Interview topic
With an Irish general election scheduled for later this month, I decided to focus on social issues in the country’s public discourse and civic society for this assignment. I hoped this approach would be likely to surface interviewees willing to speak about issues they were passionate about, while allowing for the possibility of conducting an in-person interview from where I live in Dublin.
I attended an online meeting organised by an environmental NGO in Ireland (of which I am not a member), where the virtual ‘floor’ was opened to attendees to contribute their views on possible strategies for building a public advocacy campaign linking climate change and sustainable public housing. These two social issues were already playing a significant role in election discourse.
I was interested in the mode of campaigning by the NGO, in which members of the public are invited to contribute openly to strategy planning alongside full-time staff and activists affiliated with the organisation on a voluntary basis. I developed three questions to ask of participants in this latter category:
- How do you see your involvement with this organisation in influencing public opinion around climate change, sustainable development and social change?
- What do you think the benefits of joining the organisation are from an activist perspective, versus eg. trade/tenant union organising, direct action or political party membership?
- What effect or changes do you hope to see from your campaigning with the organisation?
These questions were intended to provide the interviewees with an opportunity to articulate their thoughts on NGO-led activism, while leaving space for the forms of ‘multivocality’ in answers, as encouraged in the process of the active interviewing (Gubrium & Holstein, 1995, p.76).
Finding interviewees
After some unsuccessful outreach, I took a direct approach to finding interviewees. Eventually, I was able to find one member via a Facebook event page affiliated with the NGO, and another member via a WhatsApp group I was added to by another contact who I knew had been involved in activism with the group in the past.
Once verbal consent was obtained from both activists, the next step was to ask if I could call them separately to better explain my request in advance of the interview itself. This was useful in introducing myself and establishing common ground. I was able to explain that I had also attended the online meeting and mention some of the topics of discussion which had sparked my interest in learning more by speaking further with participants, noting Gubrium and Holstein’s direction that prior knowledge of relevant areas of discussion can act as “a way of cultivating shared awareness and experiences” between interviewer and interviewee (1995, p.76).
On both phone calls, I also explained that names and interview transcripts need not be published. This was particularly important from the perspective of the second interviewee, who felt that they were not “knowledgeable” enough to speak in depth about climate change in a public interview. I explained I was not interested in expert views on climate change, but in hearing from people who were involved in activism through membership of civil society organisations. This helped reassure this interviewee. Research in the area has indicated that telephone interviewees are more likely to seek clarification (Drew, Irvine and Sainsbury, 2012, p. 96), and while I would later conduct the actual interview in person, their disclosure led me to reflect again on my framing of the purpose of the interview and to consider how to improve the way I frame future interview requests.
Question formulation and interviews
Organising the first interview over Zoom was relatively straightforward. A time and date was agreed almost immediately and there were no issues with connecting. This interviewee lived abroad, but remained very interested in Irish political and policy discourse. This interviewee was more willing to speak about specific policy issues in a framework which adhered to more conventional political responses to climate change. They expressed the view that campaigning as part of a larger organisation was more likely to result in them “being listened to”. They trusted and appreciated the degree of professionality that the NGO’s staff lent to campaign organising and expressed the hope that the NGO would have more leverage to ‘force’ the issue of climate into a prominent election campaign issue.
The Zoom interview was relatively quick compared to the second interview. After brief remarks at the start, and the three agreed questions were discussed, the conversation concluded as the interviewee had other commitments. While the answers were insightful, opportunities to build rapport were limited, although the shortened format of the interview was a contributory factor.
The second interview, which took place in-person, proved more difficult due to scheduling. Eventually, a mutually convenient place was agreed at a public library. The venue worked well; as a public place it acted as a neutral space while also being familiar to the interviewee.
The interviewee expressed the view that their membership of the NGO was important as a means of connecting with like-minded people. They had been involved with other political organisations in the past but felt that the issue of climate change was not prioritised sufficiently. They appreciated the autonomy to propose and weigh in on potential campaign strategies in a way that they felt would not be possible in a political party.
The interview was longer than the first. While we got through the agreed three questions relatively quickly, we spoke in more detail about climate activism and national politics. I sensed it would be rude of me to leave too soon after the three questions had been asked. Indeed, the ensuing conversation outside the interview framework opened a number of avenues of further discussion (such as how climate activism has evolved since they first got involved and their personal motivations) which would have been of interest in a more discursive analysis of the subject material.
The multivocality hoped for in the interview design process did emerge via positional shifts in both interviewees’ answers which did not emerge in discussion with the larger group during the online meeting. For example, the first interviewee expressed a degree of doubt about the extent to which the general public would make an easy connection between the issues of housing and climate change, a point which was not discussed in much detail in the online meeting. In this sense, these more direct interviews provided more nuanced insights.
Reflections
I found this a useful exercise in developing my interview skills. In recalling Yow’s perspective that everything the interview does before the interview contributes to the “establishment of the character of the relationship between interviewer and narrator” (2016, p. 153), I found that participating in the online meeting ahead of the interviews significantly helped in building rapport with the interviewees, as it provided a basis of familiarity and appeared to indicate to both interviewees that I took a genuine interest in the local activist scene.
Areas I noted for future interviews include:
- Starting the process of looking for interviewees as early as possible and be proactive – try multiple channels and approaches.
- Ensuring that interview questions do not leave any ambiguity. Try to speak with the interviewee prior to the interview itself to clarify the purpose of the interview.
- Prioritising in-person interviews where possible.
Liam Corcoran
References
Drew, P., Irvine, A., & Sainsbury, R. (2012). “Am I not answering your questions properly?” Clarification, Adequacy, and Responsiveness in Semi-structured Telephone and Face-to-face interviews. Qualitative Research, 13(1), 87–106. SAGE Publications.
Gubrium, J. F. & Holstein, J. A., (1995). The Active Interview. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Yow, V. (2016). Interviewing Techniques and Strategies. In R. Perks & A. Thomson (Eds.), The Oral History Reader (3rd. ed.) (pp. 153-178). Oxon: Routledge.