Continuing the Design: Making the

Research Credible
In: Qualitative Interviewing (2nd ed.): The Art of Hearing Data

By: Herbert J. Rubin & Irene S. Rubin

Pub. Date: 2012
Access Date: February 10, 2019
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9780761920755
Online ISBN: 9781452226651
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452226651
Print pages: 64-78
© 2005 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research
Methods. Please note that the pagination of the online version
will vary from the pagination of the print book.
Continuing the Design: Making the Research Credible

Through careful design you ensure that your results are credible
to the reader of your research. To enhance credibility, you
choose interviewees who are knowledgeable, whose combined
views present a balanced perspective, and who can help you
test your emerging theory. You investigate your research
problem thoroughly, accurately present what the interviewees
have said, and carefully check apparent contradictions and
inconsistencies. You write up your report transparently, so
readers can see how systematically and accurately you
collected, recorded, and analyzed the data.

Choosing Interviewees

Your interviews gain credibility when your conversational

partners are experienced and have first-hand knowledge about
the research problem. To convince readers that your research
does not have an unintended slant, you select interviewees
whose views reflect different, even contending, perspectives.
Once you have formulated your tentative theory, you choose
interviewees who can help you flesh out the theory, modify
it based on their experiences, or steer you away from a
nonproductive avenue of inquiry.
Finding Interviewees who will Provide Useful Information

Interviewees should be experienced and knowledgeable in the

area you are interviewing about. Finding them may take skill
and time, sometimes including a bit of detective work. Picking
the low-hanging fruit—that is, talking only to interviewees who
are easy to find and talk to—may not give you a balanced or
accurate picture.

Experienced

Finding interviewees with the relevant, first-hand experience

is critical in making your results convincing. A report from
someone who was kidnapped is better than one from a
journalist who interviewed the victim. If you want to learn about
student culture, talk to students who have participated in that
culture, not to their parents, guidance counselors, teachers, or
even resident assistants.

Finding students to talk to may not be difficult, but finding the

person who attended a particular meeting that occurred years
ago may be more problematic. Your search for particular
individuals may be hit or miss in the beginning, but once you
find one person who was involved in the matter, he or she can
usually tell you who else to talk to or where you might find
documents that list the names of others who were involved.

One way to begin is to ask for help from general informants who
have already observed the scene. Social workers and even the
police might be able to point out informed gang leaders. Political
lobbyists can tell you which congressional staffers were most
involved in drafting particular pieces of legislation.

When you are examining a specific issue such as a political

dispute or a successful protest, you can look in newspapers, on
Web sites, or in newsletters for the names of people who were
involved. If you are studying a historic or political event, you can
often find out who did what by looking in court records, libraries,
or archives (including newspaper archives). Sometimes a bit of
detective work and preliminary inquiry is required to get started.
In an oral-history project about a black musicians' union, for
example, Diane Turner (1997) had to ask around to find
consultants in the field who could tell her the names of
performers who had been in the union.

Knowledgeable

It seems obvious enough that the people you want to talk to

should be knowledgeable about the research problem. To learn
about computer viruses, you do not interview graphic artists
but instead track down specialists in computer security. The
problem is that not everyone who should know about something
is necessarily well informed.

Assuming that a police specialist in computer crime will know

something about hacking is reasonable; a mayor ought to know
about making political deals with council members; an
executive director of a social-service agency should know what
that agency accomplished. But a person's position is not always
a good proxy for what he or she knows. New city-council
members are often ill-informed about governance. New police
officers will be able to cite rules and regulations but may not
know how things are actually done. One health-policy analyst
may have spent a lifetime studying health care, whereas
another may have squeaked by learning the minimum
necessary to stay employed.

Sometimes you cannot figure out in advance how much

someone knows. The best you can do is choose a person who
is in the appropriate position and then after interviewing him or
her decide if you have obtained the information you needed.
More often, however, your preliminary research suggests who is
knowledgeable. When Herb first started studying growth issues,
he knew of the importance of city officials, housing developers,
and environmentalists. After a while he figured out that those
who controlled the sewers were also crucial, as sewer capacity
limited growth, so he added the sanitary engineers to his list
of people to interview, and when they were interviewed they
suggested including road planners.

