Ethnographic interviews

The task of developing an emic, comprehensive and in-depth

understanding of a group of Chinese students’ conceptions, values, beliefs and attitudes of their emotional lives in intercultural communication is challenging, as meanings of emotions can be quite unconscious, subtle and unique. Also, as stated earlier in this chapter, in addition to exploring participants’

understandings about emotions, I am also interested in investigating the effects of relevant sociocultural and historical contexts on these understandings. Hence, a research method which is good at verbalizing individuals’ ideas, capturing the uniqueness and richness of individuals’ meanings attached to emotions as well as outlining the features of relevant contexts in which these meanings evolve is essential for this study. As a result, I adopted ethnographic interviews as the main data collection instrument in this study for the following reasons. First, it is characterized by ethnographers’ direct interactions with participants which facilitate participants to put their thinking about emotions into words. Second, by valuing participants’ own words and perspectives as well as encouraging them to elaborate their ideas in the interviewing processes, ethnographic interviews effectively probe the diversity and richness of participants’ meaning world without imposing researchers’ understandings to participants (Dick, 2006; Partington, 2001). Third, ethnographic interviewing data is contextual in its nature and interpreting such data requires referring back to relevant contexts and identifying their features which shape the data (Brewer, 2000; Dick, 2006).

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As a result, ethnographic interviews is useful to make participants’ unique, rich and complex understandings about emotions explicit as well as to unfold the ways relevant contexts impinge on these understandings, which matches my research aims and focuses and is therefore an appropriate data collection instrument for this study.

The following paragraphs outline the design and procedures of the

ethnographic interviews conducted in this study, followed by discussions about the important issues emerged in the interviewing process.

Rounds, types, and the focus of ethnographic interviews

This study follows a longitudinal approach with the view to helping me to produce a more dynamic and comprehensive picture of participants’ emotional lives throughout their entire taught Masters study period. Two rounds of ethnographic interviews were conducted during the academic year 2012/2013, which took place in the Christmas vacation and the summer vacation of that year respectively. As mentioned in the previous section, prolonged participant observation in the research field was also conducted during this period. The value of adopting a longitudinal approach was that, first of all, participants’ experiences and perspectives may be ever-changing, and a longitudinal study enabled me to collect more time-sensitive accounts with the aim of gaining insights into the relationship between time and meaning making processes (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007) so that the participants’ dynamic emotional lives during their taught Masters study period can be better captured. Moreover, conducting the second round of interviews helped me check my own

understandings of the previous information revealed in the first round, as well as to probe further information if necessary (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007).

There were 26 interviews in total, which were conducted in the participants’ own accommodations. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. In the first round, based on an initial grasp of the field gained from early

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(see Appendices 1 and 2 for the Chinese and English versions of the first round interview guide) with the aim of eliciting and identifying the main themes of participants’ emotional engagements in their intercultural encounters from their own perspectives. I focused on discussing participants’ emotional

responses and the reasons for such responses as they engaged in intercultural encounters within various academic and social situations, such as participating in classroom or group discussions, completing academic assignments, preparing for academic assessments, interacting with academic staff and classmates, building a social network in the university, attending students’ social activities in the university, and so on. This helped me to gain an overall picture of the kind of emotional encounters participants had in their intercultural communication within the research context, as well as an initial grasp of the processes and underlying reasons for these encounters from their own perspective. At this stage, I was uncertain about what issues were perceived as relevant for my study focus by the participants. Hence, unstructured interviews were more useful in terms of learning from participants and raising initial awareness of what needs to be explored further (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).

Accordingly, in the first round of interviews, quite a lot of

information-eliciting questions were posed. In other words, questions focused on eliciting descriptive accounts of the perceived important features of

participants’ emotional experiences in the field, what Spradley (1979, p. 87) calls ‘grand tour’ and ‘mini-tour’ questions. The following are examples of a grand tour and a mini-tour question respectively:

A grand tour question

请你描述一下你来英国之后，在哪些学习环境中与外国人（学校教职员工，学生，等 等）有过交流?

