Semi-structured interviews

An outline of the interview topics was sent in advance to participants (Appendix 5). The key topics were:

• Personal relationship with nature

• Views on the environmental situation

• Views on their organisation’s impact on nature

• Experience of influencing organisational decision-making

• Experience of attending to body sensations, emotions and thoughts whilst participating in or running a significant meeting

Data sources Format Rationale

2-hour in-depth semi-

structured interviews Audio recorded and transcribed verbatim Obtain detailed account of experience, can probe deeper and follow emergent lines of enquiry (Smith, Flowers & Larkin 2009) Participant diary of

experience of significant meeting

Entries written shortly after important meeting by five participants

Record embodied awareness of the experience (Pagis 2009) Researcher reflexive diary Entries written shortly after

each encounter and ad hoc throughout

Record my experience and reflections to ensure rigour and quality (Marshall & Reason 2007) Indirect observation of

participant Audio recordings by two participants of a meeting with colleagues

Indication of organisational discourse and salient frames that participants are exposed to or are interacting with (Wright, Nyberg & Grant 2012)

Organisational documents relating to environmental policy, strategy or practice

Public online resources and documents, and internal documents e.g. meeting minutes, briefing notes

Final debrief conversation Audio recorded Share theoretical framework and

key findings with participants as a stakeholder check for credibility and trustworthiness of findings (Thomas 2006)

I wanted to find out how they conceptualised their own relationship with nature as well as the current environmental situation for two main reasons of particular relevance to addressing the secondary research questions. Firstly, because they may give indications of psychological threat responses, and secondly so that their personal thoughts and feelings about the natural world could be compared with their (i) perceptions of how colleagues or the organisation as a whole thought and felt about the natural world, (ii) salient frames in organisational discourse as indicated in other data sources, namely organisational

documents and indirect observation.

The participant account of their experience and their thoughts and feelings about the impact their organisation has on nature took up the bulk of the interview, addressing the primary research question. Their embodied awareness during a significant meeting ended up having relatively little time due to the time constraints of a two-hour interview. However, the diary entries provided information on this topic.

Interviews were conducted in locations selected by the participants that would provide appropriate privacy and quiet, which for interviews in person was a meeting room in their place of work during working hours. One interview was conducted by video Skype. All interviews were audio recorded with permission of the participant. I asked open questions, which in IPA is considered to be an inductive approach (Eatough & Smith 2010). See Appendix 6 for interview topics and example questions.

Reflections

I found building rapport fairly easy with all the participants, although some went much further in expressing their personal thoughts and feelings than others and subsequently I felt closer to some than others. My reflexive diary shows that when I noticed the participant to

be relaxed or a bit nervous, I was often also feeling similar emotions (perhaps countertransference?) I felt very engaged in the encounters, I liked them and found interviewing them enjoyable, interesting and stimulating and also felt empathy when they talked about difficulties they were experiencing. In some interviews we laughed together a lot. I think this relational approach helped make the interviews more enjoyable for the participants too, and helped them feel safer to disclose personal information (Lertzman 2015). This approach is consistent with the criteria for validity and quality in IPA studies of sensitivity to context (see 3.3.3).

Over the course of the six interviews I grew more comfortable with the dilemma of how much of myself to give: there had to be some reciprocity to avoid damaging rapport, but I also did not want to influence them more than need be. I found I agreed with much of what they said with regards to the environmental situation if not always how they chose

personally to respond to it. Awareness of my agreement and non-agreement helped me in the analysis phase to keep my interpretations non-judgemental.