When you have little to go on in figuring out who might be

informed, one approach is to first find people whose job it is
to monitor that arena, and ask them with whom to speak. For
example, reporters follow specific beats, such as the art world,
city hall, or immigration; those in charge of computer bulletin
boards normally pay attention to developments in cyberspace;
editors of newsletters for religious groups, environmental
groups, or model-airplane clubs can guide you about current
activities in their respective fields. People who run professional
organizations or trade associations or who act as consultants
keep tabs on what is going on and can point out to you who is
likely to have the specific knowledge that you want to obtain.

In cultural studies, almost any member of the group should be

able to provide you with examples of common practices, beliefs,
and values, but few are experienced in communicating what
they take for granted to outsiders. So you look for “encultured
informants,” individuals who know the culture well and take it as
their responsibility to explain what it means (Spradley 1979, p.
47). The server at the restaurant with several years experience,
the sergeant in the police district, and the full professor at
the university are often knowledgeable about their respective
settings and able to describe the culture to you.

In both topical and cultural studies, rarely can you find a single
individual who has all the information that you seek. Instead,
you look for people who know about particular parts of a
problem and then piece together what they collectively know.
If you are studying how a corn field became a strip mall, there
may have been many people involved along the way, each of
whom knows a part of the story, and you want to talk to all of
them.

With a Variety of Perspectives

The credibility of your findings is enhanced if you make sure

you have interviewed individuals who reflect a variety of
perspectives. The philosophy of responsive interviewing
suggests that reality is complex; to accurately portray that
complexity, you need to gather contradictory or overlapping
perceptions and nuanced understandings that different
individuals hold.

Sometimes you are simply after complementary

understandings. If you are researching for a biography, you
would want to include the person's spouse, children, friends,
other relatives, and work associates, because each one would
know the subject of your biography in a specific context, would
see him or her a little differently. If you are studying religious
values, you should seek the views of both clergy and
congregants, because how seriously they take the values will
differ.

In cultural studies you note from your early interviews or

observations the distinguishing characteristics in the group and
then interview people who differ on these specific
characteristics. Key distinctions may be between the old-timers
and the new recruits, between PC users and Macintosh
advocates, or between those who want to fight back and those
who prefer to accept the status quo. If you are examining what
courtesy means, the relevant distinctions might be between
those who are higher or lower in a bureaucratic hierarchy or
those with higher or lower status in a group. You are not looking
for any differences at all but looking for those that are related to
the concepts and themes you are working out. As you continue
to interview people from each of the relevant categories, each
new conversation should add less and less to what you already
know, until all you start hearing are the same matters over and
over again. At that point, you have reached what Glaser and
Strauss term the “saturation point” (Glaser and Strauss 1967),
and you stop.

In topical studies, you picture the research arena as a theater in

the round and try to locate interviewees with different vantage
points on what is going on at center stage. You then talk to
individuals from each of those vantage points. In studying an
educational system, school board members, principals,
teachers, parents' associations, and students all have their own
slants. When Pushkala Prasad (1991) studied the founding of
the clerical union at Yale, to obtain these distinct perspectives,
she conducted semistructured interviews with union organizers,
clerical and technical workers, faculty, students, representatives
of the Yale administration, and members of the New Haven
community.
When you are studying controversial issues, you want to obtain
all sides. A police officer and a speeder are likely to have very
different views on why a ticket was given. Our experience is
that when we solicit alternative views and our interviewees are
aware that we are doing so, interview quality and credibility
improves. In a business dispute, you might want to speak to
union members first, and then, armed with the union
perspective, ask to talk to upper-level management to get their
version. Upper-level managers may be irritated enough at the
things the union is saying to want to set the record straight.
Herb's experience is that people from one side of a dispute will
suggest what to ask the other side and even provide needed
documents. Interviewing both sides not only helps ensure
balance but also ensures considerable depth, as people want to
make sure you really understand their views.

