Stage two and three: In-depth interviews

Means

In the second stage, these thirteen parents were interviewed plus the five new parents.

The first phase of interviews was conducted from August and September 2005.

The interviews were planned to be held when parents were beginning to think about

preschools. However, the time of entering a preschool is very flexible in Taiwan so

parents can send their children to a preschool at a time to suit themselves. It is not

necessary to follow the particular schedule. As a result, when the interviews took

place, some children had already been to their preschools for a couple of weeks or a

couple of months; on the other hand, some children had not started their preschool life

and some of them had just started. In addition, two of the parents had already stopped

sending their children to a preschool because they could not get used to preschool life.

None the less, the purpose of this research was to try to understand the process by

which parents made choices of preschool. The time of children entering a preschool

did not influence their criteria for making a choice but it might influence their

responses. Parents whose children started their preschool life before the interview

took place not only talked about their criteria for choosing preschools but also their

children’sexperiencein thepreschoolsin thefirstinterview.

The second phase of interviews was conducted from April and May 2006. Eighteen

parents participated in the second phase of interviews. The interviews aimed to

investigateparents’satisfaction with theirchoicesin orderto probeany changesof perspectives on the quality of preschools. The interview questions were designed by

referring to the data from the first phase of interviews. When the second phase of

interview was conducted, two parents who had stopped sending their children to

preschools in the first phase of interview had sent their children to different

preschools. Another parent stopped sending her son to the preschool and considered

sending her son to another preschool. I used emails and MSN to follow up her change

of preschools after I returned to the UK. In addition, one parent had pressure from her

parents-in-law to move her son to a cheap preschool. She sent emails to discuss her

concerns with me when I was in UK. All the information from emails was very useful

for my research.

The participants were interviewed face to face and took about forty minutes to one

hour to complete. In order to help parents feel comfortable during the interview the

location was chosen by the parents. All the parents were happy for the interviews to

be recorded by MP3 recorder. The interviews were transcribed in detail in order to

avoid unreliability (Wellington, 2000). Bryman mentions that tape recording helps to

correct the natural limitations of memories and of the intuitive glosses that we might

place on what people say in interviews, although transcription is time-consuming.

Bryman (2004) suggests that to transcribe the interviews early helps the researcher to

be more aware of the emerging themes and allows them to be referred to in a more

direct way in later interviews. Therefore, the transcription of each interview in this

research was done immediately after interviewing in order for any missing

information to be followed up. The transcripts were sent to the interviewees to check

for inaccuracies. All the interviews and transcriptions were in Chinese. Two

interviewees added some more information to the transcriptions and sent it back to me.

parent by email or letters and encouraged them to keep some notes about the schools.

For example, the notes might include specific activities organized by the school,

special communications with the teacher or head-teacher or particular things with

which they are dissatisfied –anything that the participant thought of as relevant.

The difficulties of doing interviews

Rubin and Rubin (1995) mention that one difficulty in attempting an interview is that

people do not always want to share their lives with you. This was true of this research.

It was not always easy for the parents to share their experience or opinions with me

despite my earlier attempts to establish a relationship with them. One parent, in

particular, proved difficult to interview. She tended to respond to interview questions

by using very shortphrases.Forexample,when Iasked her,“Can you tellmeabout yourchild’sexperiencein thisschool?”Sheresponded “Idon’tknow”.Ifollowed up by asking her“whatdid hesay to you abouthispreschool?”Sheresponded “Nothing special”.Consequently,itwasdifficultto getworthwhileresponses.Forthisparent, choosing a preschool seemed to be a spontaneous action without specific expectations.

It was difficult for her to explain what for her, was taken-for-granted actions (Rubin

and Rubin, 1995). I had to listen carefully to her response in order to probe issues and

encourage her to share more information.

Interviews have to be conducted with care and sensitivity (Cohen et al., 2000). The

interviewer has to concentrate during the interview in order to have good interaction

with the interviewee. Whilst this was the intention the realities of interviewing

mothers can be different. Sometimes, interruptions during the interviews, such as a

interviews. Two participants in this research had young children with them when the

interviews took place. I made a note when interruptions happened in order to be able

to continue the conversation and follow up the issues being discussed but it still

influenced the quality of interview. However, parents were doing me a favour by

participating in this research; thus it was difficult for me to ask parents to have

someone looking after their children during the interviews.

Another difficulty is the time pressure. The parents in this research lived in two

different cities. I had to plan the interview schedule carefully and have some

flexibility, because sometimes parents forgot or confused the time of the

appointments. In addition, it was a longitudinal study; thus, to have good relationships

with participants was very important.Itwasnecessary to maintain atoneof“friendly” chat (Fontana and Frey, 1994) and spend some time talking about other topics in

which the parents may be interested to build up the relationship between the parents

and me. Although there was pressure on time during the interviews, all interviews

were enjoyable experiences conducted with a sense of trust and friendship.