Focus Groups and Group Interviews
5.3 Interviewer-Interviewee Interaction in my Focus Group Interviews
As interviewer - in my role as teacher-researcher interviewing my own learners - 1 cannot claim to be objective. 1 am just as much part of the data as the learners are. Within this context, it is useful to remember Rubin and Rubin's (1995: 22) advice:
Qualitative interviewing does not require you to drop your own cultural values and assume those of your interviewees, but it does require you to be self-aware. When interviewing, keep in mind that your cultural assumptions might affect what you ask.
(Rubin and Rubin, 1995: 22)
Due to this positioning as both active interview participant and listener I have to be aware of my own assumptions and values. Stake also (1995: 103) addresses the role of the researcher in general:
But perhaps the most important choice is how much will the researcher be him- or herself? Much of the time, the researcher will have no apparent choice, the circumstances require it, or the researcher does not know how to act otherwise. Often, the researcher will be pressured to be more the evaluator, the scientist, or the therapist than he or she wants to be. Others will help to negotiate the role. The role should be an ethical choice, an honest choice.
(Stake, 1995: 103)
The question to ask in relation to my research is how much was I as interviewer the teacher-researcher or - to split these roles up - how much was I the teacher and how much was I the researcher? In simplistic terms, I was acting as a researcher. However, for my interviewees I was still their teacher who had been teaching them two hours earlier. In some interviews 1 would feel more like a researcher and in others more like a teacher. As outiined before, my roles as teacher-researcher overlapped. The hierarchical relationship between myself as teacher-researcher and my learners as well as among learners cannot be denied, but it can be alleviated by being aware as researcher of my biases and the constraints of my research environment. Rubin and Rubin (1995: 14) describe these biases in the following terms:
Part of the philosophy of qualitative interviewing is that interviewees and interviewers are both individuals, with emotions and interests and biases that affect how the research is done. Personal involvement is a great strength of the methodology, but it also creates problems that must be addressed. An interviewer has to be sensitive to his or her own biases, to the social and intellectual baggage he or she brings to the interview.
(Rubin and Rubin, 1995: 14)
It is also not only the interviewer who brings his or her own biases to the interview, but it is equally the interviewees who bring their social and intellectual biases to the interviews. Their willingness to contribute during the interviews is closely related to the events of the day or the week. they feel they have had a bad lesson, the process and the outcome of the interview can reflect these kinds of lessons. These reflections can consist of unwillingness to cooperate during interviews, carrying arguments from the classroom into the interviews, being about their learning experiences, refusing to listen to other learners, listening carefully to other learners and reacting to others' theories by adding another layer of 'thick description' (Rubin and Rubin, 1995: 56). Also, just as my research has influenced my teaching, the interviews have been carried back into the BFC classroom by some of the interviewees as I will illustrate in the following section.
So far, 1 have focused mainly on my role as teacher-researcher who interviews some of his learners. Interviewing some of my learners is slightly problematic, since the hierarchical teacher-learner relationship does not fail to exist in the focus group interviews. At the same time, it is crucial to find out about some learners' perceptions in order to get to a clearer understanding of BFC classroom interaction. Additionally, it is important to remember that my interviewees were year olds at the time. general terms, 1 am faced as teacher-researcher interviewing some of my learners with a tension that is both due to the teacher-learner relationship and to the age of the interviewees. and Haw (2000: 16) address this tension:
Professionals [...] are left to struggle with the tension between recognising that young people may hold certain views because of a lack of 'experience' or 'maturity' as well as because they have unique insights.
(Hadfield and Haw, 2000: 16)
It is difficult to judge if I was able as interviewer to differentiate clearly between 'lack of "experience" or "maturity"' and interviewees' 'unique insights', since knowing my interviewees from our BFC classroom may have influenced me both favourably or unfavourably. However, it is clear that 'the views of young people are significant because of the immediacy of their experiences.' (Hadfield and Haw, 2000: 16)
Apart from being a means for collecting my research data including some of my learners' 'voices' is crucial for the following reasons:
• Because the interviewees may benefit personally, • Because the interviewees have a right to be heard,
• Because the interviewees have a unique perspective or ability to effect (adapted from Hadfield and Haw, 2000: 8)
More closely related to researching interaction in my BFC classroom giving some of my learners a 'voice' is important because being interviewed has allowed my interviewees to explore BFC classroom interaction in terms of relationships. Britzman (1991: 15) comments on this as follows:
Voice suggests relationships: the individual's relationship to the meaning of her/his experience and hence, to language, and the individual's relationship to the other, since understanding is a social process.
(Britzman, 1991: 15)
The relationships that I have explored through my interviews focus on classroom interaction and implicitiy include:
• Teacher-learner relationships, • Relationships between learners,
• Relationships between learners and lesson content.
Exploring these relationships through Focus Group Interviews has allowed me to establish a 'thick description' (Rubin and Rubin, 1995: 56) of interaction in my BFC classroom.
In order to examine in more detail these layers of 'thick description' (Rubin and Rubin, 1995: 56) that are specific to my research and reflect the various participants' 'voices.' I discuss my use of focus group interviews through my related diary entries in the following section.