You do not need a vast number of interviewees to increase

the credibility of your findings; instead, you have to be able to
convince readers that you have interviewed to obtain different
points of views and that when brought together these
understandings provide a complete picture. You might want to
double-check certain key conclusions, but once your double-
checking verifies your initial findings, you can stop.
To Build and Test Theory

Though you want to be able to describe what you have heard

and in doing so answer your specific research question, you
also hope to be able to build a theory that has broader
implications. With this goal in mind, you select interviewees
in ways that give you confidence in extending what you find
beyond the immediate research setting.

For instance, suppose you are studying a bureaucratic

squabble about whether to reduce funding for day care and
increase funding for highway repairs in a municipal budget as
a step in building a theory that might explain the source of
municipal conflicts. To begin, you need to figure out what this
squabble is really about. Is this an argument over priorities,
whether the city should reduce funding for day care and
increase funding for highway repair? Or does it reflect a quarrel
between the public works department and the city manager,
suggesting that the theory will be about contests over power
in a bureaucracy? Or is it symbolic of deeper schisms in the
community and resulting disagreements over who should be
involved and how political decisions should be made? Testing
each of these ideas requires asking specific questions from a
different set of interviewees, and you have to do so to see which
provides the best explanation.

If the argument is really about tradeoffs between specific types

of expenditures, there should be plenty of evidence of other
quarrels over budget tradeoffs that you can learn about by
interviewing other department heads concerning the frequency
and intensity of budget quarrels, perhaps on the tradeoffs
between having more police on the street or better road repair,
or between more spending for downtown improvements in
parking or neighborhood spending for improved drainage. To
examine if the quarrel is more about the city manager asserting
control over the director of public works, a different approach
is required. If the battle is over control and not really about
a budget item, you should find evidence of conflicts over
nonbudgetary items between the city manager and the public
works director, perhaps over staffing or issues of management
style. To test this out, you might want to talk to both the city
manager and the public works director about prior conflicts,
what started them and how they were resolved, and then
compare their answers to those of the other department heads
and see if their answers differ in tone or content. If this battle
is between the manager and the public works director, the
public works director is likely to be more emotional, angrier,
or more frustrated than his peers in other departments. To
explore the third possibility, that you observed only the edge of a
social cleavage that goes beyond City Hall, you would interview
council members, the mayor, interest group representatives,
and homeowners' association activists and organized groups
representing the poor, and ask them in general what types of
issues cause clashes and the role the different groups played.
In this way you can determine if what you initially saw at City
Hall reflected larger social issues rather than narrow
bureaucratic concerns.

In building theory you combine several themes and then test

them to see if they hold. Next, you try to figure out the
mechanisms that link cause with effect and conduct interviews
to explore if these mechanisms hold. If you suspect that family
income and educational background affect how unmarried
teenage girls cope with pregnancy, you interview unmarried
teenagers who differ in terms of income and education and
work out a series of questions that encourage them to discuss
ways in which income or education influenced their decisions
and their strategies. If you find no differences between your
interviewees, you would then reject the idea that income and
education explain how teenagers cope with pregnancy.
Searching out mechanisms is easier when you include
considerable relevant variation in your choice of interviewees.
In her study of pregnant black teens, for example, Elaine Kaplan
tried to include as much diversity as she could, seeking out
older women who had been teenage mothers, as well as current
teenage mothers, and teenage mothers from middle-class
backgrounds as well as those from poor backgrounds (1997).
Kaplan also talked to teachers, counselors, and black and white
teenage girls who did not get pregnant. By interviewing a broad
range of people, she was able to describe the context of
teenage pregnancy; by looking at older and younger women,
she was able to examine the effects of teenage pregnancy over
time; by looking at teens from middle-class as well as working
and poorer families, she could determine what the results of
poverty and other factors were; by interviewing white as well
as black teens, she could see the impact of race. Kaplan built
into the selection of interviewees sufficient variation to suggest
different mechanisms for her theory on how pregnant teenagers
coped.

