Interviewing

Both researchers and interviewees can have multiple intentions and desires, some of which are known and some of which are not (Scheurich, 1995). In keeping with the idea of rhizomatic interactions, Scheurich (1997) describes how human interaction and meaning are neither unitary nor teleological. Instead, interactions and meaning are “a shifting carnival of ambiguous

complexity, a moving feast of differences interrupting differences” (Scheurich, 1997, p. 66). This suggests that questions can mean different things to the researcher and interviewees and can change over time or situations. As discussed in the previous chapters, the student and teacher interviews in this research do not purvey truths but rather are produced truths which are filtered through the research process. This “moving feast” (Scheurich, 1995, p. 243) offers a discursive rhizome for contemplation.

The postpositivist interview process has been described as “a conversation with a purpose” (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 268) that aims to “access the perspective of the person being interviewed” (Patton, 1990, p. 278). Scheurich (1997) challenges an unproblematic view of conventional interviewing that is based on modernist assumptions for it underestimates the complexity of one-to-one human interactions. He suggests that in conventional interview research the researcher is situated as omniscient.

…as a kind of god who consciously knows what she/he is doing, who (if properly trained) can clearly communicate meanings to another person, and who can derive the hidden but recoverable meanings within the interview to support an abstract generalization.” (Scheurich (1997, p. 64)

This purpose of gaining essentialist ‘meaning’ can be identified in Kvale’s (1996) summary of six best ‘practice criteria’ which can be used for judging the quality of an interview and are frequently recommended in methodological literature.

• The extent of spontaneous, rich, specific, and relevant answers from the interviewee.

• The shorter the interviewer’s questions and the longer the subjects’ answers, the better.

• The degree to which the interviewer follows up and clarifies the meanings of the relevant aspects of the answers.

• The ideal interview is to a large extent interpreted throughout the interview.

• The interviewer attempts to verify his or her interpretations of the subjects’ answers in the course of the interview.

• The interview is ‘self-communicating’ – it is a story contained in itself that hardly requires much extra descriptions and explanations. (Kvale, 1996, p. 145)

The criteria identified by Kvale require researchers to “centre the subject” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 735). In their research interviews Mazzei and Jackson (2013) resist searching for coherent narratives that represent truth from a centred subject. They acknowledge and accept the centeredness of interviewing practices and work both within and against a project they consider is failed from the start. Rather than give up on the concept of the interview as a method, they are explicit the specific assumptions that they make about data, voice and truth and, instead, work the limits of such practices.

[W]e accept in our research and in the conversations with the women in this study that the data is partial, incomplete, and is always in a process of a retelling and remembering. The methodological implications of this view is that we as researchers question what we ask of data as told by participants, question what we hear and how we hear (our own privilege and authority in listening and telling), and deconstruct why one story is told and not another (Alcoff, 1991). (Mazzei & Jackson, 2013, p. 262)

Language “is not bounded or stable; it is persistently slippery, unstable, and ambiguous from person to person, from situation to situation, from time to time” (Scheurich, 1995, p. 240). Comprising more than language, interview data is not limited to spoken words and may encompass inhabited silences (Mazzei, 2013). Rather than pinning interview data down to establish ‘truth,’ this study takes a poststructural approach to interviewing. This view recognises that individuals are constituted and reconstituted through the various discursive practices in which they participate (Davies & Harré, 1990) and have a vested interest in seeing themselves as coherent selves that have continuity over time (Wright, 2003). Interview texts become dynamic constructions of these subjectivities – both the interviewer's and the interviewee's, and as such they can reveal how individuals discursively constitute particular kinds of

subjectivities through their choices of language (Wright 2003). Discursive practices themselves need to be part of a reflexive consideration in relation to the ‘truths’ that are generated (Frankham & Edwards-Kerr, 2009). Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghaill (2006) contend that researchers need to be reflexively aware of how epistemologies may implicitly produce versions of reality rather than being mirrors or devices to access reality.

