Interview method

In order to go about explaining why interviews were an appropriate method for my research project, it will be useful to clarify what kind of interaction may be referred to as an interview. For Guber, casual interaction in the field may constitute an interview:

“Una entrevista puede consistir en un saludo de paso, con una breve indicación acerca de algo que acaba de suceder; en un encuentro concertado para conversar sobre tal o cual tema” (Guber 2004: 143)⁵⁶. Thus, many different types of exchange involving speech may constitute research data, and the particular nature of the interaction may be casual, formal, or somewhere in between: “The concept of

56 “an interview can consist of a passing greeting, with a brief indication about something which has just happened, in an arranged meeting to discuss a certain topic”.

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“interviewing” covers a lot of ground, from totally unstructured interactions, through semi structured situations, to highly formal interactions with respondents” (Bernard 2001: 156).

For Rubin and Rubin, qualitative interviews are particularly useful for eliciting “in-depth answers about culture, meanings, processes, and problems” (Rubin and Rubin 1995: 5). For Guber, the potential uses of interviews include learning about the past:

“la entrevista es una de las técnicas más apropriadas para acceder al universo de significaciones de los actores. Asimismo, la referencia a acciones, pasadas o presentse, de sí o de terceros, que no hayan sido atestiguadas por el investigador puede alcanzarse a través de la entrevista” (Guber 2004: 132)⁵⁷. This function of interviews was particularly useful for my research given that the narrative reconstruction of the past often came up in conversation.

Rubin and Rubin refer to the different types of qualitative interviews as being part of the same family, which differ in their approach but all reflect “the same philosophy of qualitative research: find out what others think and know, and avoid dominating your interviews by imposing your worlds on theirs” (Rubin and Rubin 1995: 5). Prior to conducting field research, I had explored qualitative interviewing methods and decided that, to fit my Grounded Theory approach, informal and semi-structured interviews would be most suitable for my research. Referring to both unstructured and semi-structured interviews, Flowerdew and Martin explain that these formats are:

“sensitive and people-oriented, allowing interviewees to construct their own accounts of their experiences by describing and explaining their lives in their own words” (Flowerdew and Martin, 2005: 111). Due to the flexibility allowed by informal interviewing, these techniques were especially useful during the early stages of the

57 “the interview is one of the most appropriate techniques for accessing the actors’ universes of meaning. Likewise, the mention of actions past or present by one’s self or by others, that haven’t been witnessed by the investigator can be reached through the interview” (Guber 2004: 132).

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project so that I could encourage the interviewers to communicate to me what is most important to them.

3.7.1 Focus groups

Towards the end of my fieldwork, when community relations staff employed by an Australian owned mining concession on Checa lands arrived to carry out a

sociological survey of both the Checa and Concha communities, mining and the detrimental effects of extractive industries became an ever-increasing topic of conversation (at least people seemed to talk about it with me). During this time I organised two separate focus groups, one for women and one for both women and men. My reasoning behind holding one session specifically for women was based on the fact that group discussions in the irrigation and community meetings I had attended in San Damián were consistently dominated by men and it is rare for

women to express opinion in front of a group. Although the second focus group was open to both men and women, only women attended. A conversation that took place during the second focus group made its way into this thesis in Chapter 6, when a small turnout meant that the two participants had a long conversation, with myself interjecting only occasionally. A rich narrative wherein a young girl is harmed by a malicious spring unfolded and I also had the opportunity to ask questions about the materiality of water beings in the on-going conversation.

During the focus group one of the participants posed the first question by raising concerns about the exploitation and resource destruction of Andean communities by foreign-owned mining corporations. I was ill prepared to answer this question, which was directed specifically towards me. That was not the first time I had been asked questions about the exploitative nature of foreign-owned mining companies in San Damián. Development projects and the historically rooted unequal power

relationships upon which mining projects in particular are based, emerged as another relevant theme during the research, particularly following the arrival of the

community relations team.

89 3.7.2 Informal interviews

Agar explains the nature of informal interviews, and the benefits of this method: “It’s called ‘informal’ for a variety of reasons. First, you don’t have a written list of

questions. Rather, you have a repertoire of question-asking strategies from which you draw as the moment seems appropriate” (Agar 1996: 140). This strategy sums up the majority of my interview experiences, which were carried out on the street, in fields, in rituals et cetera. As Agar explains, informal interviews happen “in many different situations besides a one-on-one isolated talk. You might ask informal questions while working with an informant on a harvest…if used with tact, the

strategies in this section can add to your ability to give accounts while doing minimal harm to the natural flow of events into which your questions intrude” (Agar 1996:

140). Informal interviews allowed me to have a lesser degree of involvement in the flow of conversations and open-ended interviews with no pre-arranged topic or format allowed me to explore issues of the interviewee’s interests and relevance. As stated earlier, these oral narratives quite naturally came up in conversation.

The regular kinds of informal interviews I sought included asking shopkeepers’ advice on offerings to take to rituals, talking about the weather, asking people which barrio they were from, and in the rainy season, asking people if they’d seen that day’s rainbows. Strategies I employed to elicit further expansion of topics brought up during conversation included repeating the final words of collaborators’ sentences, remaining silent, offering an affirmative ‘ya’ or ‘mmm’, nodding and asking open ended questions geared at expanding upon issues which struck my interest. I found informal interviews to be highly intensive experiences, where I sought to synthesise the newly gained information with the data I’d already collected, and simultaneously to formulate questions according to what I was being told in that instance. For this reason, semi structured interviews geared at addressing specific questions were not as useful an approach as informal encounters. I found it more fruitful to keep

conversations dynamic, eliciting more information using the above techniques if significant themes such as culture change or barrio identity came up.

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