To summarize, how you choose your interviewees is central to

building confidence in your results. You do not necessarily have
to talk to a lot of people, but you have to talk to people who
have had the appropriate experience, are knowledgeable, and
are able to explain to you what they know. You need to select
interviewees who collectively present an overall view of your
topic, while at the same time choosing them with sufficiently
different backgrounds to provide convincing evidence for the
theory you are trying to build.

Thoroughness and Accuracy

An appropriate choice of interviewees helps make your

arguments credible, but you also need to show that your
questioning and sampling have been thorough and that what
you report is accurate.

Thoroughness means investigating all the relevant options with

care and completeness, checking out facts and tracking down
discrepancies. Thoroughness means choosing interviews to
obtain disparate views and carefully piecing together the
separate parts of a puzzle. Thoroughness requires preparing
follow-up questions when evidence is missing or thin, or when
you hear something that sounds puzzling. Thoroughness
involves carefully backing up each explanation you offer with
evidence from your interviews. If you cannot find evidence, or if
the results do not hold up in a variety of situations, you do not
report them.

Thoroughness means investigating new paths as they crop up,

redesigning the study as often as necessary to pursue these
new directions. It entails testing out alternative explanations,
talking about them with interviewees who have different
backgrounds and perspectives. Sometimes thoroughness
means digging back in time to tell a story from the beginning
or looking for missing parts of narratives. It might involve your
tracking down promising leads that introduce new ideas or
identifying and then interviewing knowledgeable interviewees
who might change your interpretation. If you find a gap in logic
when you get to the write-up, you go back to the interviewing to
fill in the missing links.

Accuracy requires that you be careful in how you obtain, record,

and report what you have heard. Accuracy includes
representing what the interviewees have said exactly as
spoken. At the most technical level, that means not making
mistakes as you transcribe and when possible asking the
conversational partners to check your transcription. When
writing reports, an accurate researcher does not rely on
memory about what people said but instead examines each
interview transcript.

Accuracy and honesty of presentation also mean that the

interviewer does not put words in the mouth of the interviewee,
substituting his or her opinions or experiences for those of the
interviewee or selectively choosing (and hence biasing) what
the person said. Sometimes accuracy means getting across the
meaning of what interviewees have said rather than quoting
them exactly, especially if the quote is convoluted or says two or
more things at the same time. To be doubly sure you are right,
draw up a summary and ask your interviewees if this is what
they meant.

Most importantly, accuracy means creating a description and

explanation of the research setting or laying out a process with
such clarity and understanding that participants in the research
recognize and acknowledge your description of their world. You
may want to run your interpretations by your interviewees to
make sure they see themselves and their world in what you
have written. Your description and analysis should be good
enough that strangers armed with your work would be able to
understand the researched culture well enough to navigate the
setting.
Believability

Believability means demonstrating that what you have been told

is on the mark and that you have not been deceived by your
interviewees. In conversational partnerships, most people try to
be honest and open; lies are rare and easily discovered in a
qualitative project. Over the course of a long, depth interview,
and better yet several, you can usually figure out where a
person is exaggerating and what areas he or she is ignoring.

Your interviewees should know that they do not have to talk to

you, that you are not trying to catch them out, and that there
is generally no need to lie. In addition, in many projects you
get to know your interviewees well, and they get to know you
well enough to be forthcoming. Because people know you are
talking to others who might tell you the whole story, there is
a tendency to be reasonably truthful. Still, if you should catch
someone in a lie, try not to get upset over being deceived.
Instead, back off and rethink why the lie occurred and then
change what you later ask so you are not pressuring
interviewees to tell you something untruthful.

Oddly enough, when they do occur, lies can be useful clues

to what is going on in your data. For example, criminologist
David Luckenbill wanted to find out the income of young male
prostitutes he was studying but felt they were exaggerating
how much they earned. Toward the close of the conversation,
Luckenbill asked his interviewees if they could give him change
for a $10 bill and learned they did not have enough cash to do
so. Luckenbill realized that his interviewees were lying about
their income, but rather than discounting what the interviewees
said, concluded that these young men so wanted to justify their
occupation that they greatly exaggerated their earnings.

