Semi-Structured Interviews

In addition to the questionnaire survey, in-depth and semi-structured interviews were also employed. According to this mode of interviewing, a list of questions on key issues is prepared as an interview guide (see Appendix 3). This memo guide is used to ensure that the interviews cover the key issues of interest. In several cases, the questions in the interview guides are adjusted to the knowledge and position of the informant in the organisation. Due to its semi-structured form, the interview process is flexible. Rather than pressing the interviewee to directly answer a set of questions, the process emphasises exploring how the interviewee frames and understands issues and events, and what the interviewee views as important in explaining and understanding events, patterns, and forms of behaviour. At the start of the interviews, confidentiality was discussed and permission for recording interviews was asked for. Taping the interview enabled me to focus more on what the interviewee was saying and also enabled a transcript of the interview which I could refer to and draw on later (Richards 1996).

I used semi-structured interviews with community leaders such as pooyaiban (village headpersons) and local officers in the Tambon (sub-district) Administrative Organisation. In addition senior civil servants were interviewed in a range of agencies: the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB), Ministry of Interior (Community Development Department and Tambon Administrative Organisation), Ministry of Industry (Department of Industrial Promotion), Ministry of Commerce (Department of Export Promotion) and other relevant offices, together with interviewing actors in the private sector such as factory and shop owners. As noted above, I also re-interviewed a sub-sample of 33 villagers of those households included in the survey questionnaire to collect more in-depth information. I also found it necessary to learn at least some of the local dialect (Leslie and Storey 2003) as many villagers often answered my questions using the local language. I learnt some local dialect from my research assistants. Even though they were not northerners by origin, they had lived in Chiang Mai for eight years or more. Thus, they could speak and perfectly understand the local dialect.

Picture 4.2 The Research Process – Interviews

I chose to conduct semi-structured interviews because they follow a form of interview schedule with suggested themes, but there is also scope for the interviewees to develop their responses and provide them with opportunities to bring up their own ideas and thoughts. Interviews take a conversational, fluid form, each interview varying according to the experiences, interests and views of the interviewees. Eyles (1988 cited in Flowerdew and Martin 1997) describes an interview as ‘a conversation with a purpose’. The advantage of this approach is that it is sensitive and people- oriented, allowing interviewees to construct their own accounts of their experiences by explaining and describing their lives in their own words.

The idea of an interview is to understand how individual people experience and make sense of their own lives. The emphasis is on considering the meaning people attribute to their lives and the processes which operate in particular social contexts (Flowerdew and Martin 1997: 111). Furthermore, for some interviewees, in particular so-called ‘elite’ interviewees such as with government officials and local chiefs, the

level of formality which a structured or semi-structured interview can provide may be viewed more positively and encourage involvement. In addition, interviews are an excellent way of getting factual information, such as details of policies and government initiatives (Desai and Potter 2006).

Obviously, studying elites means that the researcher often has access to a particular organisational structure which can be used in many ways to facilitate the research process. Such elite organisations regularly provide large quantities of documents – some private, some public – which can be useful both for providing more information before actually meeting with anyone from the organisation for the purpose of conducting an interview (thereby allowing more insightful research questions to be devised ahead of time) and for verifying some of the statements made during interviews (Herod 1999). Seldon (1988) suggests that civil servants can be the best interviewees, arguing with a wonderful turn of phrase that: ‘Civil servants tend to be dispassionate creatures by nature and profession: cat-like, they observe action, storing the information in mental boxes that can yield a rich harvest to those who take the trouble to prise them open’ (Seldon, 1988: 10 cited in Richards 1996: 201).

In the particular case of Thailand from my experience with elite interviewees, Thai elites respond and provide in-depth information. This may, possibly, have been because these elite interviewees knew that I was only a student doing my thesis, and was therefore seen as non-threatening. They therefore answered the questions in a more open minded manner and became less secretive and suspicious. Being a Thai, rather than a farang (foreign) researcher, has both advantages and disadvantages. A key advantage was my understanding of Thai culture and manner of social engagement; a disadvantage, however, was that I could not easily extract myself from the norms of such engagement, which can be constraining.

As Dexter (2006) suggests, elite ‘people in important or exposed positions may require VIP interviewing treatment on the topics which relate to their importance or exposure’ (Dexter, 2006: 18). Elites, almost by definition, are less accessible and are more aware of their importance, so problems of access are significant. However, there are a number of advantages of elite interviews, for example, s/he can provide information not recorded elsewhere, or not yet available for public release. Moreover,

s/he can help to establish networks, or provide access to other individuals, through contact with a particular interviewee, the so-called snowball effect (Richards 1996). As suggested by Richards (1996), before I went to interview senior civil servants and local elites, I wrote a letter setting out clearly my status, explaining briefly the nature of my research, what benefits I hoped to gain from conducting the interview and how I intended to use the information. I aimed to flatter the prospective interviewee by emphasising that his or her input would be beneficial to my research.