Interview Protocol

The necessity of using long unstructured interviews has already been introduced, which combined with the wide diversity of interviewees18 made the use of a formal interview protocol impossible. However, a general approach to conducting the interviews was used, albeit one which required modification for each interviewee together with fine tuning and improvisation during the interview itself. This section uses excerpts from one interview to illustrate how the approach worked.

For the majority of interviewees I felt it likely that it would be difficult to persuade them to talk about their environmental values. To reduce this problem, a major objective of the early part of each interview was to make the interviewee feel comfortable with both the subject matter of the interview and me as the interviewer. All interviews therefore started with a topic I felt the subject would wish to talk about. This required advance research on my part to identify an appropriate topic, to acquire sufficient knowledge to be able to engage the subject in meaningful discussion, and in order to appear credible. This was evident in small interjections by me which pepper the transcripts. In the following excerpt I raise the topic of the power UK supermarkets wield in the food chain:

PQ: You are unusual aren’t you in Britain. Supermarkets have much more

power.

Brian: That’s right, that’s right. In Europe, you’ve got to do what the branded

people say. The manufacturers have far more power. And even.... and that’s especially true in America as well. Which is why [the US biotech industry] thought, oh well, we can treat the Europeans and certainly the British in the same way that we treat the American consumers.

For Brian, an interviewee from a food retailer, the choice of opening topic was obvious. He had been involved in the launch of a GM food which had been widely praised for the way in which it had been introduced, and the early part of the discussion revolved around the success of the product. Perhaps in this case, the approach was too obvious, and Brian himself pre-empts the move to the next topic:

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Brian: It’s earned it’s place on the shelves like everything else... Right, what

do you want to ask me really?! [laughs] I’ve told you my bit!

PQ: I’ve actually already touched on what is really the essence of what I’m

looking at. I’m interested in the way that the different groups and other similar debates actually engage with each other. It is a simplification, but it illustrates the point I want to make, is that the pro lobby, generally tend to use very scientific, very economic arguments - instrumental arguments, whereas the anti groups as I mentioned before tend to use different arguments: moral, ethical, emotional arguments, and because of that the two often fail to engage with each other. [...]

The next topic, outlined in the above extract was how the subject interacts with the different interest groups involved in the debate. This was used in most interviews as a way of introducing discussion about the agenda of environmentalists without straying from territory with which the interviewee would be familiar. In addition, as most participants had difficulty engaging with their opponents, this was often a topic of some interest to them. This section often yielded valuable insights into interviewees’ attitudes towards environmental issues and environmentalists, and provided much of the material used to describe how subjects justified their professional actions.

A method often used when it was felt appropriate was to introduce the notion of scientific uncertainty and of competing scientific claims to understand how the interviewee coped with the issue. The following comment is typical of the type of response this produced. Here, Brian sums up his favoured approach to the safety of GM food by making a distinction between proof of hazard and proof of safety:

PQ: [...] What I’m trying to probe is where you would draw the line [about

scientific uncertainty] . I’m not trying to say that I’m either for or against it. [lengthy discussion follows about instances of scientific uncertainty relating to food]

Brian: We need scientific evidence that the doubt exists. Put it that way round.

I then started to introduce more abstract topics, the first being the symbolic nature of the first GM food. The following is typical of exchanges on that theme:

PQ: What I think people like [NGO] are bothered about is that this whole issue

is completely hijacking the debate that they think should have happened before that. What direction do we go in with agriculture, because it is, after all, really important. How do you feel about that?

Brian: They’ve got a point in an ideal world. Unfortunately we don’t live in an

ideal world. We’ve got to deal with the real world. In an ideal world, you talk to our customers, they’d like to shop on the High Street, or in village shops, and traipse from the butcher to the baker to the greengrocer, and they certainly don’t want this wide choice of 30,000 products. So they’d like to go back to how

things were in the old days. Of course they wouldn’t. When it really comes to it, give them the chance, this is why we are successful. Because they want to be here. So do you honestly think that people are going to take part in a debate in this country, the masses, in this country, on what agricultural policy should be? Erm, there is no way.

Moving onto more abstract territory, the notion of ethics and professional activity was introduced, primarily by seizing upon material introduced by the interviewee:

PQ: OK.. Something else I’d like to talk about, you mentioned that you don’t

have an ethics committee.

