In-depth Interviews

Qualitative semi-structured interviewing is an established and respected method for social and geographical research (Mason, 2002). Considering in-depth interviews as personal and intimate encounters (DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree, 2006), I used them as a window to the stories of participants (Rabionet, 2011). In particular, such interviews were useful for eliciting information regarding the attitudes, acuities and perceptions towards the station. I separate out the young people and stakeholder interviews below.

I conducted more than 90 semi-structured in-depth interviews with volunteers at KCC Live. The majority of young people were interviewed individually, but there was one occasion when I interviewed two young people together after an on-air incident. I recorded the interviews using my mobile phone, as this device is familiar with young people (whereas a digital voice recorder may not be), and I therefore felt that its use was less obtrusive. The spaces and places in which research encounters occur is important, particularly in children’s geographies where certain spaces can be

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skewed towards adult power and authority (Jones, 2008). I conducted interviews within soundproofed studios at KCC Live and empty classrooms at Knowsley Community College. These locations were familiar to volunteers and places they told me they felt comfortable, thus putting participants at ease (see Longhurst, 2003). By conducting the first interviews after I had been a member of the station for around four months, it is reasonable to claim that my position as a ‘familiar face’ to the young people enabled a more relaxed interview environment.

Interviews typically lasted between one and one and a half hours, or around 30 minutes for follow-up interviews. Preliminary interviews focused on collating autobiographical data to provide contextual information about each volunteer (see also O’Toole, 2003). I also asked questions to discover what KCC Live means to the interviewees (see Appendix 3). The interviews loosely followed the proposed questions, allowing participants to bring to the fore issues that were important to them. Follow-up interviews pursued points raised in previous interviews or related to seeking clarification of my observations. I conducted the follow-up interviews around two months after the initial interviews, and I conducted between two and seven follow-up interviews with each young person. The number of follow-up interviews varied, for instance, depending on how frequent a volunteer’s presence was at the station, whether they remained at KCC Live throughout my research, and how contactable they were if they left the station. This repeated informal ethnographic interview technique enabled me to conduct further interviews intermittently throughout the fieldwork, whenever I saw fit or, as was sometimes the case, when a young person requested to be interviewed. The reason for requesting to be interviewed, I was told, was the cathartic benefits of the interview process, allowing young people to vent repressed emotions, or to reflect on recent successes and achievements.

I conducted six semi-structured in-depth interviews with key stakeholders at KCC Live, including: station management and management from Knowsley Community College, where KCC Live is based (see Appendix 4 for participant information). I opted for a combination of purposive and snowball sampling. I used purposive sampling to recruit major players within KCC Live and the college, and I used a snowballing technique to recruit less visible interviewees (see Clapham et al., 2014),

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specifically former members of college management. Most interviews were conducted within empty classrooms at Knowsley Community College. Regarding former management, who considered it uncomfortable to encroach on college territory under new management, I organised interviews at a local café. Interviews typically lasted between one and one and a half hours.

These interviews functioned as a pocket of participation (Franks, 2011), as young people were involved in designing and refining interview questions for current station management (see Appendix 5), and the founders of KCC Live (see Appendix 6). This took the form of mental mapping sessions whereby volunteers came up with a series of questions that they thought would be suitable to ask, with the research objectives in mind. Before each stakeholder interview began, I explained the outline of the research project and the participants’ right to withdraw. Following Longhurst (2003), I asked questions in a friendly conversational tone, promoting a two-way exchange, as opposed to a stringent question and answer structure. All staff members were interviewed individually, with the exception of a joint feedback interview at the end of the research project, where I delivered recommendations to two members of KCC Live management and recorded their responses.

5.5 [Participatory] Focus Groups

Focus groups, characterised by interaction (Smithson, 2000), are valued for eliciting the views and experiences of young people (Morgan et al., 2002). In my research, the purpose of focus groups was to foster group discussions surrounding issues that had surfaced during individual interviews and my observations. This is important as “we are none of us self-contained, isolated, static entities; we are part of complex and overlapping social, familial and collegiate networks” (Kitzinger, 1994:117). Though discussions of the appropriate number of focus group members abound, I am in agreement with Krueger (1995) that six to eight participants is an effective size (see also Horner, 2000). I held two focus group sessions with volunteers; both focus groups contained seven participants. The focus groups were conducted within empty classrooms at Knowsley Community College. Each focus group lasted approximately one hour. I obtained written consent from all participants prior to conducting the focus groups. Further to this, at the start of the focus group sessions, I read a statement aloud explaining the format and nature of the sessions. I created an

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enjoyable atmosphere for participants by providing refreshments (food is seen as a popular incentive, Vromen and Collin, 2010), and emphasising the informality of the sessions.