Even though lying is not a major problem, you still need to

choose interviewees and design questioning patterns to
minimize distortions, calculated omissions, and exaggerations.
You question in ways that enable you to verify what the
interviewees tell you, reconcile contradictory or inconsistent
information, and fill in gaps of missing material. Try to make
sure you do not push interviewees beyond what they know and
are willing to talk about. You make your results more believable
by using multiple sources of information and building some
redundancy into the design. You can often check out what
people are saying by observation and background work. A
leader of one organization will probably not distort the fact that
he or she has had or is having a fight with another organization
when you have witnessed public disagreements and are known
to read the newsletters of each organization.

Interviews are more believable when it is clear that the

interviewees have had direct access to the information
requested. If you are talking about the president, and you
interview a guard at the Capitol, readers are likely to ask
themselves how a guard could know this type of information.
You design your questions and choose your interviewees so
that you establish not only what they know, but how they know
it. Do they have first-hand experience? Have they studied the
matter themselves? If you are after a technical point, do they
have the requisite expertise? Irene always starts her interviews
with a few questions on the conversational partner's experience
base—how long they have worked in their current job, what
work they did before, and if she doesn't know, she asks some
details about the work.

To help you recognize distortions, fabrications, and omissions,

you build redundancy into the design by asking the same
question in different ways to check out the results. If you
encounter inconsistencies, you can ask about them politely. You
might broach the subject with the following: “I noticed that you
mentioned earlier that you did not like the planning aspect of the
budget process, but now you are talking about the importance
of planning in revenue projection. That sounds contradictory….”
Then let the conversational partner explain the apparent
contradiction. Keep in mind, though, that people can hold two
contradictory views simultaneously, and both may be true in
the sense that the interviewees believe them both. A person
can believe in environmentalism, because clean air is good, yet
drive a large car because it is safer. You need to check out the
inconsistency and find resolutions where they exist, but you do
not have to force people to an unrealistic level of consistency or
embarrass them about the compromises they have made.

Redundancy also means asking at least some of the same

questions to different people in separate roles in ways that allow
you to check your interviews for consistency. Suppose you were
conducting a study of street people and discovered that though
there were widespread norms of food sharing, street people felt
that it was okay to steal from each other. Such a finding appears
somewhat inconsistent, and to make your report believable, you
need to show that you explored these differences. You could
do so by asking people when it is okay to steal and when it
is not, hoping to obtain more nuanced answers, for instance,
that it is okay to steal but not so much that people end up
with nothing to eat. If you cannot resolve an inconsistency
between interviewees, you may have to pick between different
versions. To make your choice of versions more believable, you
need to show how you evaluated the interviewees' memory, the
quality of the evidence, and the bias or slant in each version.
Sometimes rather than pick one version, you present two or
more different versions and use the sharp differences to explain
why a conflict was so severe.

When you are checking out inconsistencies or omissions, if

possible, compare your findings with other sources of
information, such as documents, newspaper stories, court
depositions, or testimony. When asked about how he knew
that interviewees were telling the truth, an investigator with
the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) argued that
on the one hand people wanted to be helpful, to figure out
what had caused a plane to crash, and on the other hand, the
agency checked all the facts against a broader context. The
NTSB interviewer reported that all the information they get from
interviews is cross-checked, not only between interviews, but
also between interviews and evidence from the debris of the
airplane, and between the answers in the interviews and radar
and weather data recorded over the planes' flight path (personal
interview with David Bowling, June 22, 2001).

