Justification for telephone interviews

Interviews can be carried out in different ways, the most common being a face-to-face or in-person interview, the telephone interview, and internet interviews through VoIP software such as Skype®, instant messaging and email. The latter two media types involve written communication and the others – spoken communication. In this project, the telephone was selected as the main interview medium, because it was cost-effective,

87 diminished power asymmetries and was flexible and practical to carry out. The discussion below explains why other interview media were not chosen for this project, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of telephone interviews.

The main advantage of using text-based internet interview media such as email and instant messaging is that it would have created ready-made transcripts (“self-transcribing,” (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009, p. 149)). However, these media were not selected for this PhD project. The main disadvantages were that it would have been more time consuming for both researcher and interviewees to generate the same amount of information through typed text than through speech, and, in the case of email, some of the immediacy and spontaneity of the interview conversation would have been lost (Opdenakker, 2006). The usually mentioned disadvantage of interview participants being required to possess a certain minimum level of written communication and computer literacy (e.g. Burns, 2010) would not have applied to the sample of young university graduates who typically have good levels of computer literacy (for example, over 90% of Futuretrack finalists rated themselves as at least ‘good’ on their computer literacy skills (Atfield and Purcell, 2010)).

Both face-to-face and telephone interviews would have been appropriate media for this project. In qualitative methodology literature, telephone interviews are typically viewed as ‘second-best’ compared to face-to-face interviews, although the evidence on telephone interview effectiveness has been limited (Novick, 2008). The often-cited advantage of face- to-face interviews over telephone interviews is that they provide the greatest opportunity to observe non-verbal social cues such as gestures, body language, and facial expressions (Brinkmann, 2014; Shuy, 2003). Although some social cues, such as intonation and tone of voice, can be observed through a telephone conversation, the range of such cues is

reduced.77 _{However, the lack of breadth of non-verbal cues only becomes a major research} impediment if these cues form an important focus for analysis in the study (Opdenakker, 2006), which was less the case in this PhD project. Instead, when graduates spoke about their experiences of work in an impassioned or emphatic way, these intonations were marked on the interview transcript to flag their importance.

77 _{Video interviews can overcome this problem to an extent, although the main drawback to using} this medium is internet connection reliability.

88 Another debated issue is whether telephone or face-to-face interviews provide a better environment for discussing sensitive questions. Researchers such as Shuy (2003), for example, argued that in-person interviews were more desirable because interviewees were more likely to feel at ease than they would do on the telephone, that it would be easier for interviewers to establish a rapport, and that interviewing in person may also help

transcend power asymmetries, such as sex and age differences between interviewer and respondents. However, these claims have been challenged by other research that suggests that some participants may prefer the interviewer to be absent (Novick, 2008), and that the telephone did not impede eliciting responses to sensitive questions (e.g. Drabble et al., 2016; Holt, 2010; Chapple, 1999).

Evidence about the implications of power asymmetries in telephone and face-to-face interviews for both interviewer and respondent is limited. From the few studies available, there is a suggestion that interviewing by telephone may have improved the quality of the data. For example, Glogowska et al. (2011) reported that the telephone helped male interviewees talk to a female interviewer in a more comfortable way, and that it particularly helped a male interviewee who wanted to discuss issues related to gender approach those issues. On the other hand, interviewer absence can also silence other aspects of the power asymmetry, for example ethnic differences between interviewer and interviewee, which may limit the critical engagement with these issues in the research interview (Holt, 2010). Again, the extent to which this affects the quality of the data collected depends on the nature of the research questions, and for this PhD project, this was not the main area of investigation.

Conducting telephone interviews was a simple way of getting in touch with the participants. I myself had been a telephone and a Skype interview participant in other research studies, and preferred the convenience of being able to stay at home to conduct the interview.78 _{It was also more time consuming than conducting a telephone interview} when factoring in the time spent travelling to the location (also acknowledged by Shuy

78 _{In the pilot study I conducted interviews in-person and through telephone and Skype and the in-} person method had several drawbacks. I met the respondents in cafes, and the background noise was sometimes impossible to avoid. While the methodology literature suggests finding quiet places in which to conduct the interview, this is not always possible in practice. It was, to an extent, possible to clean the recording prior to analysis using Audacity® software to remove some of the background noise. However, this was a time-consuming process which also lost some data quality on the respondent’s voice.

89 (2003)). The Futuretrack respondents were located all over the UK, and travelling to meet with them would have substantially eaten into my time and my allocated research budget. Lastly, some of the respondents themselves expressed a preference to talk on the

telephone because they too were very busy to meet in person. Thus, telephone interviews, by virtue of being more convenient and cost-effective to conduct, and suffering few disadvantages relative to interviewing in person, were selected as the interview medium in this PhD research project.