For this interviewing exercise, Luke and I interviewed a total of six international students - each of us conducted two interviews individually and two individuals jointly. On listening to the recordings while transcribing the verbatim, I noticed some differences in interviewing styles between Luke's and my interview style. In addition, I realised that I have a tendency to interrupt and make assumptions during interviews, which greatly compromises on their quality. This indicates that I have to improve my interviewing technique.
Upon further reflection on the exercise, I broke down the interviewing process into three main phases:
(1) Prior to the interview
Before coming up with the interview questions, Luke and I discussed about the theory with regards to the topic that was assigned to us - the experience of CBE international students studying at ANU. Our theory was based on semiotics, which is defined as the study of the structure and meaning of language. We proposed that a person's semiotic background, not just his or her command of English, will play an important role in influencing his or her experience in the ANU. We took some time to develop the interview questions, because we both felt that it was important to first formulate a theory.
Coming from a quantitative background, I also noticed that the way in which we went about theorising and forming interview questions is slightly different for both types of research. For example, Luke (coming for a qualitative background), was sharing with me how certain words (such as describe, can you tell me more about ..., experiences, influences, attitudes, etc.) were preferred in qualitative research when formulating the interview questions.
When constructing the interview questions, we tried to make them as broad and neutral as possible so as to reduce potential interviewer and social desirability bias. The following five questions were part of our interview:
- How do you feel as an individual in ANU with regards to your identity?
- How do you associate with others at ANU?
- How does your experience at ANU differ from your experience of Australia/home
country? - How satisfied are you with your conduct at ANU and ANU’s conduct of you?
- Overall, do you find your experience at ANU enjoyable?
(2) During the interview
Many international students did not fully understand our interview questions, and were only able to respond only after we have clarified the meaning of certain words in the interview questions. This was an oversight on Luke's and my part, because we had assumed that firstly, all ANU-CBE international students will have the same command of English as us, and secondly, they they will understand the meaning of the words "identity", "associate", and "conduct" in the context of semiotics. It is important that interviewees understand and do not misinterpret the questions, otherwise the responses may not help in collecting relevant data. However, the questions that interviewees asked also shed light on certain issues that were new to us, and gave us a better understanding of their cultural backgrounds and customs.
On the whole, I found that having a scribe and an interviewer made it much easier to conduct an interview. The quality of the interview was also maximised. When we conducted the interviews jointly, one of us was in charge of ensuring that the recorder was functioning and taking down observational notes, and the other was in charge of asking the questions and interacting with the interviewee. Having conducted interviews individually most of the time, I found myself less stressed and hectic in the joint interviews.
In terms of interviewing technique and style, I felt that while I could connect with most of the interviewees who came from Asia (Filipinos, Malaysians, and Chinese), I struggled when I had to prompt interviewees for further elaboration of the claims they made. Sometimes, in prompting interviewees to explain in detail, I felt that I have interrupted the conversation and their train of thought, and even imposed my views on their responses. Luke assured me that such incidents usually point to a lack of experience rather than a lack of interviewing skills. I must admit that I'm so used to structured interviews, that semi-structured and unstructured interviews seem a little overwhelming to me at first. Fortunately, after conducting a few more interviews, I slowly got the hang of it and conducted the semi-structured interviews more confidently.
(3) After the interview
Transcribing the interviews verbatim took some time, but having a systematic approach facilitated our subsequent data analysis. Based on our theory, we used coding to analyse the transcribed data. After the entire interviewing process was over, I referred back to the observational notes I took during some of the interviews. Together with the transcripts, I thought that the fieldnotes contributed to the entire data analysis process, especially when we proceeded to code and make sense of the wealth of data that we had collected.
Having gone through this exercise, I would like to thank my groupmate, Luke, for being so wonderful and patient to me. Given that I am still learning the ropes of carrying out qualitative research, I must say that I have learnt a lot from you! I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise.
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