Interviewing as a Research Method

While interviews were not the only method I used in my research, they were the central form of data collection in my research, starting with student views on experiences that influenced their CT, and moving onto instructor/administrator views on how they develop CT.

Regardless of criticisms of interview research (discussed below), doing social research without interviews would be tantamount to not "taking account of the way actors interpret and thus understand their worlds" which would remove the meaning from one's sociological explanation, and imply that humans' reasons for their behaviour are irrelevant, "thus assuming a way of seeing which reduces human beings to the role of ‘unwitting dupes’ of structural forces beyond their comprehension and influence" (Scott 1996b, p. 67). Having said this, interview data cannot be considered an infallible source of information (Hammersley, 2003).

In trying to understand experiences that develop CT, neither correlational research, nor

observation (of social interaction or even analysis of written texts) would have given insight into how any experience worked in practice to develop CT for each individual student. Instead, I chose to use interviews to try to understand how students perceived the development of their CT, and then later to understand how faculty/administrators perceived their own efforts to develop CT. These interviews therefore provide insight into the meaning-making of the interviewees (Hammersley 2003), to the extent that they were conscious of it, and willing to share it with me during the interview.

There are different approaches to interviewing depending on one's paradigm (Scott, 1996b) and research question, and one can differentiate among them along several continua regarding (Kvale, 1996 cited in Cohen et al., 2000): degrees of structure, whether they are more exploratory or hypothesis-testing, whether descriptive or interpretive, and whether they have a cognitive or an emotional focus. In general, positivists are likely to focus on hypothesis-testing and use more structured interviews than interpretive researchers (Scott, 1996b). Interview data can be used for a variety of purposes, including "source of witness accounts of the social world", "source of self- analysis" for the interviewee, as "indirect source of evidence about informants' attitudes and perspectives" (which assumes the interview data can be reapplied in different contexts and times), and as conversational data itself to be analyzed (Hammersley, 2003, p. 120) - sometimes the researcher uses interviews for a combination of these purposes.

As a researcher coming from a largely interpretive paradigm, I chose to conduct semi-structured qualitative interviews, during which knowledge was built constructively between the participants and me, as I probed their answers to understand them more fully. The student interviews were more structured than the faculty/admin interviews as I wished to cover different aspects of CT (see next section) with each student. Follow-up questions, however, depended upon the response, and aimed to probe for further details. Faculty/administrator interviews were much less

structured, and more conversational, and often important points in the interview guide were covered by the interviewee without my prompting. In all my interviews, I occasionally referred to situations/experiences common between the interviewee and myself, asking them to elaborate further on those experiences. There were also some situations where I shared personal

information (e.g. to tell students something about how I was a student) in order to encourage the interviewee to give more details.23By bringing in such situations, I helped bridge the interviewee's thinking beyond the immediate situation, widening the contexts the interviewee could reflect upon (in an attempt to partially address one of the criticisms of interview data as representing reality that may not extend to other contexts/times Hammersley, 2003, more below).

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This approach to interviewing could be seen as a way of reducing the "power" of the interviewer, and increasing reciprocity (as the interviewee also learned something about me), but could be critiqued as manipulative in the sense of trying to persuade the interviewee to give more information by making the interview seem more conversational. Given that the subject matter of my interviews was not likely to harm the participants in any obvious way, and that these sharings were spontaneous rather than premeditated, I felt they were justified in order to encourage interviewees to talk with less inhibition.

Interviews, however, do not give the researcher direct contact with reality, but only entry into the way the interviewee perceives reality at a certain point in time. It is "not possible to access the 'authentic' self of research participants" (Roulston, 2010, p. 207). One needs to recognize that the interviewee's views of reality may be different from how others would see it (Walford, 2007, cited in Roulston, 2010); s/he may be unconscious of certain conditions and motivations influencing their behaviour, as well as unintended consequences (Bhaskar, cited in Cohen et al., 2000), and therefore be unable to articulate them in an interview. This is not to say that human beings are completely controlled by external factors, but that we must recognize that they are also not completely free social agents, (Giddens, 1994, cited in Cohen et al., 2000) nor are their reflections on their actions necessarily the only possible interpretations. It is always a possibility that

interviewees would willingly choose to misinform, evade, lie, or pretend (Roulston, 2010), or even unintentionally mislead the interviewer, for example because of faulty memory (Walford, 2007, cited in Roulston, 2010). Moreover, everyone's perceptions can change with time and

circumstance (Walford, 2007, cited in Roulston, 2010), and is shaped by background assumptions and biases (Hammersley, 2003). All of these critiques of interviewing do not discount the potential value of interviews, but provide cautions for researchers to use such data critically, and not to rely too heavily on them as the sole source of data (Hammersley, 2003).

There are also some ethical issues with interpretive interviewing which Roulston (2010) calls "romantic": the conversational tone may hide inequalities in power between

interviewer/interviewee; and researchers may be able to manipulate the interviewee while they are in confession mode.

Some of the measures for improving quality of qualitative interviews are similar to those already mentioned previously (section 4.6), such as triangulation of methods and participants, using multiple interviews with each participants, member checking, prolonged field engagement, and researcher reflexivity and openness about subjectivity and research process (Roulston, 2010). In my research, I tried to interview a diverse sample of students, instructors, and administrators, in order to gain insights into different viewpoints within AUC. The diversity in this sample works towards achieving what Gadamer (1975, cited in Usher 1996) calls a "fusion of horizons", which results from "intersubjective agreement where different and conflicting interpretations are

harmonised" (Usher 1996 p. 21). The different views that resulted from the diversity of individuals allowed me to compare their experiences and perceptions in order to gain and present a fuller picture of the variety of experiences available at AUC. Recognizing, however, that individual perceptions are partial, I tried to gain further insights by supplementing interview data with observational data and additional documentation, as well as other published and unpublished research conducted at AUC. In some cases, I returned to interviewees for further elaboration, though this was not done with all participants. I used member checking with instructors, but not students. Prolonged engagement with the field is one of the strengths of conducting research as an insider to AUC. I have also tried throughout this thesis to be reflexive and open about my research process, trying to bring out elements of my own and interviewees' positionality and background assumptions.

As mentioned, I conducted my interviews in a semi-structured manner, and because CT was the central topic to be discussed in the interviews, I chose to provide a detailed conception of what CT entails, in order to use it in the interviews. This framework is shared below, before details of my research design are shared.