Episode 30: Episode 30. Tricks, Tips, and Stories in Qualitative Interviewing

In this episode, Amy Stich interviews Kathy Roulston on interviewing in qualitative research. This conversation is great for both beginners and advanced researchers. The following is a transcript of the conversation. Amy Stich  0:11  Hello, everyone. Welcome to qualitative conversations Podcast Series hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. I'm Amy Stich and associate professor at the McBee institute of higher education at the University of Georgia and affiliated faculty with the qualitative research program here at UGA as well. I also currently serve as the CO-editor of the six newsletter with one of our students here at the Institute Erin Leach as a guest host today I'll be interviewing Dr. Kathy Roulston on interviewing. Dr. Roulston is a professor in the qualitative research program at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Her research interests include qualitative research methods, specifically qualitative interviewing and analysis of talk in interaction. Her most recent books include interviewing a guide to theory and practice. That's published with sage just coming out in 2022. And Exploring the Archives A Beginner's Guide for Qualitative Researchers co authored with Kathleen de Morais, and published by Myers education press. Outside work Kathy enjoys working with fiber and textiles, and exploring the creative pleasure of spinning hand dyeing and weaving. Dr. Roulston thanks so much for joining us to discuss a topic that all of our qualitative listeners will very likely know at least a little something about an interviewing may even be something that some of our more experienced listeners may at times take for granted as an all too familiar tool for data collection, rather than a method that provokes very meaningful, often critical methodological questions that I know you're going to talk about today. So why don't we just start by you telling us a little bit about your scholarly interests and interviewing and how you got started?Kathy Roulston  1:57  Thank you, Amy, for that lovely introduction. So I first became interested in the methodological aspects of interviewing when I was doing my doctoral studies at the University of Queensland in the 1990s. I had conducted quite a few qualitative interviews prior to that as part of my master's degree in the early 90s. But when I did those interviews, I really saw them as a transparent means for gaining information about the world. So when I was doing my doctoral studies, I was learning about ethno methodological approaches to analysis from Dr. Carolyn Baker. And I took a very puzzling excerpt from an interview that I had conducted in my earlier study, and I reanalyzed it. And then this analysis helped me to get a better understanding of the performance of work that goes into the construction of interview data, in the ways that interviewers and interviewees produce interview data together, and then also how, as a researcher, it's possible to cut and categorize the interview transcripts in a way that can generate findings that can actually distort the ways in which the talk was produced. So I think there's quite a lot of writing about that now. But Dorothy Smith wrote an article back in the early 70s, called theorizing as etiology. And I used that to think about how coding based approaches to data analysis can hide how researchers contribute to the generation of interview accounts. And, of course, I've done methodological work on research interviews since that time, and I still am very intrigued by how research interviews get done.Amy Stich  3:54  It's so interesting. And that's a really lovely transition into some of those deeper methodological or substantive questions surrounding interviewing. Can you talk to us about some of the recent developments in interviewing?Kathy Roulston  4:08  Yeah, thanks. Thank you, Amy. So, over the last couple of yea(continued)