As interview data is influenced by “participants’ perceptions of the situation, the research focus, interview questions, likely audience and interpretation, as well as the structural constraints they face and their personal values and biographies,” there is no such thing as an “unmediated voice” (Alldred & Burman, 2005, p. 181). For Scheurich (1995), both researcher and interviewee/s bring “a plethora of baggage” (p. 249) to the interpretive moment of the

research process. It is important to recognise “the radical, indeterminate

ambiguity or openness that lies at the heart of the interview interaction itself, at the lived intersection of language, meaning and communication” (Scheurich, 1995, p. 249). For this reason poststructural researchers strive to recognise and name some of this discursive ‘baggage’ (e.g. epistemological orientation, social positionality etc) although these orientations can be both conscious and

unconscious. Of course analysis of this baggage is necessarily mediated by the researcher’s own discursive orientations or baggage. Furthermore, Scheurich considers that terminology is irrelevant; whether we call the process an

‘interview,’ a ‘conversation’ or ‘storytelling,’ what is important is what we believe about what occurs during this interaction. He emphasises the

importance for researchers of going further than introducing the indeterminance of interviewing and then proceeding to name ‘reality.’ In the interviews and in my interpretation of them I have strove to allow for the “shifting openness within the interview itself” (Scheurich, 1995, p. 250). Mazzei (2009) utilises the Deleuzian notion of a crack to illustrate how researchers can listen at the limit to hear what they do not anticipate and rupture what is knowable and askable. I turn a focus not on what is evident but a return to Deleuze’s notion of the crack … It is this imperceptible crack through which the destabilized and silent voices slip. A listening at the limit then does not ignore the hairline fractures, but notices the pain and uncomfortableness present within them. (Mazzei, 2009, p. 55)

Writing about interviewing in posthumanist research, Mazzei (2013) highlights how human agency can be seen as entanglement as “voice” cannot be thought of as existing separately from the milieu in which it exists. Drawing from Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology she contends that there is no present, conscious, coherent individual, “no participant in an interview study to which a single voice can be linked – all are entangled” (p. 734). This non-essentialist notion of entanglement poses a challenge to interpretive contentions of what comprises quality in regard to interviewing practices. In this study while the voices of the participants are foregrounded in the analysis – they are simultaneously

entangled with others, the researcher’s included.

Roulston (2010) observes that discussions of ‘quality’ in interviewing, encompass how interview questions are asked in practice, how studies are designed and conducted, and how interviewing as a method fits with the underlying theoretical and epistemological assumptions about knowledge production. She cites four inter-related facets of research that have emerged from the methodological literature on qualitative interviewing:

“whether (1) the use of interview data is an appropriate means to inform the research questions posed; (2) the interaction facilitated by

interviewers within the actual interview generated ‘quality’ data – for example, interviewers asked questions in effective ways to elicit the data required to respond to research questions, and both speakers adequately understood one another’s intended meanings; (3) ‘quality’ has been addressed in research design, the conduct of the research project, and the analysis, interpretation and representation of research findings; and (4) the methods and strategies used to demonstrate the quality of interpretations and representations of data are consistent with the theoretical underpinnings for the study.” (Roulston, 2010, p. 202) The first element is addressed in my research design with the interview data adding detail to and enriching the assemblage of discourses. In regard to the second element, I turn away from liberal humanist approach to align this study with St. Pierre’s response to “The Call for Intelligibility in Postmodern

Educational Research” (St. Pierre, 2000b) where she advocates the shift from an insistence on ‘meaning’ to an investigation of where research goes and what it does there. Likewise, Mazzei (2013) connects her approach to interviewing with a Deleuzo-Guattarian emphasis on knowing how things work and what they produce rather than producing meaning. Roulston’s (2010) third and fourth elements are important to this study, in that the research methods align with the study’s epistemology and importance has been placed on the quality of analysis, interpretation and data representation.