Practical considerations

Due to the range of people covered by the interviews and my wish to maximise response rates, I had to schedule my fieldwork carefully. For example, I focused on speaking to tourists during the summer and early autumn when they were most available, thus leaving late autumn and winter free for interviewing businesses, who were too busy to be interviewed during the height of the tourist season.

A related consideration was that many of my interviewees were members of the general public or small business owners who were not accustomed to being interviewed. For this reason, I carried out the interviews with tourists, café, pub and restaurant owners and food producers in person. This helped people relax more easily than if I had tried to question them over the

telephone. However, for reasons relating to travel time and cost efficiency, I interviewed several food and tourism experts over the telephone, using special recording software, with the permission of the respondents. This worked well because I was talking with busy people who were used to being interviewed and they were therefore happy to talk over the telephone at a time that was convenient to them.

In all my interviews – whether in person or over the telephone – I would ask permission before recording answers and, in the case of the businesses, I also assured them that I would not publish any sensitive commercial

information concerning their company. By using a Dictaphone, MP3 player or telephone recording equipment, I was able to concentrate fully on what the

person was saying, which would have been harder if I had had to take notes. After the interview, I was able to download these recordings and transcribe them in full7.

However, despite conducting pilot research before beginning the main process of data collection, other difficulties emerged in the course of the fieldwork and I did my best to deal with these as they occurred. The first problem was the difficulty of contacting manual workers for interview at Bath and Lancaster universities. Unlike academic and administrative staff, cleaners, caterers and porters were not contactable by email and this was particularly problematic at Bath where I could not approach potential interviewees in person. As a result, I had to resort to a snowball sampling technique, where I asked my academic and administrative respondents to recommend cleaners or porters that they knew from their departments. I was then able to contact the individuals in person to explain more about the project. This strategy proved effective but took a considerable amount of time and effort. During the course of the fieldwork, I also became more adept at the practicalities involved in interviewing. For example, I discovered that the audibility of the recording could suffer if I was outside on a windy day or if there was a lot of background noise going on. If possible, I took steps to control these factors – for example, by not conducting interviews in the vicinity of busy roads and by being mindful of where I placed my recording equipment. I also learnt that, if I had arranged an interview far in advance, it was a good idea to telephone the day before to check that the interviewee was still

available. This was especially important if I was making a special journey; I once had the experience of driving 60 miles only to find that my interviewee had forgotten the arrangement and gone out for a meeting.

The final issue I had to deal with was that of particularly garrulous or reticent respondents who would say too much or too little. Reticent interviewees were easier to manage because I would always go into an interview prepared with a series of prompts that I could use if necessary. These helped to bring out more information than was initially offered. However, overly talkative

respondents were harder to handle because I did not want to be too assertive or have too much influence on the structure of the discussion. In these cases, I did the best that I could and used the prompts on my interview schedule to ensure that the conversation remained as focused and relevant as possible. Although such inter-personal dynamics could make things difficult, they were also what made interviewing such a rewarding process. At the end of my fieldwork, I had spoken to over 150 people and I would frequently come away from such encounters feeling privileged to have gained an insight into

someone else’s story. I also felt that, on many occasions, participants had enjoyed sharing their views about what was important to them, and this was a satisfying feeling to have.

This chapter shows how I needed to talk to a wide range of actors in order to get a variety of perspectives on the interactions between food and tourism. However, this approach resulted in a very large number of interviews for a study of this nature. As a result, I had to give careful thought as to how to

handle and interpret the volume of interviews that I had. The concluding section of this chapter describes how I dealt with this issue through the creation of a rigorous analytic framework.