Interview

Interviews are chosen as a main research method in order to investigate how play is perceived by kindergarten practitioners, in that it enables researchers to have access to interviewees’ views, experiences, emotions, perceptions and meanings, and to get unique, non-standardized, personalized information in greater depth (Cohen et al., 2007). In the relevant studies of teachers’ perceptions of play, researchers either make use of questionnaires (Dako-Gyeke, 2009) or interview (Badzis, 2003; Bennett et al., 1997; Rogers, 2000; Shen, 2008) to address the problem. According to Dako-Gyeke (2009), the reason that she selects the questionnaire rather than interview to gather information about teachers’ beliefs concerning play is that questionnaires are not only efficient for describing the characteristics of a large population by collecting data from a larger size sample, but also an economical method. However, questionnaires also have some shortcomings. The main defect is that it sometimes leads to misunderstandings on the part of respondents, since the same questions may have different meanings for different people, and more importantly, the researcher cannot give timely explanations to the respondents when this problem occurs (Cohen et al., 2007). In contrast to the questionnaire, the interview is regarded as a higher response research method, and participants tend to be more involved, motivated and say more about the research in interviewing than using a questionnaire. Moreover, the interview allows researchers to ask difficult and open-ended questions and in an in-depth manner to understand how human beings view the world (Oppenheim, 1992; Fontana & Frey, 2000). Furthermore, the interview is considered as a suitable technique to use when carrying out intensive studies of a group of selected individuals (Merriam, 1998) and it is often deemed as the best available means for accessing participants’ opinions, beliefs, values, views,

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perceptions, understandings, interpretations and experiences (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004; Mason, 2002). It enables respondents to express their own opinions in their own terms. Because of the above-mentioned features, the interview is considered more appropriate than the questionnaire for my research. Thus, I decided to employ interviews to access teachers’ views on the value of play, the effectiveness of play in achieving their teaching goals and their role in play; how they decide whether or not to be involved in play; and aspects that may influence their implementation of play. Nevertheless, the interview approach is time-consuming in terms of collecting and analyzing data. Moreover, it is prone to interviewer bias (Cohen et al., 2007). This shortcoming may be eliminated by combining it with other research tools (Yin, 2009; Merriam, 1998). Therefore, I resolved to adopt interviews in conjunction with observation, so as to minimize bias and to offer a more holistic interpretation of play in Chinese kindergartens.

4.1.2.1.1 Relevant issues of interview

The first crucial decision about interviews is to decide which type of interview to use in the current study. There are different types of interview, defined by researchers according to different criteria in the literature, such as informal conversational interview, interview guide approaches, standardized open-ended interview, closed quantitative interview (Patton, 1990), group interview (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007), structured interview, semi-structured interview, non-directive interview, focused interview (Gray, 2009), face-to-face interview, telephone interview, one-to-one interview, and group interview (Robson, 2002) etc.. These different types of interview are adapted to fit to the specific research purpose and can be employed at different stages of the same study (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). The purpose of my research is to understand teachers’ views of play and their experience, and to explain how they apply play to kindergarten routines in certain ways. In order to achieve this, it was thought to be preferable for me to interview teachers first, to ascertain their personal perception of play before observing their actual practice. After the observation, I needed to interview the teachers again to obtain a deep understanding of their account for specific play-based practice. Compared to group interviews, a one-to-one interview would probably enable teachers to give sufficient personal explanations to their beliefs, experiences, and behavior.

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Moreover, a face-to-face interview would probably make teachers feel comfortable in expressing their ideas through eye contact with the researcher, in contrast to a telephone interview. In addition, a less structured interview such as the open-ended or semi-structured interview would probably provide much more information and deeper interpretation of the ways in which teachers translate play in class teaching, rather than a highly structured interview.

Based on the research purpose of my study and the characteristics of different interviews, I decided to adopt three types of interview drawn on by Cheng (2001) in her case study of exploring Hong Kong early childhood practitioners’ experience of the implementation of a play-based pedagogy. The three types of interview, namely pre-observation interview, stimulated recall interview, and post-observation interview (Cheng, 2001; Cheng & Stimpson, 2004) are all face-to-face individual interview. As Schon (1995) suggested, a teacher’s personal practical knowledge is guided by his or her own theories-in-use or theory of actions. These theories can be revealed only through reflection and observation. Stimulated recall interview and post-observation interview have been considered to be effective to trigger reflection, as they “facilitate retrospective verbalization of thought processes that occur simultaneously with some recorded overt behavior” (Cheng & Stimpson, 2004, p.342). They are often utilized to “tap practitioners’ decision-making in situations of teacher interaction with children in classrooms” (ibid). In this sense, the pre-observation interview allowed me to access kindergarten teachers’ general ideas of play, while stimulated recall interview and post-observation interview enabled me to explore in great depth of teachers’ personal theories of action through facilitating their reflection on action. Thus these three kinds of interview are considered suitable for my research.

Pre and post-observation interviews, as the names indicate, were conducted respectively before and after the observations of classroom practice with individual teachers. Stimulated recall interviews were carried out at two different times. Firstly, I resolved to conduct these as informal conversations with the observed-teacher immediately after I observed certain play activity in classroom, allowing the teacher to explain in some depth what took place in

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the class. Secondly, I planned to interview teachers after each of them had watched certain audio-visual recorded play episode of classroom observation.

Among the above-mentioned interviews, the pre and post-observation interviews were designed as semi-structured ones, in which I was guided by a prepared list of exploring questions, but also had the opportunity to probe beyond the interview schedule (Merriam, 1998). This exercise enabled interviewees to express their viewpoints in a relatively open situation (Flick, 1998) and allowed me and interviewees to develop unexpected themes (Mason, 2002). The stimulated recall interview was designed in the form of a less structured interview, for it had great flexibility, and allowed interviewees to say what they wanted. It was assumed that through these interviews which would take place in sequence in different stages of the study, kindergarten teachers’ views of play and the explanation behind their real practice of application of play could be understood in greater depth.

An interview schedule (see Appendix A and B) for the pre and post observation interviews and the stimulated recall interviews was designed to help me to organize my thoughts on questions and successfully go over the purpose of the study with the interviewee (Creswell, 2007). Interviews were recorded using audio recording equipment, with teachers’ permission, as this enabled me to concentrate more on what was said, so as to maintain good eye contact with interviewees, to “capture a good deal of the interviewees’ intonation, voice quality, hesitations, self-corrections” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004, p.199). Additionally, it could assist me to ensure the integrity of the data and to support further analysis (Merriam, 1998).