Brian: If you talk to [name] they set up an outside crowd. PQ: A sort of ethical audit type thing?

Brian: Yes. Erm, because it’s more and more supplier based. That’s why we

don’t. Erm, we say to our suppliers, we want proof from you that you’re not employing child labour when picking the bananas in Ecuador.

PQ: So you do deal with it, Brian: Oh yes.

PQ: So what actually drives that. What would make you decide that you don’t

want to deal with child labour picking bananas wherever it is?

Brian: Erm, well it’s wrong. This not a good thing. PQ: But who decides that, do you decide that, or...

Moving on to the issue of the relationship between GM food and environmental values, a method which was often, though not always successful in eliciting responses was to talk about the importance of biodiversity. In this interview, Brian evaded all questions relating to his personal values, which he does in the following extract:

PQ: Going beyond that though, one of the things that’s been talked about with

GM foods, is whether or not it will increase or decrease biodiversity.

Brian: Yep.

PQ: Now I’m not a scientist, and I don’t really want to get into a big discussion

of the pros and cons of the different arguments, but do you think that that’s an important debate to have from a personal point of view?

Brian: Erm, yes, if we know enough. It’s like the all the people having a go,

shout at us from the outside, mostly because they haven’t got any of the information you’ve got. And therefore they go on what they get from reading the newspapers. I don’t know enough about biodiversity, really, erm... to... do other than say right, government is signed up to things like Montreal Protocol, and provided we as a company are not doing anything which breaches those agreements, then we’re doing “the right thing”,

Other topics used here included the reasons why one might wish to conserve Giant Pandas or Antarctic ecosystems which have no obvious use for humanity. Finally, all interviewees were asked whether they had environmental values, and if so how they would express them. In the following example, Brian is continuing to evade personal questions, and I am making one of several attempts

to persuade him to talk. It illustrates how the topic tended to be broached, and also how leading questions were sometimes used to draw subjects into topics they may have been reluctant to discuss - in this case without success.

PQ: But what I’m really trying to get out of this though, is your personal view

really, on why... I mean you’ve said that you have environmental values, why do you think things like that are important... I don’t know... consideration of future generations.... because you happen to like the countryside, because you have religious beliefs, there are any number of reasons why those things might be important.

Brian: Well, we’re a corporate member of the CPRE...

PQ: But I mean you as a person. I’m interested in you as a representative of

[company name]

Brian: Right.

PQ: But also you as an individual, because you are both of those things Brian: Yes.

The following section of transcript19 illustrates a successful attempt to persuade the interviewee to talk about their environmental values:

PQ: OK Moving on into even more abstract terrain, would you say on quite an

abstract level that you have environmental values?

Sally: What me personally? PQ: Mmm.

Sally: Yes, oh yes, I do.

PQ: How would you describe them? I know that is a bit of a big question. Sally: Well I think its consciousness of the natural environment really, and

your impact on the species and the plants and animals that are out there, so I would try and protect those if I could.

PQ: Why do you feel that way?

Sally: Well I think everything’s interconnected and that err if you do lose

species that it contributes to the general degradation of peoples lives and the quality of life and so you look back over hundreds of years and see what’s been lost, you would actually see quite a degradation because its happening on such a small scale, people don’t notice.

PQ: Do you mean because its happening so slowly.

Sally: Yes, people sort of get used to it and they adjust and they perhaps don’t

realise that perhaps there hasn't been the degradation in their environment when indeed there has.

The interviews then concluded with the interviewee being asked if there was anything they would like to say followed by a request for suggestions of other people I might interview.

In summary, the interviews generally started with a discussion of the subject’s professional work and moved on to talking about how they interacted with those holding opposing views before moving onto the more abstract territory at the

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heart of the project. These were introduced by considering the symbolic nature of the first GM food which led into linkages between ethics and professional action and the relationship between GM food and environmental issues. Finally, direct questions about environmental values were asked, both through the use of examples and in more abstract ways.

In this way, the interviews represented a gradual build-up to the topic of environmental values by introducing this abstract, possibly alien concept through the use of more familiar topics. These gave useful pointers towards effective ways of improvising an introduction to the topic in addition to providing detail of the structure of the subject’s arguments.