Interviews

Interviewing, according to Holloway (2005: 39), is the most commonly used data collection method in qualitative studies. This is because, through interviews, the participants are given a chance to describe their own experiences and views of the world. Burgess (1984: 102) refers to an interview as a ―conversation with a purpose‖. The main aim of using interviews in qualitative research, according to Kvale and Brinkmann (2009: 1), is to enrich and capture explanations about participants‘ lived experiences before the researcher draws any conclusions. This means that the participant is very important in this kind of inquiry. To emphasize the role of the participant as the source of information during the interviews, Holloway (2005: 39) observes that ―the aim of the interview is to capture the participant‘s own words, their thoughts, perceptions, feelings and experiences‖. However, as Talmy (2010: 16) argues, themes uncovered through interview data are co-constructed by the researcher in interaction, and constitute not only ―talk about Identity‖ but also the performance of identity. I thus view my interviews as not simply giving my insight into the identities of the speakers; rather, I am aware of the fact that interviews become another space where individuals could perform identities. I conducted two types of interviews: individual interviews and focus group discussions. I used an interview guide during both types of interviews. This guide was an outline of the different topics and themes that I needed to investigate and these were helpful in probing for responses, especially during the focus group discussions.

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4.7.3.1. Individual interviews

A total of 50 individual interviews were conducted (see section 4.6 for the details on composition and selection of participants). These interviews had both structured and semi- structured parts. The interviews were used to collect data on the participants‘ identities, attitudes and perceptions towards their own language and the other language(s) with which they are in close contact, and the social interactions in which they engage in their various networks, both within and outside their communities. According to Milroy (1980), social networks can be used to account for variability in individual linguistic behavior in the communities. In this study, I thus asked about such social networks in order to discover with which different people the participants interact and to examine the effects that such interactions have on the construction of linguistic identities.

Once the local leaders introduced me to the participants, they ceased to be involved in the study; they did not sit in on any interviews. Some interviews were held in one homestead.16 Here, I interviewed some members of that homestead and others from neighboring homes. The other individual interviews were conducted in individual homes, in a convenient place inside or outside the house, as found for us by the person to be interviewed. This sometimes came with challenges as the participants obviously had various activities to perform throughout the day. Some participants needed to do household chores or grocery shopping or had to collect children from school. In an attempt to limit our interviews being interrupted by the above responsibilities that the participants had, I informed them beforehand of the day and time that I would prefer to visit them and checked whether this would suit them. This then gave the participants the opportunity to schedule their day accordingly.

On the Kenyan side of the border, there was one incidence in which I was busy interviewing a participant when the head of the household, his two sons and their wives arrived home together with two friends. They listened to a part of the interview, and became interested in the study. So after the interview, I explained to them the aim of the study, gave consent forms to those who could read, and explained the content of the consent form to those who could not read. They all signed the consent form and we started a group discussion.

16

In the Samia community, a father and his sons share a compound. When the sons get married, they set up home with the father. This means that a particular home can actually consist of many ‗homes‘, each with its own head but all with one overall head, the father.

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I conducted all interviews in Lusamia as I was dealing with people in the rural areas of Busia town, of whom few were educated (and, in the Samia communities, being educated is equated with, amongst others, the ability to speak English well). However, a small number of the participants could speak English, and there was Lusamia-English code switching during such interviews.

4.7.3.2. Focus group discussions

According to Stewart, Shamdasani and Rook (2007: 51), focus group discussions are conducted ―to obtain specific types of information from a clearly identified set of individuals‖. To follow up on the individual interviews, the same participants were organized into groups of between 10 and 12, and focus group discussions were held with the help of an interview guide. After the individual interviews, I would inform those participants I felt would contribute much to the group discussions that I would be calling them yet again to enquire about their willingness to take part in another interview, but this time in a group setting. Those participants who accepted were then later informed of the day, time and venue of the group interview, most of the time through their local leaders or friends.

