Formulating interview & focus group questions

and difference from the previous years and locations. Similarly, while my observations from events in 2007 and early 2008 helped to shape my thinking around the research question and the formulation of an interview schedule, having commenced interviewing in March 2008, I started to trace similarities between the themes emerging from my interview data and my observations from events. Thus, participant observation contributed to making this research a thoroughly iterative process.

4.3.2 Formulating interview & focus group questions

The formation of a schedule to guide the interviews and group discussions was influenced by both the research question and by themes I had noticed emerging from the participant observation and the ‘media dossier’ component of the research up to that point. For the interviews in particular, it was also my aim to encourage as free-flowing a narrative as possible. Having said that, there were a wide range of issues that I wanted to address, and so the interviews may be best described as ‘semi-structured’ rather than ‘unstructured’.

As already outlined, in formulating the interview schedule, it was my aim to access constructions of identity and claims on Irishness through eliciting narratives of ‘living Irishness’ in England. I avoided direct questions such as “what does your national identity mean to you?”, or “how do you conceptualise Irishness?” in favour of a range of more open-ended questions. This is not to say that participants would be unable to answer such questions, but having been posed in a theoretical, academic style, the answers to these questions would likely be framed in a similar style and would not reflect the personal, day-to-day construction of identities and identification that might be hoped for – consequently, the data may lack richness and validity. In common with Ní Laoire (2007) the question-set

was developed in order to allow participants talk ‘around’ their experiences of migration and living Irish in England, as well as directly about them.

A copy of the schedule that guided the interviews can be found in Appendix 1. In this schedule, I grouped themes I wished to address over the course of the interview under topic headings, and listed some possible questions to ask in order to encourage conversation on that theme. Given that I was interviewing both migrant and second generation participants, a slightly different schedule was drawn up for each, in order to match likely experiences.

For example, I opened my interviews with migrants by asking them about where they were from in Ireland and the circumstances of their migration, while I opened my interviews with second generation Irish people by asking them about their upbringing, and childhood memories around being from an Irish family in England. Thus, the two approaches invited chronologically-based narratives of Irish lives in England, but tailored to the experiences of the individual participant.

It should be noted that this schedule guided, but did not determine the pattern of the interview. As can be seen from Appendix 1, the schedule attempted to anticipate the

‘messiness’ of the interview as a conversational interaction rather than attempt to impose order on it. Besides the opening and the closing question, I did not consider it important that the questions be asked in the order set out on the schedule. Rather, I attempted to fit the questions to the ‘flow’ of the interaction i.e. if a participants talk appeared to me to be starting to address themes ‘scheduled’ for later in the interview, I introduced these questions at this point. Similarly, while I wished to cover each of the themes previously identified, I did not consider it important that every single one of the questions on my list was posed. If I felt that a participant had already addressed an issue thoroughly, it was my view that it would be a source of frustration for them to be asked to repeat an answer simply in order to satisfy the vagaries of my interview schedule.

Broadly, the themes I attempted to address over the course of the interview were as follows. For interviews with migrants, I began by asking them where they were from in Ireland and then went on to ask them about the circumstances of their migration and arriving and beginning to live in England. Following this, in various order and by various means, I asked them about their involvement (or non-involvement) in Irish communities, or in Irish activities in England, about their personal sense of Irish identity, about local identity, about their relationship with present-day Ireland, about any negative experiences they may have had in England, and about their plans for the future. For interviews with second generation Irish people, I began the interview by asking them about their upbringing and their childhood memories of ‘being Irish’ and belonging to an Irish family in England, before going on to cover many of the same themes as listed above, but more tailored to second generation experiences. I finished all the interviews with an invitation to participants to add anything that they felt may have been important about Irishness in England that we had not covered.

In forming a schedule for the group discussions, I was less interested in eliciting personal biographical narrative and more interested in examining the ways in which Irishness as a concept was mutually constructed and contested. As such my schedule (Appendix 2) covered such areas as “what makes you feel most Irish?”, “what makes a ‘real’ Irish person?”, and the ways in which Irishness is represented in England. I also wished to use the group discussions to explore the generational aspect of Irishness, both in regard to successive generations of migrants and with regard to second generation Irish people in England. In order to facilitate this discussion, I circulated an Irish Post article addressing such issues entitled “What will Irishness mean in the future?” from November 2007 by Joe Horgan, a regular columnist who is himself second generation Birmingham-Irish, but now lives in Ireland. A copy of this article can be found in Appendix 3. Following circulation of

the article, I then enquired as to whether participants recognised the themes and the sentiment of the article in their own experience and encouraged a discussion about generational differences around Irishness.

As I have mentioned, this research was inherently an iterative process. As such, no two of my interviews or group discussions followed exactly the same pattern. Also, as I gained experience as an interviewer through carrying out 30 interviews in a short space of time, I built up a sense of, crudely speaking, what worked and what did not. Thus, later interviews were informed by lines of enquiry that had proved fruitful in previous interviews, while I also learnt how to frame questions in such a way as to be relatable and understandable (following a few awkward moments in early interviews where I realised on being confronted by blank looks that I had framed a question using language that was overly technical and academic). Similarly, I would occasionally use a theme or an idea that had arisen in one interview or group as a means of rhetorically questioning some of the themes in other interactions (with due regard to confidentiality, of course). For example, a conversation that arose almost spontaneously in the second of my group discussions around what a ‘modern’ Irish centre ought to look like proved sufficiently illuminating about constructions of Irish authenticity that I subsequently deliberately introduced it as a question in the third group discussion.

4.3.3 The process: Recruiting participants, conducting interviews and group