In research projects where lying, distortion, or exaggeration

may be a problem, such as when someone has done something
wrong or embarrassing, you may need to make extra efforts to
get past fronts, images, or self-serving versions of a story or
event. Suppose you were interviewing students who dropped
out of college and asking them why they left. This is a
sufficiently embarrassing problem that some interviewees might
not tell you the whole truth. They might say they dropped out
because they lacked money, but perhaps there were other
reasons as well that they failed to report. Normally, you would
only ask people about their own experiences, but if the self-
reports are suspect, to encourage your interviewees to explain
more fully the reasons for dropping out, you might take a
different tack and ask the interviewees to provide examples
from other people they know. In most answers, the interviewee
will be drawing on his or her own experiences as well as those
of friends and acquaintances, and may point out which
examples are personal. Giving the interviewees the option of
talking about other people helps avoid embarrassment while still
keeping the discussion grounded in real examples.
Sometimes distortions reflect an obligation the interviewees feel
to provide a formalistic reply because of their work role. Electric-
company spokespersons may insist that the nuclear plant
accident never put citizens in any health danger, because to
admit otherwise might force costly repairs and invite lawsuits
for health damage. Police and court employees are particularly
likely to give formalistic answers, because if they admit they
do not follow appropriate procedures, their evidence is suspect
when presented in court. Similarly, scientists might give
normative answers about how they do their research, because
actual procedures may seem too casual and threaten their
credibility and possibly their funding (Thomas and Marquart
1988). Even qualitative interviewers might sometimes tell you
how something should be done rather than the way they
actually do things because they are afraid of losing your
respect.

Ideally, you work to phrase questions in ways that avoid

formalistic replies. If what you are asking about might involve
violation of rules, laws, or norms, you should probably work
out an indirect way of approaching the matter. One way people
provide indirect answers is through telling stories that contain
the answer but without saying so in so many words; rather than
asking a question directly you might want to ask for stories
on the topic and then analyze them for themes they contain.
Another approach to use if the initial answer seems vague is to
follow up by presenting a concrete incident of the type under
discussion and ask for comments about it. Conversely, if a
person has detailed a specific project in harmonious terms and
you suspect that you are getting an overly optimistic report, later
in the interview you can ask about stresses more generally.

Overall, try to avoid asking questions that might evoke

formalistic answers. When our colleague Jim was asking court
officials to discuss how they carried out hearings on parole
requests, all he got back were descriptions of the formal
procedures. About to give up, Jim switched his line of
questioning to topics he knew were not covered in the manuals
and asked the officials how they felt about the convicts. To this
question, the interviewees responded directly and openly. The
officials elaborated and indicated how their negative feelings
toward the prisoners influenced the way they conducted
hearings. Another approach is to base your questions on what
you and the interviewee have both observed. The interviewee
is unlikely to give you an idealized answer because he or she
knows you just saw what actually happened.
Only if these more polite and indirect approaches fail and you
really need the information would you want to risk a more
challenging approach. “I really want to talk to you about the role
of faulty welds in the coolant system in the recent shutdown of
the plant, and whether officials knew about the welds. That is
what some folks are saying, and I would like to get your side.”
That is pretty challenging wording, but it may be necessary if
the interviewee has been giving nothing but bland statements.
He or she may respond to find out how much you know, and
in doing so confirm or disprove your suspicions. Or you may
get a detailed rebuttal of the charges. Once conversational
partners start to explain, the tendency is for them to get it right,
especially if you have already shown that you are sympathetic
and trustworthy. If you are concerned that interviewees might
distort or omit information, for example, in an evaluation project,
avoid boxing them into conclusions that make them
uncomfortable. It is better to ask what obstacles a program has
run into than to word the question to ask why something in
particular failed. Asking about obstacles avoids the implication
that the problems were not addressed or that the interviewees
were at fault.

Be cautious about asking questions before the interviewing

relationship is fairly solid and the interviewee knows that you
are informed enough to test the answers you get. Irene almost
always talks with subordinates and technical staff before
interviewing bosses and political appointees, and then from
what she learns, words her questions to send signals that say, “I
already know quite a bit; if you say something that sounds a bit
off, I will pick it up.” You can ask a ranking official about layoffs
in a federal agency by saying something like the following: “The
unions have argued that there was no need for a reduction in
force, but that it was carried out anyway. What could they mean
by that? What was the reason for the reduction in force?” By
mentioning that you have talked to union representatives and
implying access to their documents, you suggest that you are
not ignorant and reduce the likelihood of getting a misleading
answer. Being seen around as a patient observer is another
way to encourage people not to distort. If it is even remotely
possible that you could have seen and heard some event or
discussion, interviewees are unlikely to claim those things never
happened and are less likely to omit them from the discussion.

