Reflections on my role and identity in the interview process

During the process of data collection through interviewing and the subsequent

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experienced interviewer, over many years in management and a long spell as a commercial research analyst I had interviewed on many occasions and for many reasons. Yet despite the mechanics of the interview being easy, the process and its output posed an important question: what knowledge that was truly external to me was I uncovering and what was I creating in the dialogue with the participant or introducing from my prior experiences in the area?

This simple exchange from one of the interviews illustrates my concern:

Participant: We’re responsible for enterprise architecture. [Vendor] are responsible for technical architecture.

Interviewer: But you also have application development? Participant: Yes we do.

Interviewer: And that’s presumably…, some is in house and some out to different people?

Participant: That’s right yes.

Interviewer: And then [Vendor] sort of sits in the middle. It takes in from development and it’s responsible for the technical architecture? Participant: That’s right, they deliver the service integration layer in the middle of

that.

In this conversation I seem to prompt the participant for answers giving my own view of the likely structure of the relationship which I formed from my own industry

experience as described above and from earlier interviews in the organisation. The result is a shared view of a (probably) uncontroversial issue. This second example is of a more complex interaction:

Interviewer: Do you see that as a big wave of innovation, a big change, as an innovation and therefore having a next step? Or do you see it as a

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progression of these small continuous improvements, these step by step changes, that just take you from the old world to the new world in little… Participant: That’s a really interesting question. I think you’ve got a lot of small

things under a bigger umbrella. So the biggest…, the big umbrella is then the rise of digital in its various forms. That enables a whole load of new things. Continues…

In this case my question proposed my own view of a potential structure for an innovation process. The participant took this and built on it further, hence we collectively moved towards a shared view of a more significant issue. This

corresponds with another of the principles of interpretive field research proposed by Klein and Myers, ‘The principle of interaction between the Researchers and the Subjects’ (1999, p.72) which calls for critical reflection on how research materials are socially constructed.

Miller and Glassner (1997) debate the question as to whether interviews are a valid way of exploring reality that is external to the discussion. This is helpful in

addressing my concerns about the way my data was constructed. They ask the question: do interviews allow reality to be perceived or do they create the reality in the discussion itself? On one hand, a positivist view of the interview is that it should be structured in a way that 'comes as close as possible to providing a 'mirror

reflection' of the reality that exists in the social world' (p.99). On the other, the radical social constructivist view is that 'no knowledge about a reality that is 'out there' in the social world can be obtained from the interview, because the interview is obviously and exclusively an interaction between the interviewer and interview

subject in which both participants create and construct narrative versions of the social world' (p.99).

Miller and Glassner (1997) go on to propose an alternative position to this apparent dualism. They believe that in depth interviewing can be used to gain information about social worlds. The interaction between the interviewer and subject is a key component of this as through interaction an intersubjective meaning is created, intersubjectivity connoting the variety of relations that exist between people's perspectives (Gillespie and Cornish, 2010). If the interview is reduced to a purely

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positivistic process where the interviewer does not interfere in the creation of meaning, that meaning may not be comprehensible to the interviewer.

The validity of such intersubjectively created meanings, understandings, differences or conflicts can still be questioned from a radical social constructivist perspective. To what extent do these represent and describe the (inaccessible) real situation that the interviewee has experienced? Miller and Glassner (1997) argue that such meanings provide the researcher with access to the interviewee's experience and that by using this access to explore the interviewee's perspective of meaning, the researcher can achieve knowledge of their social worlds.

Extending this logic to my own experience, the world I aimed to understand through these interviews had two broadly defined parts. It contained objective realities like contracts, cost targets, organisational charts, realities that could be described and tested in formal ways; for example by looking for shared understanding and common descriptions of the entities involved. There were also more intangible, socially

constructed factors, like the relationships between people or organisations and the knowledge and competences involved in the IT system. To understand this world a range of different interviewing techniques were needed. A positivistic approach could be used to understand the objective realities; by using the right questions and prompts a ‘mirror image’ of the objective reality could indeed be created, the

prompting I used in the first example above is simply an efficient way of achieving this. Its results can easily be tested in the approval process set up for each case study.

In understanding the more socially constructed factors a trap seems to exist. I still ask myself if my interview process resulted in consistent creation of a true

intersubjective meaning. In some cases, like the second above, I believe it did. However there may have been others where the participant and I left the interview with our own distinct ‘narratives’ of the social factors we had discussed. The use of multiple interviews based on similar topics may serve to reduce the risk of profound misunderstanding, as may the case study approval process, but the risk remains.

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