Semi-structured Interviews

Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with the festivals’ committee members, who were also local residents. This method was chosen as a means of obtaining in-depth information about how the festivals are organised, and to gain an insight into what the festivals mean to them as volunteers, as residents, and into their thoughts regarding

what the festival means to the local community. A relaxed interview somewhat similar to a conversation is useful for building rapport; however, it is more than a conversation. Jennings (2005, p. 105), referring to the work of Dexter (1970), argues that interviews “are conversations with a purpose”. The interview process allows a researcher to develop an understanding of how “people experience and make sense of their lives”, thereby producing “a deeper picture” than what may be gained by simply using questionnaires (Valentine 2005, p. 111). Interviewing also allows researchers to seek clarification of a particular aspect of their research (Creswell 2009; Jennings 2005). As well it draws valuable information from people who are knowledgeable about the topic of research, information that cannot be obtained using other research methods. Nevertheless, there are limitations to the interviewing process; e.g., it may be expensive and overly time-consuming (McGuirk & O'Neill 2005; Teddlie & Tashakkori 2009). And, as Jennings (2005) suggests, it may also be difficult to know when an interview should be brought to a close. Some of the information may be confidential and therefore unusable in the research (Teddlie & Tashakkori 2009); and, the presence of the researcher may elicit biased responses (Creswell 2009).

I commenced the research process by contacting via email relevant persons listed on the festival websites and arranging meetings to discuss the aims of my research. I visited both festivals in 2008 to meet with committee members and to collect archival information. Written confirmation was obtained from both festival committees at this time. After obtaining ethics approval in 2009, I returned to Scone and Georgetown to undertake my research. Prior to the festivals, I attended organisational meetings where I was provided with names of previous committee members, especially those who were part of the inaugural festivals. In both cases, key informants made contact with past committee members and asked them to phone me. Everyone who agreed to be interviewed was given a written overview of the aims and objectives of my research. In addition, they were asked to sign a consent form prior to the interviews (Appendix One).

Twelve semi-structured interviews were undertaken in relation to the Scone festival, eleven with residents who were currently, or had been, involved with the festival, and the twelfth with a council representative. Two of the eleven interviewees had

participated in the organisation of the inaugural festival in 1980. The interviews were held in May 2009 during and immediately after the festival at a time designated by each interviewee. There were no group interviews and none was repeated. In the case of the Georgetown festival, eight individual interviews were held, seven with past or present committee members and one with a council representative. There were also two group interviews, one with four people who were involved with festivals held during the 1980s and the other with six people who were members of a business women’s group responsible for the parade. There were no repeat interviews. All of the interviews were held in October 2009 during and after the festival. In total, twenty individual interviews and two group interviews involving ten participants were conducted in the two case studies.

In both case studies, the committees consisted of only a small group of volunteers; thus, there was only a relatively small and limited pool of interviewees I could draw upon. Every effort was made to interview all of the committee members. However, some declined to be interviewed as they were either too busy with the festival or with their work commitments, indicative of some of the problems one encounters when researching community festivals held in rural or small towns. Nevertheless, this did not detract from the wealth of information I obtained from people who had been involved in the festivals for a number of years and were passionate about the festival and their respective communities.

In Georgetown, I had several informal conversations with local business owners and residents who approached me following an interview I did with the local newspaper and a brief interview on a local television programme. These interviews were organised by one of the committee members, who was impressed by the fact that I had travelled from Australia solely to research their festival. As a result of this media attention, several people approached me during the festival to recount their memories of past festivals or to express their views of the current festival. The brief local profile I gained from exposure by the media lent credibility to my research and enabled me to access sources of information which may not otherwise have been available. While there was no such media attention in Scone, some of the interviewees were aware of work done earlier in

the region by Associate Professor Phil McManus, from the University of Sydney, and this to some degree enhanced the significance of my own research.

A narrative approach was employed in which the interviewees were encouraged to tell their stories while I listened and responded to their comments (Willis 2006). This semi- structured interview process enabled me to gain relatively deep insights into what the festival meant to the people involved in the organisation of the festivals, and to the council employees who supported the festivals. During the interviews, I was able to develop a sense of how important the festivals were from the way people spoke of the hardships, the fun and the friendships forged during the festivals and their memories of past festivals. The strength of feeling was obvious throughout the interview process, something that would have been missed when completing a self-administered questionnaire. I ceased the interviewing process when I was no longer able to find committee members prepared to be interviewed.

All interviews were recorded digitally and transcribed verbatim. Particular care was taken to accurately record the distinctive dialects of individual interviewees in Georgetown. I have noted in the text where the interviewees were laughing to convey a sense of the enjoyment the people experienced from certain aspects of the festivals. But, verbal pauses, such as ums and ahs, have been omitted from the record. Each interviewee was allocated a code in order to protect her/his anonymity and to comply with the requirements of the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of Sydney. The Scone interviewees were coded (S) followed by a number 1, 2, 3, with the same format used for Georgetown (G).

The process of analysis began by reading through the transcripts several times before commencing the coding process. A layered coding approach was applied beginning with the descriptive codes or in vivo codes, i.e., codes sourced using the interviewees’ own words, before moving to the analytical codes, which provided links to the theoretical literature (Cope 2003; Crang 2005; Willis 2006). Information obtained via the interviewing process was compared and contrasted with information obtained from textual documents and during participant observation. It was then linked to the

theoretical underpinnings of this research. Generally speaking, analysis occurs at different points within the research process given that a researcher is constantly analysing the data, and thinking about links to both the method and theory while undertaking the fieldwork. This inductive process means that a researcher is constantly moving back and forth between the collected data and the theoretical framework of her/his research (Crang 2005, p. 223).