Unfortunately, though people often try to tell the truth,

sometimes their memories have faded or they have blurred
two or more events or characters together, or not remembered
exactly what was said. Oral historians often tell their
interviewees what period of time they will be covering and ask
their conversational partners to look for documentation they
may have kept of those days, such as diaries, appointment
calendars, or old newspaper clippings that might refresh their
memories. The National Transportation Safety Board
investigator mentioned previously often encounters crash
survivors who cannot remember what happened. To deal with
this problem, he carefully leads them up from earlier events
before the flight and well before the crash, going step by step
until they cannot remember any more. Other interviewers learn
how to link what they are asking with events they are pretty sure
the interviewees can recall. When Irene was interviewing about
how cities changed their budget process, she sometimes asked
questions about events 20 years earlier. Instead of asking for
dates when something occurred, she asked the interviewees if
they remembered who the mayor was at that time. A change in
mayor is a big event, and workers at City Hall tend to remember
it. Once Irene knew who the mayor was, she could check on the
dates of that mayor from other sources.

Demonstrating Credibility Through Transparency

Transparency means that a reader of a qualitative research
report is able to see the process by which the data were
collected and analyzed. A transparent report allows the reader
to assess the thoroughness of the design of the work as well as
the conscientiousness, sensitivity, and biases of the researcher.
Interviewers maintain careful records of what they did, saw, and
felt and include portions of this record in their final write-ups so
the reader can determine where and how the researcher went
beyond what the interviewees said.

To ensure that data is transparent, you should keep notes or

recordings that others can read or play back, so long as
confidentiality and anonymity are protected. Keep in a log how
the transcript was made, whether directly from tape, from notes,
or from memory; how it was verified; and the level of detail
it contains. If the transcripts are edited versions of the audio
recordings, the log should note the kind of material that was
left out. Your path of analysis should also be transparent, with
a record kept showing the coding categories you used, that is,
how you sorted out what people said.

Be as precise as you can in your records. On notes that you

reconstructed from memory, include details such as “this is my
term, not his” or “I am not sure of the order here; the point about
her mother may have preceded this.” If you have paraphrased a
question or response, mark that too, so you know later that you
cannot use it as a direct quotation. Also include a record of your
feelings about the whole interview, such as “this interview was
filled with tension” or “the group was friendly and teasing, and it
was hard to get past the small talk.”

Both for your own records and to make it clear to others what
you did, keep a separate notebook, almost a diary, of your
project. If you did participant observation, describe what
occurred, when it took place, how long it lasted, and provide a
summary of what you learned. You can keep a running file of
ideas as they emerge and in it also note what was happening
in the research—how you felt, with whom you were
speaking—when you made major decisions, such as
determining to follow a particular theme or explore a specific
concept. You are making your own biases, slants, and reactions
transparent to others. You may want to refer to this log when
you write up the report, and it should be made available to
others in the unlikely event that they want to examine it.

The requirement that the research process be transparent

encourages the researcher to stay close to the data in writing
up a report, including summary statements only when they can
be backed up with the words of the interviewees. Flights of
imaginative fancy are controlled when the original interviews are
publicly available and quotes from the interviews are presented
in the report to support each major conclusion.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have shown how to design an interviewing

project to ensure the thoroughness, accuracy, and believability
of the research. In doing so, you let the reader see, to the extent
he or she wishes, how you arrived at your conclusions without
overwhelming him or her with unimportant details. In your write-
up, make your research process visible but not intrusive. Quote
generously from your interview transcripts to back up key
points. The reader should be able to follow the logic of the
analysis, hear the voices of your interviewees, and distinguish
the voice of the researcher from those of the interviewees.

Good design prevents twin nightmares from becoming reality.

The first nightmare is getting to the end of the data gathering
and not having anything significant to tell. The second is coming
up with sparkling findings only to have their importance,
representativeness, or truth value questioned. Design guides
the choice of interviewees and the lines of questioning to help
build understanding, verify ideas, and provide evidence for
emerging themes. It keeps the study on track, even if in an
iterative approach to research you do not know exactly where
the final destination will be when the train first leaves the station.

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452226651.n4