Owing to the multiple participants in contrast to the sole researcher, focus groups can be characterised by a power imbalance (Smithson, 2000). I initially planned my role to be facilitator and to probe for explanation yet, during the first focus group, I noticed that certain young people were keen to adopt a key role in leading the discussions. I did not see this as problematic. See the following excerpt from the focus group session:

Robbie: You can still have community though because, okay maybe it is mainly older generations but when they live in a close [a residential street], and it’s, I think it’s sometimes people’s reluctance to go and knock on a door and say “hello”, I think that if you knocked on, yeah, if you knocked on most people’s doors and said “hiya I’m so and so from down the street” they’d be like “oh hiya how are you?”

Bruce: Do you think the media has anything to do with that? Making us scared of strangers?

Robbie: You see, when you said you used to play out, I think that like, stuff like with Jamie Bulger14, made people not want to let their kids out. Like when I was little, my parents would use to say “just go and play, just don’t go over the line”

(Robbie, 26 and Bruce, 25, focus group) Having noted young people’s desire to take the lead in asking questions, I implemented a participatory design into the second focus group through adopting a peer-led dimension, allowing the young people to ask the questions.

I trained the young people, through informal role-play examples, in asking questions to elicit rich data and in effective listening skills. However, I wish to mention that many of the young people already possessed skills in posing questions and listening, owing to their experience of interviewing music artists and bands. Therefore, whilst some authors (e.g. Kilpatrick et al., 2007; Lushy and Munro, 2014) find that peer researchers fail to probe for further information or to clarify issues, young people at KCC Live were particularly effective at this. One area of training that young people

14 _{James Patrick Bulger (known in the media as Jamie Bulger) was a two-year-old boy who}

disappeared from the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, while accompanying his mother. It was found that Bulger had been abducted, tortured and murdered by two ten-year-old boys.

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found useful was non-verbal cues (such as smiling and nodding to acknowledge what is being said). Since young people’s interviews with artists and bands often occurred via recorded telephone discussions, many young people were not conscious of the visual cues they were conveying or receiving. Thus, the young people became “learner researchers” (Byrne, et al., 2009:71) through this process.

A peer-led dimension to focus groups can remove the power differential between the researcher and the researched (Murray, 2006). Below, I provide an excerpt from the second focus group session to demonstrate an instance of the success of this participatory approach:

Harry: That’s where the Liverpool - Manchester rivalry comes from, like we have the docks, and that’s where we built all our money, and then Manchester built the Manchester shipping canal to steal some of our trade Robbie: Do you not think also though that we’ve lost this sense of community too because funding’s been cut for everything?

Harry: I think community’s actually getting a little bit stronger because of that, like do you remember when the libraries started shutting and people, people rallied. People rallied because like that’s when communities get together when they actually started to think wait a minute, we actually live here, this affects us, and it not only affects me but it affects my neighbour, and that’s when community happens I think, like lately community has felt a lot stronger and I actually believe that

(Harry, 24, and Robbie, 26, participatory focus group) I term this a participatory focus group as, dissimilarly to the peer-led focus groups that Murray (2006) discusses, I remained present. This was under the request of participants who asked that I monitored the session in case they went ‘off track’. I was a silent observer and only interjected to ensure an equilibrium of power within the group, or when asked to by the young people. I believe that my presence in this situation had no more of an impact than it did during my observant participations, and in line with Murray (2006), I found that the young people’s conversations during the focus group were of the same nature as those that I typically observed. Again, I recorded the focus group sessions using my mobile phone, aiming for an unobtrusive presence.

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5.5.1 Map-Labelling Exercise

I asked young people at KCC Live if they would like to take part in a map-labelling exercise of a Merseyrail map. Five young people opted into this, and the exercise was then undertaken within a focus group setting. A popular Liverpool social media account ‘Scouse Bird Problems’ previously posted a labelled Merseyrail network ‘map of the local area’. I used the same map and asked the young people to help me to label it. Although certain studies have used map drawing with young people (e.g. Literat, 2013; Ravn and Duff, 2015), I position map-labelling as a less onerous activity. This was particularly suited to my project as I was curious about young people’s thoughts on locations that were geographically mapped. My intention with this activity was to gauge young people’s conceptualisations of neighbouring towns and districts. As the young people were not concentrating their efforts on drawing, I found they engaged in lively debates. Within this task, I used “word association” (Sanderson and Thomas, 2014:1170), whereby I read out the names of different areas on the map, in turn, and asked the volunteers to discuss amongst themselves words that they associated with these places. I then asked the young people to work together to decide one key word that they associated with this place, which I then used to label the map. Though I have included this map within my findings (see Chapter Seven), I was most interested in the discussions that unfolded during the exercise.