Semi-Structured Interviews

The fourth and most substantial component of the data collection constituted of sixty four one to one interviews. These were conducted between November 2013 and March 2014 (thirty-two with participants living in the South East of England and thirty two with participants living in the North East of England.) The interviews were intended to explore the meanings individuals assigned to their fish choices in a much deeper way than is permitted in group-based discussion. By holding the interviews after the conclusion of the workshops, it was intended that they would elicit both new themes and permit the exploration of issues that arose through the group discussions. For those interviewees who also kept a diary, holding the interviews after the return date for the diaries permitted exploration of issues arising with the diary keeping as well as ensuring that the diaries were returned (as the researcher could take them away with her after the interview concluded) – thereby increasing the diary return rate.

Each interview was conducted in the same format. For practical reasons the majority of the interviews were conducted over the ‘phone but where logistics allowed a number (n = 15) were conducted in person. The same researcher undertook every interview using a semi-structured interview guide (Appendix 7) that was designed to capture information about historical, current and future buying behaviours; consumers’ understanding of the term sustainability; and consumers feelings about different edible fish species (thereby addressing the overarching Research Objective : Why the Big 5, as well as the six supplementary Research Questions (RQs 3 – 8 (see Fig 1 and Table 1, p. 19-20).)

Interview participants were recruited directly from the workshops; through snowballing - by asking workshop participants and local business contacts to suggest people who would be willing to be interviewed; and, by directly recruiting shoppers from fishmongers and supermarkets in the study areas. The decision to recruit new interviewees in addition to the workshop participants was intentional, serving both to mitigate against a failure to recruit sufficient participants from the focus groups (people had already given up a lot of their time to the two workshops); and, to provide the potential to explore the effect of previous involvement in the study upon interview responses (as a measure of the effect of the workshop process upon the participants.) Participation was further incentivised by the offer of inclusion into a prize draw. Repertory Grids were used to add structure to the discussion about current preferences. The Repertory Grid approach is rooted in the Personal Construct Theory developed by George Kelly (Kelly 1955) At the heart of construct theory is the notion of “every man his own scientist” – the idea that as humans we all strive to understand ourselves and our surroundings; and that we do so through continual experimentation – developing hypotheses (“constructs”), subjecting these

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to testing, evaluating the results and then accepting or rejecting the results based upon our findings with a consequent effect upon our behaviours. In this way, every individual develops their own personal construct system – a theoretical framework through which they view the world (Fransella and Bannister 1977). The repertory grid technique allows researchers to elucidate personal constructs in such a way that the researcher is able to see through others eyes, without necessarily having to agree with or have the same constructs as the interviewee. The method involves a number of steps. Firstly, a series of elements are identified that are relevant to the area being researched. Because this study was concerned with why UK consumers prefer the top 5 species of Salmon, Cod, Haddock, Tuna and Prawns and the possibilities for encouraging consumers to try less utilised species, the elements were determined by the researcher in advance. They were the top 5 most commonly eaten fish species and five less commonly eaten, but still commercially available, UK wild-caught fish species (as identified through the analysis of the Tesco club-card data). The specific choice of these ten species was made with a view to ensuring that every person had at least some knowledge of each species, thereby ensuring equal participation amongst all the interviewees and complete grid construction in every interview. A blank grid is in Appendix 8.

Triadic sorting was then used to elicit a set of constructs from each interviewee. In this method, the interviewer asks the interviewee to identify how two of three items chosen by the interviewer are alike, or different from one another (Kelly 1955). The words the interviewees use to describe the differences are then recorded on a pre-printed grid, with the contrasting words placed at opposing ends of a row (see Table 26). The interviewer continued to present combinations of elements to the interviewee in order to generate between 10 and 12 constructs.

An advantage of the Repertory Grid technique is that the process of completing the grid, through structured conversation between interviewee and interviewer, allows for the elicitation of additional information about the individual’s understanding of a given topic and the importance they assign to it. The choice of particular words to differentiate elements, for example, can be probed by the interviewer, through the use of why questions to elicit further insights into individual meanings. By laddering in this way, it is possible to move the discussion from a description of attributes only to higher levels of abstraction and so into a deeper exploration of consumer motivations for engaging in particular behaviours (Reynolds and Gutman 1988). So- called, higher-order constructs elicited through laddering were added to the grid as the interviews progressed.

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Once the outline of the grid was complete, interviewees were then asked to provide a very simple score for each element using a tick / cross approach – where a tick indicated that an element rated near the positive pole of their construct and a cross that it rated nearer the opposite end (see example in Table 26). This simple method enabled the researcher to visually inspect the grids for emergent patterns during the interview process and to engage the participant in a discussion about those patterns. In turn, these conversations, often yielded additional constructs that were then rated, as above. The process of construct elicitation and rating continued until such time as the participant felt that they had given everything they wanted to say on the topic and the researcher was content that there was sufficient material, in the completed grids themselves and from the narrative of the interviews, to permit subsequent analysis.

Table 26 Example of Partially-Completed Repertory Grid

Salmon Cod Tuna Prawns Herring

No bones      Bony

Firm texture      Flaky

Easy to cook      Difficult

The completed repertory grids were retained, securely, by the researcher for analysis at both the individual and group level – the latter to explore the extent to which commonality (use of common constructs), might explain reasons for variations in overall fish consumption and the types of fish eaten by UK consumers.

Each interview was audio-recorded and subsequently transcribed and imported in to Nvivo 10 for analysis. Three high level codes were initially created that reflected the overarching research question and the six supplementary questions generated from the first two phases of data collection and analysis (see Fig. 1 and Table 1, p. 19-20). Thus, the first theme was “Consumers and the Big 5.” The six questions were grouped under two topic headings – sustainability; and retail behaviours. The resulting high-level codes were thus “consumers and sustainability” and “consumers and retail.” All of the workshop and interview data was subsequently coded to these high level themes, with additional lower level codes developed reflecting the finer detailed themes within each of the main themes.