Interview

Interviewing was chosen in this study. Interview elicits rich responses from participants that reflect ‘a degree of reflectiveness, personal candour, and genuine talk’ (Converse and

135 Schuman, 1974, p. 1). According to Johnson and Turner (2003) using interview in a study allows me as a researcher to “probe the interviewee for clarity or for more detailed information when needed” (p. 305). Even though interviews allow researchers to gain more in-depth information, yet according to Paget (1999) interviews relate to content creation. In this instance, Paget argues that many researchers tend to standardise an interview’s content by deciding on the questions being asked (or not asked) and their sequence, as well as the types of questions (either open-ended or closed questions, probing or discontinuous questions).

However, it should be noted that the questions of ‘what’ and ‘how’ in an interview also relate to the purpose of the interview itself (Holstein and Gubrium, 1999). They further exert that since interviews could lead to potential bias and error, researchers should ask questions properly in order to get desired response from participants. One of the approaches to ensure that researchers only ask appropriate questions relating to a study is by preparing a set of interview questions beforehand and the questions would be asked according to certain order and manner as suggested by Sommer and Sommer (1997). In this study, a set of interview questions was prepared prior the interview (see Appendix 17 for details of the interview protocol).

In short, even though interview could be seen as a potentiall y manipulative115 way of getting desired information from participants, my stance is some direction is needed as long as it is conducted following ethical procedures. According to Rose (1945), an interviewer must be objective and honest while asking questions and taking down interview responses. In addition, he proposed that other than truthfulness and rapport with the interviewee(s), an interviewer might also need to ‘experiment verbally with the subject’ (p. 143). However, he asserted that verbal experimentation116 during interviews should be used sparingly. Rose (1945) contended that there are three instances in which a researcher as an interviewe r might need to use experimentation in interviews:

115

The word ‘manipulative’ might be too strong to be used. However, while conducting interviews in this study, I kept myself aware on the purposes of conducting interviews and thus, I restrained myself from asking questions which were not s tated or related in the interview protocol. However, I paraphrased the sentences in the interview protocol to suit with the flow of interview.

116

In verbal experimentation as suggested by Rose (1945), an interviewer might probe participants’ responses through giving out fact or information, or examples from personal experience or challenging participants’ responses by asking them to clarify or illustrate further such as by using sentences like ‘What do you mean by that?’ or ‘Is this what you mean?’.

136 First, if the researcher wants to explore a misunderstanding of information, giving the correct or factual information might reveal any change of response as well as clues on the misinformation that a participant might have.

Second, participant’s negative attitude or response might not be revealed directly and thus, by using examples from researcher’s personal experiences, for example might elicit full expression of attitudes that otherwise would be hi dden from the researcher.

Third, inconsistencies of statements could be challenging to be interpreted later on and thus, probing117 during interview is needed to find actual responses which should be obvious to the researcher.

Experimentation during interview was found to be effective in eliciting responses from teacher in public schools about role problems in a study by Becker (1954). From Becker’s (1954) study, it was found that participants were unwilling to give honest statement about aspects related to relationship with superiors or unfavourable events that they have experienced or exist in the school where they worked that could be seen as negative to the public. Therefore, as a researcher, it is pertinent to probe further using approaches like experimentation as suggested by Rose (1945) earlier. In his study, Becker illustrated that he “played dumb” in front of some participants who responded by giving general statements of a situation. Furthermore, he also asked participants to provide examples which allowed him to understand the hidden expression through their behavioural descriptions. However, it should be noted that such tactics could be possible if the interview is conducted face to face. In general, face to face interviews are more flexible in terms of its content (Singleton Jr. and Straits, 2001).

Therefore, in this study, taking into consideration the challenges in getting honest response from participants as well as a range of tactics that I could adopt as presented by Rose (1945) and Becker (1954) during interviews to elicit frank responses, I used face -to-face interviews. These allowed me to explore further the answers participants gave in the semi -structured questionnaire (open-ended questions) given prior to the interview session. The interview session began after the completion of answering the questionnaire. Other than that, using face-to-face interviews also allows me to answer questions by an interviewee to clarify a

117

In this study, when I probed for more detail responses from participants, I did not offer any theoretical information about giftedness to prompt responses from participants, rather I asked for further clarification by asking the participants to provide examples.

137 misunderstanding or to give him or her opportunity to make a request for any arising matter directly. For example, an interviewee did ask for a short break in an interview to perform prayer. I complied to her wish and after a 15 minutes break, the interview resumed.

In summary, an interview is not a perfect means of data collection. Its advantages and disadvantages are taken from Johnson and Turner (2003) which I took into consideration before deciding to use interview in my research as presented in Table 5.14.

Table 5.14: Advantages and disadvantages of interview

Advantages Disadvantages

Good for measuring attitudes and most other content of interest

Allow probing by the interviewer Can provide in-depth information Allow good interpretive validity

Useful for exploration and confirmation

In-person interviews expensive and time- consuming

Possible reactive and investigator effects Perceived anonymity by respondents possibly low

Data analysis sometimes time-consuming for open-ended items

Measures in need of validation (Adapated from Johnson and Turner, 2003)