Qualitative interviews

The second sequential phase of this study was the conducting of the qualitative interviews with a selected sub-sample of the respondents of the quantitative survey. There were three

81 main reasons for conducting qualitative interviews: firstly, to triangulate the findings of the quantitative online survey; secondly, to explore the translocal practices performed by the migrants and the motives behind them; and thirdly, to assess the implicational aspects of the performed practices for the urban changes in the origin places. So the first concern for proceeding further was the selection of an appropriate data collection mode for qualitative interviews. The nature of the above mentioned inquiries required in-depth, detailed interviewing for which the most suitable mode was face-to-face interviews. Hence it was selected as a data collection mode for the qualitative interviews.

Face-to-face interviews

Though face-to-face interviewing can be conducted for any kind of structured, semi-structured or unsemi-structured inquiries, it is regarded as most suitable data collection mode for unstructured inquiries where other data collection modes are incapable of bringing in depth and breadth to the collected data. The presence of the interviewer makes it possible to assist the respondent to provide the right answers in cases of any ambiguities and misinterpretations, and thus, improves the quality of the collected data (Bethlehem, 2009:

153-154). The persuasive power of the interviewer also helps in improving the response rate towards the survey, which remains non-existent in other modes of data collection and thus they often struggle with a low response rate (ibid.: 154). But the main concern with face-to-face interviewing always remains with its cost factor as it is the most expensive mode of data collection among other traditional modes (ibid.). The most expensive cost factor remains with the travelling costs as an interviewer has to travel to the places of the respondent’s convenience. On the other hand, in cases of collecting sensitive data, the presence of the interviewer can also negatively affect the collection of required results (ibid.). Further, face-to-face interviews also require a proper setting of both place and time to conduct them, which otherwise may affect the quality of the collected data.

According to the research design, I needed to conduct the qualitative interviews with the respondents from the state of NRW only. My research inquiry did not involve the collection of any sensitive data, therefore my presence had no negative effect on the responses by the interviewees. Except a few respondents (three out of twenty) showed some reservations over the questions asking the details of remittances and money investments in Pakistan while only one respondent showed some concern over questions related to personal matters and attainments. But the nature of these queries does not guarantee a better response if asked by some other data collection mode either. Still, having a proper spatio-temporal setting for conducting these interviews remained a concern for conducting these interviews. Those were neither expert interviews nor household interviews rather the individual migrant’s interviews which had to be conducted at agreed upon places - normally places of convenience for respondents. This was also the case with the time for conducting the interviews.

The majority of the interviews was conducted in respondents’ homes followed by respondents’ working places. The working places included their offices or their shops.

Around one fifth of the interviews was conducted at some café or a coffee shop lacking ideal settings. These places were not very conducive interview settings, but were the only options available. Also, the majority of the interviews (twelve out of twenty) was conducted during normal weekdays while remaining interviews were conducted on weekends. There were three interviews which were conducted after midnight (one of them was lost along with the

Chapter 6 Research Design

82 recording device while traveling back to Dortmund) while remaining interviews were conducted in the afternoons and evenings. In terms of location, the majority of the interviews was conducted in Dortmund (seven), followed by Wuppertal (four) and Bochum (three). The average length of these interviews was 25 minutes with longest lasting 44 minutes while the shortest lasted only six minutes. This significant variation in the length of an interview depended mainly on the performed practices of the respondents. The more a respondent had performed practices, the longer the interview lasted in exploring implications and vice versa. The detail of the setting of these conducted interviews is appended (Appendix 8).

Data collection instruments

The data collection instruments used for conducting qualitative interviews, were a semi-structured interview guide and a recording device whose details are given below.

Interview guide

The main instrument for conducting qualitative interviews was a semi-structured interview guide. The first part of the interview guide was comprised of semi-structured questions aimed at triangulating the findings of the first phase i.e. quantitative survey. The respondents were asked questions according to the broad types assigned to them and hence, questions were phrased accordingly for every type. The second and third part of the interview guide dealt with the inquiry of performed translocal practices of the Pakistani migrants and their motivations for such practices. The second part was semi-structured while the third part was unstructured. The last part dealt with the implications of the performed practices. Except first part, all other parts were identical for every type of the respondent (interview guide is placed on Appendix 9).

The challenging part of designing the interview guide was envisaging the range of possible translocal practices which might have been performed by the Pakistani immigrants in the selected markets/sectors of Pakistan during the study period. The main issue was to keep a flow in the sequencing of the questions in order to administer the interviews diligently. Mainly, it was the last part related to inquiring the implications of the performed practices, where overlapping and repetitions of various dimensions of the performed practices were expected. So the difficult task was the administering the last part, especially in those cases, where a respondent was found as a performer of more than one practice.

Another issue for conducting these interviews was the selection of interviewing language.

Though the interview guide was designed in English, it was not a suitable language to conduct interviews in Germany. Due to lacking good command of the German language, I decided to go along with the co-ethnic interviewing technique and opted again the native language, i.e. Urdu to conduct these interviews. Afterwards, this accommodation doubled my work as I also needed to translate responses into English at the time of transcribing these interviews.

Recording device

As a standard operating procedure, these conducted interviews were recorded with the prior consent of the respondents. These consents were sought at the time of interviews,

83 meanwhile I was also ready for any case of refusal against such request, for which I had an interview guide on a format which could be used for taking the notes directly on it. But, luckily, there was not a single refusal and I was successful in recording all the interviews with the help of a voice recorder which ensured uniformity in the collected data. The recording device generated audio files in ‘MP3⁵’ format which is compatible with ‘F4’

transcription software. The MP3 file format offers an appropriate compromise between recording quality, file compression and flexibility in file handling (Dresing et al., 2012: 10).

Another reason for which I needed the recordings of the conducted interviews was that I had to translate the interviews into the English for academic purposes, which was impossible without having recorded audio files.

Data management plan

The second phase of the qualitative interviewing was operationalized only after determining the findings of the first phase of the quantitative survey. That operationalization also needed methodological refinement, NRW sub-sample selection and preparation of an interview guide. After finalizing the detailed methodology, it took two additional months to prepare the interview guide. Once prepared, the guide was tested through a pilot interview with a respondent who was initially kept as a backup respondent for the sub-sample. Later, it was included in the sub-sample as the content quality of the pilot interview was in uniformity with other conducted interviews. Initially, the second phase of the qualitative interviews was also designed to be completed in three months, but I was unable to complete all interviews within the reserved time for this activity. I extended the time span of the activity for one additional month. Nevertheless with the four month timeframe, I was only able to conduct 20 interviews including the pilot interview. The detail of data collection and management is placed on Appendix 7.