inter-subjective process between myself as a researcher and what I observed (McNaughton Nicholls et al., p.245) and captured in a recorded conversation. I used semi-structured, open-ended prompts encouraging respondents to develop their own accounts, drawing on context, time and place, critical events, characters and other elements as they chose. I tried to keep a continuous flow, informed by - but not dictated by - a palette of questions I had available. I recorded interviews using a handheld tape recorder and also the voice recording software on an iPhone.

I transcribed the interviews as soon as possible afterwards, and in some cases paid others to produce first draft transcripts. Where I used others to create a draft, I would replay the interview in its entirety and check the integrity of the transcript, filling in gaps, correcting names and references and otherwise checking accuracy to the limits of my own ability. I experimented with voice recognition software but discovered that there was no substitute to constructing the transcripts manually and then editing them.

The interview guide

The interview guide draws on, reinterprets and adapts Spradley’s proposals for doing ethnographic research. Spradley (1979, p. 58) promotes an approach to interviews as a ‘series of friendly conversations into which the researcher slowly introduces new elements to assist informants to respond as informants’. The interviewer directs the focus of the interview towards understanding the informant’s cultural knowledge, developing rapport and eliciting information. He puts forward a schema of descriptive questions, which is adapted here for this research. Spradley suggests that the responses to Grand Tour questions ‘offer almost unlimited opportunities for investigating smaller aspects of experience’ (1979, p. 88). He proposes follow-up questions using the same approach of encouraging the respondent to talk in an open- ended way, now focusing on specific or smaller issues. Mini-tour questions may be framed around issues generated by responses to the Grand Tour questions or might be drawn from the researcher’s knowledge of the setting. They are designed to elicit more and more specific descriptive accounts from the respondent.

The interview questions

At the outset, I prompted the respondent to describe the cultural scene or setting by asking one or more ‘Grand Tour’ questions, designed to encourage informants to ‘ramble on and on’, as Spradley would have it, eliciting descriptive accounts. In this case, the setting for planning might be understood as the Lower Lea itself, the social and political context in London and in the local area, or the institutional context within which planning was taking place.

I tailored ‘Grand Tour’ questions to fit the person being interviewed, and example questions are indicated below. Where questions are linked to Spradley’s categories the italics, after each proposed question below, indicate his analytic category. Although the prompts below are set out as formal questions, in practice I used them as guiding themes, encouraging and steering the conversation intuitively and allowing it to take its own course:

1. Can you tell me the story of the development plans you were involved in? Tell me when you were involved, what was the process, the main issues, events, people involved? (Guided Grand Tour)

2. Can you describe the Lower Lea at the time when you (wrote, commissioned, helped with) the Plan? (Guided Grand Tour)

3. Can you tell me what the purpose of the Plan was: What battle was being fought, who were the champions and who or what were the barriers? (Specific Grand Tour)

4. Can you paint a picture that typifies life in [the institutional setting of the person being interviewed]? What were the major concerns and in what context did you meet and work with people to develop the plan? (Typical Grand Tour) 5. I picked up on themes arising from the responses to the opening questions with further ‘Mini-Tour’ questions. Questions typically were framed around examples, experience, or involved asking the respondent questions about the use of terms and phrases, or references to specific experiences.

I used Mini-Tour questions to encourage respondents to describe the themes in the plans. What were the main ideas being expressed in the plans? Did those ideas draw on ideas from elsewhere or where they novel? Here, I tried to elicit descriptions of narrative themes, their internal relationships within the plans, and the sense in which they draw on wider ‘key narratives’ drawn from the setting, or broader ‘grand narratives’ from the historic and socio-economic context.

For all of the questions above, I invited people to share memories of details: to introduce colour and specificity, making their story as vivid as possible.

I went on to ask respondents questions designed to elicit specific memories of critical events and then to focus on their own experience of the events.

Examples were:

6. Can you recall the key moments in the development of the plan? If you were to focus on how the plan evolved our time, what were the big or small moments that you would use to set out the timeline?

7. Tell me about your story, about you experience of these events and moments? Help me to understand how you were involved. What role did you play, what did you do, and how did you feel about what happened?

I asked questions to explore and check my own memories, conversationally, asking respondents to reflect on the verisimilitude of my recollected account of events and my interpretation of them.