According to Flick (2008), there are various ways of constituting focus groups. One thereof is to select participants who know each other or are related in some way (other than being involved in the same research study). Another is to select participants who do not know each other, who have never met and may not even do so again after the focus group discussion. The participants in the focus group discussions in the present study were a mixture of what Flick (2008) describes: some knew each other beforehand; others first met during the discussion. However, Holloway (2005) partly disagrees with Flick (2008) on the issue of selecting participants who already know each other, on grounds that although members of a focus group [should] share common experiences, they do not have to know each other. Four of the groups that I constituted consisted of people from only one side of the border and the fifth had a mixture of people from both sides of the border. Some participants in the latter group reserved comments and hesitated a lot before speaking (unlike in the case of the same- country groups), perhaps because they did not feel very free to air their views as they did not know many of the other group members. The hesitation by some of the members of the mixed group indicated to me something about group dynamics and identity. It thus seemed that following Flick's (2008) recommendation rather than that of Holloway (2005) was beneficial in the case of this study.

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The focus groups took the form of unstructured interviews. According to Clark (2013: 171), ―an unstructured interview can be more free-flowing and not tied to answering specific questions. This can help the researcher to gather more information than that obtained in the individual structured or semi-structured interview‖. However, Clark (2013) notes that the unstructured interview has the disadvantage of the participants deviating or the researcher being carried away and losing sight of the objectives of the discussion. To counter that, I had some questions ready to assist me in bringing back the discussion to the main points of focus, but not so many that the interviews would be classified as semi-structured. The interviews were recorded using a digital audio recorder to save the time that online transcription would have taken and to enhance the accuracy of the information, as Creswell and Plano (2011) advise. These free discussions enabled me to obtain more, rich and varied data to supplement that obtained from the individual interviews. However, conducting group interviews is not a data collection method without limitations, as discussed below.

Limitations of focus group discussions

Focus group discussions, like any other data collection method, have limitations. Parahoo (1997) mentions the following obstacles to successful group discussion.

1. Some participants may be introverts while others are extroverts, and the extroverts may dominate the discussion. This could cause the researcher to lose useful information that would have been provided by the introverts, had they been given an opportunity to do so. This can obviously affect the outcome of the focus group discussion.

2. The environment in which the discussion is carried out can inhibit or foster successful group discussions. If the discussion is held in a noisy place, for instance near a road or market, then the participants may be distracted from time to time.

3. The recording device may be incapable of capturing the voices of participants who are not positioned very close to it.

4. The researcher may also have problems taking notes when many people are speaking, and as a result some important information may be left out.

In addition to the above limitations, Holloway (2005) points out that it is not easy to control focus groups, especially if the numbers are large, and transcription is far more difficult in the

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case of large groups as some people‘s voices may not be loud enough to be captured audibly by the audio-recorder. Transcription and analysis of data obtained through focus groups can also be time consuming. In the case of the current study, the interviews were held in Lusamia, so I had to transcribe the Lusamia recordings after which I had to translate these transcripts into English. I then had to code and categorize the data into themes (see section 4.8 below).

I was aware of the above-mentioned limitations when I started the focus group discussions, so whenever there was one person dominating the discussion, I would tactfully ask another if they thought the same or had a different view. At times, I addressed participants who were very silent and encouraged them to express their views on or knowledge about the issue being discussed. This gave most participants an opportunity to get involved in the discussions. As regards the issue of some participants‘ voices not being captured by the audio recorder, I had a research assistant to help with me with recording and sometimes with taking notes. The research assistant would move the audio-recorder closer to the person who was speaking to ensure that all that was being discussed was captured. I was thus able to concentrate on the discussion; I only took down notes on the main points.

During the focus group discussions, the responses to the different questions the researcher raised did not differ much from those obtained from the individual interviews. The only difference was that the focus group discussions allowed room for addition of information by another participant to what someone had already said.

4.8. Data management and analysis