JT and SP are seasoned professionals with consolidated careers in academia and photojournalism, respectively. Their work deeply engages with themes related to ComDev, particularly in the areas of feminism and climate activism — both fields that I find inspiring and impactful.
I have recently interviewed them to get to know their work better, and to discuss the impact that AI is having in their field, among other relevant questions.
This post reflects on the findings of the interviews as methodology research.
About the participants
JT (72 years old, US national) is a professor of political science at a university in the US. At an early age, she embraced feminism as a way to counter her “passivity” — in her own words — towards global injustices and to protest the war her country was waging in Vietnam. Ever since, she has developed her career to research in gender studies, focusing specifically on the ethics of care. In her most recent work, JT explores the connections between care and democracy.
SP (39 years old, Spanish national) is an award-winning photojournalist who has portrayed some of the great human tragedies of our time: the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, the isolation in nursing homes during the pandemic, the Russian war on Ukraine and, more recently, the devastating floods in Valencia, Spain. As a committed professional, he has launched a visual media project to raise awareness of the climate emergency.
First contact
I contacted JT through her Spanish publishing company after seeing the announcement of her participation in the 2024 edition of “Biennial of Thought” in Barcelona. The response was positive, and upon her visit we met in person in the center of Barcelona, in a space provided by the same publishing company.
The second participant, SP, is a professional I had worked with in a covid-19 emergency response mission four years ago. Therefore, my contact was not a “cold call” as with JT. The approach was also more casual (via email and, eventually, whatsapp) and with no intermediaries.
Rapport
Both interviews were conducted in the participants’ native languages, but in different formats: in-person and online. From a researcher’s perspective, the two scenarios for building the rapport were quite different:
- An in-person interview with a participant I had never met before, conducted in a language in which I am not native speaker (English) and that involved complex vocabulary and specialised knowledge of political theories (JT).
- An online interview with a participant I had previously met, conducted in my native language (Spanish) and within my professional field (SP).
For JT’s interview, more preparation was required to familiarise myself with her theories and specific lexicon, while for SP’s, I invested more time in following up on his work, and latest publications in the media.
Upon commencing the interview, the stages to develop the rapport could be summed up as the following:
- Consent request: Before starting the interview, the participants’ consent was requested. Despite this having been already asked by email, they were both informed about the purpose of the interview and its use.
- Camera awareness: Both interviews were recorded on camera, and both participants experienced high self awareness of being filmed, especially at the beginning of the interview. JT expressed worry of involuntarily touching the lavalier microphone, and SP joked about his “messy hair” on camera.
- Warm-up questions: I started the interview with generic questions that could serve to ease the environment, reduce the camera awareness and build trust.
- Questions of interest: After building what I perceived as a comfortable rapport, I jumped into the core questions which require a formed and critical opinion of the participants (e.g.: direct, probing, and interpreting questions). This included challenging some of the participants’ possible inconsistencies. For SP’s interview, this was highly important since some of the questions related to his work could trigger traumatic experiences (e.g.: impact of AI and deep fakes in the coverage of war).
- Wrap-up questions: I finished the interview with lighter questions, giving the space to the participant to comment and ask, and thanking them for their participation.
Semi-structured interviews
I conducted semi-structured interviews around ComDev-related themes:
- Impact of AI in your field
- Examples of modern colonialism
- Challenges in care and democracy / journalism and climate change
The questions were adapted to the expertise of the participants and to their answers. Aligned with the interest of this blog, the following is an example of the first question prompts and an extract of the answers:
EGS: Recent headlines report on AI as the solution to the healthcare crisis in the UK, or to the childcare crisis in the US. Why does it seem easier to develop such sophisticated technology instead of putting care at the center of human life?
JT: The AI solutions and the other robotic solutions have a place, but they don’t substitute what care is about. Care is about creating and sustaining relationships. And relationships require really close contact. AI can’t do that. Women, working class men, men of color, ethnic groups, or the lowest group in the caste system are the people doing the actual dirty care work. The only way to begin to try to make everybody’s voice equally heard is through democracy.
EGS: You found yourself showing evidence of war crimes, and there were people who doubted the veracity of your photos. How do you fight denialism and AI-generated deep fakes?
SP: I covered the massacre in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv. It was so frustrating to be publishing photos of the corpses, the testimonies of the survivors, and realising that for some people your work is as credible as a Twitter bot saying “that’s a lie”. A large part of the population cannot distinguish between propaganda, disinformation and facts.
Learning outcomes and reflections
In my experience, semi-structured interviews allow for a good flow of dialogue and create space for authentic interactions. The organic questions posed by the researcher can serve as stimuli for participants, who may feel that their responses are genuinely interesting or compelling enough to go off script. This is an important point to take into consideration when building rapport, whether in person or online.
Active listening techniques are essential to show engagement with the points raised by participants. However, in video-recorded interviews, it is especially important to avoid interrupting participants (unless they are off topic) and use additional non-verbal communication to demonstrate agreement and prompt follow-up. This approach ensures having clean and clear responses for possible video edits.
While the language used (native / non-native speaker) did not pose any problems for the development of the interview, additional preparation and learning of specific vocabulary were required to conduct the interview with JT due to the academic nature of her theories. The interview with SP was conducted in familiar professional coding (Holstein, 1995).
Both face-to-face and online interviews faced technical constraints, which could add some confusion: microphone audibility (in person) and brief Internet disruptions (online).
Recording both interviews on camera required measures to counter technological awareness, but also provided a comprehensive view of data collection, including non-verbal communication. Reviewing both recordings has revealed certain reactions and silences from the participants that I, as the interviewer, missed during the live interview. This shows that the interview is an active text, a site where meaning is created and performed (Trier-Bieniek, 2012) collaboratively by the interviewer and the participants (Holstein, 1995). The nature of active interviewing reshapes the interviewer into an ethnographer, who records for future analysis (Holstein, 1995) and meaning construction.
Header image: Freepik.
References
GARCIA, A. C., et al (2009) ‘Ethnographic Approaches to the Internet and Computer-Mediated Communication’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 38:1, pp.52-84
HOLSTEIN, J. A., & GUBRIUM, J. F. (1995). The active interview. SAGE Publications, Inc., https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412986120
TRIER-BIENIEK, A. (2012). Framing the telephone interview as a participant-centered tool for qualitative research: a methodological discussion. Qualitative Research, 12(6), 630-644. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112439005
Super interesting to read, Eva. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Thanks so much for your comment, Ana! Very much appreciate it!