Please describe in what academic situations you had communication or interactions with non-Chinese (e.g., university academic staff, students, etc.) in the UK?

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请告诉我当你在这些学习环境中与外国人（学校教职员工，学生，等等）交流的时候， 各自产生了什么样的感受（例如：幸福感、成就感、被认同感、迷惑、不被认同感、 害怕、焦虑、孤单、无助……）？

Please describe what kinds of feelings (e.g. happiness, success, approval, confusion, disapproval, fear, anxiety, loneliness, helplessness...) you experienced when

communicating or interacting with non-Chinese (e.g., university academic staff, students, etc.) in these academic situations?

These questions enabled me to get a general picture of how participants experience emotions in intercultural communication before exploring them in a more in-depth and systematic way. After that, some ‘more focused questions’ were raised in order to better ‘understand local perceptions and categorizations of experience’ (Johnson and Weller, 2001, p. 497). In addition, at the end of each interview, I invited participants to talk about anything they felt to be particularly important and relevant to the research focus that was not mentioned previously in the interviews. This raised an opportunity to gain access to and to analyse perceived unusual or irregular experiences in addition to the frequent and routine ones in the field, in order to capture a more complex, holistic, and individually unique overview of the realities of emotions in intercultural encounters. From my point of view, asking such a kind of questions ensured me to effectively explore the variety and complexity of participants’ understandings of and actions towards emotions in intercultural communication. This helped me to develop both common and diverse

understandings of the shared tacit knowledge of emotions within the sample. The aims of the second round of interviews were two-fold. First, participants were presented with a list of emotions (see Appendices 3 and 4 for the Chinese and English versions of the second round interview guide in which the list is included). The list consisted of those emotions that were most commonly discussed as well as those perceived as important by only a few participants in the first round of interviews, with a view of covering both common and

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then invited to choose one or more emotions from the list and talk about their relevant experiences around these emotions which took place between the first and second rounds, and to compare and contrast these experiences with their previous relevant experiences mentioned in the first round. This “compare and contrast” type of questioning was aimed at probing participants’ potential developments and/or changes in the ways they construct and negotiate the meanings of the themes identified in the first round data, as well as the

underlying reasons for these developments and/or changes. In summary, in the second round, by asking participants to consciously compare/contrast and reflect on their experiences at different points, time-sensitive accounts of participants’ emotions in their intercultural encounters can be elicited.

Second, in the second round, participants were invited to talk about other important emotional events and experiences that occurred after the first round, which may be unrelated to or cannot be fully captured by the emotions on the list. This helped to enhance the breadth of the investigation and to provide a more holistic and time-sensitive picture of the research phenomena.

During the interviewing processes, I used visual prompting technique with a view to helping participants to verbalize their emotions more easily when necessary. Specifically, the visual prompt refers to a chart of online chatting facial expressions which indicated various emotions including universal ones, i.e., anger, happiness, disgust, surprise, fear, and sadness (Boucher and Brandt, 1981) (see below):

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Figure 1 The visual eliciting tool in ethnographic interviews

In Appendix 5, I summarise the key information about the two rounds of ethnographic interviews, including the format, interview date, and duration of each interview.

Interviewing language

In my view, the choice of interviewing language should facilitate participants to articulate their emotional experiences in a detailed and nuanced manner, given the complex and rich nature of emotional experiences. Participants’ mother tongue, i.e., Mandarin Chinese, was therefore a more desirable

interviewing language to adopt in this study. This seemed to match participants’ own expectations of the interviewing language as revealed by their responses to my invitation to participate in the study, such as ‘Can I use Chinese (in

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all participants the freedom to choose their own interviewing languages, however, in order to ensure they used the one with which they felt most comfortable at specific interviewing moments. All participants chose to use Mandarin Chinese in interviews, although code switching on a word and phrase level was not uncommon. In a few cases, whole English sentences were used mainly with the aim of repeating what others said in English.