There were a number of instances where I noticed the participant watching me closely for a reaction to what they were saying: looking for signs of agreement, approval or judgement perhaps. Mostly I was able to maintain an open and non-judgemental attitude, drawing on my mindfulness and coaching training. But there was one instance in particular where something said really affected me and triggered me into responding. I wrote afterwards:

I sometimes sensed they wanted to please me, to give me what I was looking for. This was sometimes conveyed via a direct question: is this what you want? But more often I intuited it from facial expressions and body language: an enquiring look, an eagerness, a neediness even. I made notes of these observations in my reflexive diary (see 4.2.3). I discovered by observing my emotional and physical reactions that I must be holding some fixed ideas of what I wanted the participants to talk about – I took feelings of surprise or frustration to be signs of this. But I wasn’t always able to bring the expectation or assumption into full view. Of course I had chosen a semi-structured format so there were topics to be covered. An example is the interview with the chief executive who was not a sustainability specialist as the others were, but for whom environmental policy was part of the chief executive remit. As we will see in the Findings chapter, her experience was markedly different from the others in a number of ways, and at the time of interview I had some doubts about her inclusion in the study and whether it was going to be useful. However, I can see from my notes that I became less worried about not getting sufficiently rich or relevant data and chose instead to trust in the rigour of my process and have confidence that I would find interesting material to work with, perhaps just not what I was expecting. Letting go of that anxiety helped me be more fully present in the interview.

… at this point I feel so uncomfortable with his assumption 'you know what I mean' that I am onside, and at his lack of empathy, that I feel if I don’t say something I am somehow colluding by my silence, I feel complicit. I don’t like how he's talking about her, even if she was out of order. Why cant he understand what is going on for her? So I say: "its affecting everybody" to nudge him towards understanding this outburst as her reaction to

extremely stressful situation that's been going on for months on end. Especially after what he's said about himself being ‘at the end of his tether’ and ‘going snap' - which she clearly has. I feel sorry for her, why doesn't he? Perception is projection: I can be like that, uncaring. He responds with "Yes it really is yeah, it really is, it really has." will he be more empathetic now? No - he carries on, "So badly managed." and places blame back at

As a semi-structured interview format was used, on occasion I interrupted the participant to probe more deeply or to shift the focus to a topic I wanted covered before time ran out. With the first interview this felt quite tricky as the participant spoke very fast and it was by video Skype, which perhaps made attending to cues a bit harder. With subsequent

interviews I stated at the outset I might interrupt and explained why, which then made interrupting easier to do without worrying about it affecting rapport.

Easterby-Smith et al (2008) point out that theories that apply to participants also apply to the researcher. With regards to coping strategies for dealing with psychological threat, there was one particular point in the research process when my exposure to the facts of ecological crisis seemed relentless: I was either conducting or transcribing interviews on the subject, reading literature or talking about my research to people. It was everywhere, all the time. It was a very difficult process to go through but with my mindfulness and ecopsychology training and experience, I was able to engage with intense emotions of despair, sadness, grief, anger, frustration and anxiety – to just be with them and accept and honour their presence. However, whilst experiencing distress at the natural world being destroyed around me, I found I also experienced beauty, magic, awe, peace, hope and wonder when I attended closely to the particularity of the natural world. I wrote about these experiences in my reflexive diary, which also helped to process them. I think my capacity to hold these layers of strong positive and negative emotions made it easier for me to be emotionally receptive to the participant in the interview (Clarke & Hoggett 2009) and to hold without fear what was arising for them. This sensitivity to what was occurring in the present moment guided my judgement of when to persist with a line of enquiry and probe deeper, and when to let something alone and move on.

Using a semi-structured interview generated a lot of rich data specific to the research questions, in ways I could not have anticipated. Probing, even when driven by my own fixed agenda, resulted in interesting associations and disclosures that may not have arisen or been expressed without such probing. This shows that it’s not just unstructured or free-associative interview methods that can produce these insights. And my participants, I noticed, tended to answer the question they wanted to answer, which was not always the question they had been asked.

The empathy and rapport I had with participants, and my attentiveness to them

demonstrates sensitivity to context and commitment, which are criteria for assessing validity and quality in IPA research (see 3.3.3).

Ideally I would have conducted a 3 hour interview because there was so much to talk about or conducted two interviews per participant. However, I was conscious of not asking too much of the participants, especially those who reported being very busy and under pressure.