Facing an interview Conditions and materials

Preconditions

When the researcher arrives at the time of the interview it is assumed that the he/she has done three things: 1. Previously select the appropriate informant according to the criteria defined in the study. 2. The acceptance of the informant to participate, so he/she must have been informed with prior to the interview. 3. Have a set of questions to ask, a more or less structured script or theme that would help direct the interview to a good end.

Place and moment

A good interview cannot be done anywhere, at any time. The interview should be conducted in a concerted, quiet, neutral place, where the informant feels comfortable, no noise, quiet. The moment is very important, because the interview requires a concerted time and both the investigator and the informant should not be in a hurry. When the interview starts, it should have all the participant’s dedication, they should not have another thing to do. I must adjust to the agreed time and, unless the informant is very comfortable, finish a few minutes before the scheduled time.

Interview Material

The interview material is: Pencil or pen, field notebook or notebook, interview script, thematic script, audio-recorder to make the recording of the conversation and later facilitate its transcription, it may seem obvious but it is not: be it analogue or digital, you have to carry always spare parts of batteries and tapes or enough memory to make the recording.

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The moment of the interview

The interview is usually initiated by signing an informed consent or recording it on the recorder. The interviewer must consider that if the subject does not wish to be recorded, the interviewer must write down the content of the interview, being true to the informant's words, if the time has come and the participant declines the interview, the interviewer should understand the situation and avoid value judgments, thanks him for his interest and offers to be available to the informant in case there is a change of opinion in the future. The interviewer's attitude should be assertive, respectful and open, and should favour the communication, the language must adapt to the conditions of the informant, it must be clear, avoiding unnecessary technicalities, ambiguities, bulky phrases, etc. The interviewer's dress should adapt to the context. For example, a dressing gown white can create distancing in the informant or misgivings. Phenomenographic interviews are different from other qualitative research interviews in that their specific purpose is to look for variations in participants’ experience or understanding of the topic of the research eliciting the qualitatively different conception of a phenomenon which are seen, experienced or understood by Interviewees (Bruce, 1994).

Research data is collected through open-ended questions in semi-structured interviews that posteriorly are analysed through iterative readings to produce an outcome space (Reid, 1997). The main purpose of using this method is to find out what is “in and on someone else's mind” (Patton, 2002, p. 341). In this particular case in Intensive Care Medicine residents about their teaching skills perception after taking a workshop. About this, Patton wrote: “...I interview people to find out from them those things I cannot directly observe” (p. 340). This is important in order to engage and create a rapport with the Interviewees allowing participants to start thinking more deeply about their experiences and perception of the research topic. According to Seidman, (2006) the use of semi-structured interviews is grounded in the phenomenological tradition designed to question meanings of experience. Seidman ties the core of

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phenomenology to the qualitative philosophy (Seidman cited by Dilley, , 2004) arguing that interviews provides access to the context of people’s behaviour and a way for researchers to understand the meaning of that behaviour. I believe that this method contributes to study participants’ perception that includes their meaning of experience and the way that experience impact on their learning process. Within this context, meaning is perceived as, not just the facts, but rather the understanding one has, that is specific to the individual, taking in consideration what is the relationship between what was said, how it was said, what the listener was attempting to ask or hear and what the speaker was attempting to convey or say. Using semi-structured interviews also allows researcher to ask a series of questions, with accompanying queries that probe for more detailed and contextual data, having access to rich, in-depth information that helps to understand the unique and shared aspects of lives, attributed to participants’ lived experiences (Piercy & Cheek, 2004).

The use of open-ended questions granted a deeper understanding of participants’ experience, providing the opportunity to verify and interpret answers during the interview, creating an engagement with the Interviewee in a formal and systematic process (Cohen & Crabtree, 2008). Also, open-ended questions were used to allow participants to freely express their perceptions and experiences about the topic in an informal conversation giving the opportunity to clarify any relevant detail or topic as they develop the issues that I was analysing. Additionally, in my research’s interviews, a journal as an aide memoire (italics are mine) was used; this journal helped me to cover the main topics of the investigation during conversation. This is useful in data collection because it serves to follow topical trajectories in the conversation that may have stray from the guide when interviewer feels that is appropriate. The main focus of the interviews was centred on asking participants to describe their experiences, feelings, thoughts and perceptions about their teaching skills and the impact of the workshop on them, including what - if any - actions they might have taken, for the improvement or positive change of their teaching skills.

