SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS

Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias (2008, p. 213) define the personal interview as “a face-to-face, interpersonal role situation in which an

interviewer asks respondents questions designed to elicit answers pertinent to the research hypotheses”. Hooley et al. (2012, p. 56) omit the “face-to-face” element from their definition: “Interviews involve an interaction between a researcher and a research participant for the purpose of gathering qualitative data.”

It is worth noting, as an interesting aside, that it was a British philanthropist, Charles Booth (1840 – 1916), who is credited with initiating the use of

interviews in a social survey. In his hugely influential work, Life and Labour of the People in London, Booth used unstructured interviews and ethnographic observations to triangulate the findings of a survey (Fontana & Frey, 2000). This multi-volume study of British urban society, which famously found that 30 per cent of Londoners lived below the bare subsistence level, was seen by many as proof of the failure of private philanthropy and a call for a more decisive public policy (Owen, 1964, p. 504).

Fontana & Frey (2000, p. 653) discuss two main types of interviewing: structured and unstructured. They explain: “The former aims at capturing precise data of a codable nature in order to explain behavior within preestablished categories, whereas the latter attempts to understand the complex behavior of members of society without imposing any a priori categorization that may limit the field of inquiry.” In addition to the structured (or schedule-structured) and unstructured (or nondirective) interview types, Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias (2008, p. 215) identify “the focused interview”, which is sometimes also referred to as “semi-structured”. In terms of flexibility, the focused interview is somewhere in-between the schedule- structured and the unstructured interviews. Here the interviewer determines the focus of the interview and pre-prepares at least some of the questions based on the topics to explore, but also allows the respondent the time and scope to discuss his/her personal reactions, emotions and opinions.

This study used focused (or semi-structured) interviews, which were conducted in person, with the exception of one that was carried out via Facebook messaging. There was a practical reason for conducting the Facebook interview. The subject was travelling abroad at the time, and meeting in person or talking on the phone would have been considerably more difficult and costly than using Facebook messaging. Indeed, researchers have found that conducting email interviews saves time and money by

removing the need to travel and avoiding the need for transcription, and that it offers increased flexibility for both the interviewer and the respondent (Hooley et al., 2012). From a methodological perspective, asynchronous text-based methods, including email, offer the opportunity to elicit more in-depth,

thoughtful answers than either face-to-face interviews or synchronous online methods such as chat rooms or video-conferencing (Hooley et al., 2012). However, the Facebook interview for this study in fact only produced a series of quick and cursory answers. This is probably because the subject was significantly younger and more inexperienced than the other interviewees. In conducting the Facebook interview, advice was sought from Hooley et al. (2012), who argue that the email interviewer needs to consider the format and design of the interview. “The email interviewer must think carefully about how many questions are initially sent out, so as not to overwhelm the interviewee. The question order and delivery are also important, as is the approach to introduce the interview” (Hooley et al., 2012, p. 62). They also advise researchers to contract participants – a process that involves explaining to participants the purpose and format of the interview and setting some ground rules at the beginning of the process in order to avoid misunderstandings. Attractive though email interviews are as a method, they are not without downsides, including the loss of visual and contextual clues, and the possible lack of spontaneity in the interviewee’s responses (Hooley et al., 2012). For this reason, all the other interviews were conducted in person, and care was taken to start with general questions to break the ice before moving on to more specific ones; keep the tone informal and friendly; and avoid getting personal (Fontana & Frey, 2000). There is actually some disagreement on the last point, with some authors arguing that interviewers should be “active participants in interactions with respondents” (Fontana & Frey, 2000, p. 663). Kvale (1996, p. 4) uses the metaphor of a traveller to describe a postmodern approach to interviewing, where an interviewer is “a traveler on a journey that leads to a tale to be told upon returning home”. This style of interviewing treats conversation as research and requires that the interviewer ‘wanders together with’ his/her subjects. This approach may work for ethnographers, who view the interview as negotiated text. However, a more rational type of interviewing was required in this study, where the interviewer’s function was simply to get answers from the respondents as objectively as a qualitative data collection method allows. To quote Latour (2005, p. 146), again: “Positivists don’t own objectivity”. So, although Kvale (1996) advocates the ‘interviewer as traveller’ style of interviewing, for the purposes of this study the researcher was more of a “miner” (Kvale, 1996, p. 3), in the sense that she viewed the knowledge of social media experts as something waiting to be unearthed and presented in a form that was as unpolluted by the researcher as possible. A more interpretive style of interviewing in this specific case would have been at best self-indulgent and at worst prone to inaccuracies. Building rapport with an interviewee is important in ensuring low drop out rates, whether a researcher is conducting email or face-to-face interviews. Hooley et al. (2012, p. 62) argue: “If participants are to feel comfortable with a researcher, the researcher needs to establish their credentials as a

trustworthy human being.” They offer examples of different ways in which researchers have tried to build rapport, including disclosing personal information to participants and providing them with access to personal websites. The importance of establishing an appropriate online profile when conducting research on the Internet is also highlighted by Hine (2005, p. 20), who advises researchers to mind their image online and argues: “Establishing one’s presence as a bona fide researcher and trustworthy recipient of

confidences is not automatic, and varies depending on the cultural context under investigation”. Following Hine’s advice, the researcher invested a considerable amount of time in building a credible online profile, primarily by creating a LinkedIn account and launching a Facebook page entitled Evie’s Research Page (see Chapter 5 for more details).

The experts interviewed for this study, in the order in which they were interviewed, are:

i. Lowri Turner, fundraising manager at Kidscan, interviewed on 14/5/2014.

ii. Aaron Eccles, senior social media manager at Cancer Research UK, interviewed on 13/6/2014.

iii. Amanda Neylon, head of digital at Macmillan Cancer Support, interviewed on 13/6/2014.

iv. Anonymous, social media officer at a cancer charity based in the North West, henceforth referred to as Charity C, interviewed on 18/6/2014.

v. Fiona Jade Cunningham, founder of the ‘No Makeup Selfie for Cancer Awareness’ Facebook page, interviewed via Facebook messaging on 16/7/2014.

vi. Bryan Miller, founder of non-profit strategy consultancy Strategy Refresh (and head of strategy and consumer insight at CRUK in 2008- 9), interviewed on 17/7/2014.

vii. Stuart Witts, social media and online community manager at Marie Curie Cancer Care, interviewed on 4/8/2014.

viii. Jonathan Waddingham, social & labs product manager at JustGiving, interviewed on 4/8/2014.

ix. Bertie Bosrédon, digital consultant for the not-for-profit sector – and head of new media and then assistant director of services (information and multimedia) at Breast Cancer Care from 2006 -2012, interviewed on 4/11/2014.

Face-to-face interviews with senior members of the digital teams of the three cases provided insights into their SNS objectives and tactics, while similar interviews with social media consultants to these charities, the social & labs product manager at JustGiving and senior members of staff at smaller cancer charities provided an understanding of the context in which the three cases operated. Finally, a Facebook interview with the founder of the ‘No Makeup Selfie for Cancer Awareness’ Facebook page explored further the No Make- up Selfie campaign. Designed to answer the research questions (see Table 4.5 below), the open-ended questions asked were informed by the literature review on institutional SNS usage, the parameters of social capital discussed

in Chapter 3 of this thesis, the thematic analysis of documents, and the findings of the online survey and web content analysis conducted previously. The qualitative data collected from the interviews complemented the

quantitative data collected from the other two methods employed in this study. It both triangulated the quantitative data and added depth and richness to the findings.

RESEARCH