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Participants were asked to provide an account of their ideas about their teaching skills before and after the workshop, using (among others) questions such as:

• What was your previous teaching experience?

• Do you think that this workshop would expand and improve your teaching

skills?

• Do you think that this workshop would expand and improve your

professional practice?

• What is the importance of teaching skills for professionals and patients? (Italics are mine).

With these considerations in mind, I decided to interview twenty-five Intensive Care Medicine’s residents, two times, one before taking a Resident-as-Teacher workshop and the second time after the workshop. This decision was based on determining if the impact of the workshop had any influence on the residents' perception of their teaching skills and how this impact would influence their activities and professional performance. Each participant had a 30 minutes interview with open questions in a semi-structured interview type. Individual interviews are probably the most familiar and the most often used form of data collection in qualitative education research. Dicicco-Bloom and Crabtree (2006) define interviews as a mean to provide access to participants’ personal perspectives and relevant experiences on an unlimited number of topics. In-depth interviews and informal conversations allowed me to do a rich and detailed exploration of the research question and to discover shared understandings related to my research inquiry (Morrow, 1992). For (Lincoln & Denzin, 2005, p. 643), taken from Vargas, (2012) the interview is a conversation, the art of asking questions and listening to answers. As a technique of data collection, the interview is strongly influenced by the personal characteristics of the interviewer. This definition, too generic and not very operative, includes any

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encounter between two people, a researcher and his Interviewee, in which the researcher asks questions which can range from opinion polls or questionnaires, that is, instruments highly structured, and open interviews where it is possible, even, that the Investigator be asked and questioned by the informant. A qualitative research interview will not be based on some highly structured closed questionnaires, although they can be used, more in open questions whose maximum expression is the in-depth interpretation through a qualitative analysis of data, where not only a conversation with an informant but the meetings are repeated until the researcher, reviewed each interview, has clarified all emerging issues or relevant issues for the study. A researcher who approaches the qualitative perspective will use the interview in their different ways of presenting themselves, but their preferences would be oriented towards the interview in which the Interviewee speaks openly. Within this context, in the next section, I analyse the types of interviews and their uses in qualitative research.

Interviewee’s answers were recorded and transcribed and subsequently analysed developing a phenomenographic outcome space. Interviews were conducted during normal residency hours in Luis Vernaza Hospital’s Department of Medical Education; they were tape-recorded with participants’ permission. Interviews were taken before and after the workshop. Information concerning with the impact of the workshop can be systematically or objectively obtained through these interviews. A researcher’s journal during data collection and the analysis process was used to record recurring themes and to better understand participant constructions of meaning within his or her context, through reflexivity.

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Researcher’s Assistant

In my study, in order to better focus on facilitating the interviews, I used the help of an assistant, solely and exclusively for the time of the interviews. As I mentioned above, individual semi-structured audio-recorded interviews were used along with a researcher’s interview journal to writing down recurring themes and participants’ constructions of meaning within the answer’s context. This journal was posteriorly read through a reflexivity analysis process during data analysis. The functions of this assistant were to observe my interviews, handle the interview journal and manage the tape recorder making sure it worked correctly and that the participants' responses were recorded in their entirety. Participants’ recruitment and interviews can be a challenge to researchers, especially for those with limited resources and time. Doctoral students may need research assistants to recruit participants and complete data collection in a timely manner (Xu & Hae-Ra, 2014). The assistant’s name and activities were provided to the Ethics Committee of the College of Social Science at the University of Glasgow, and to participants prior to the beginning of the interviews. The assistant’s participation allowed me to have a greater focus in the interview while I was observing and taking notes of participants’ attitudes and gestures, this way, I was able to “recontextualise the interview-based data by examining contextual issues that may impact the data” (Morrow, 1992, p. 250).