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Conducting semi-structured Conducting

semi-
interviews with the Vietnamese structured
interviews
Thi Quynh Trang Nguyen
Faculty of Education, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia 35
Abstract Received 1 April 2014
Revised 28 July 2014
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss several cultural and psychological aspects that the Accepted 11 August 2014
author experienced in the interview fieldwork with Vietnamese and the strategies to deal with these
methodological issues. It aims to assist non-Vietnamese researchers planning their qualitative
fieldwork with Vietnamese participants.
Design/methodology/approach – The results are drawn from using an autoethnographic approach,
in which the author presents and analyses the experiences of conducting individual semi-structured
interviews with 15 Vietnamese college teachers in the PhD qualitative study on the Vietnamese concept
of face – thể diện.
Findings – The author argues that in interviews with Vietnamese participants, an interviewer should
be mindful of the interviewees’ unfamiliarity with the ethics approval procedure, their reliance on
relationship and trust, their self-face concern and low level of elaboration. It is important that the
interviewer be seen as an “insider” by the Vietnamese interviewees, not an “objective” outsider
researcher. In addition, an interviewer needs to be sensitive to detect any subtle cues that may emerge,
and be flexible enough to adjust the interview questions if necessary and employ suitable techniques to
adapt to these changes.
Research limitations/implications – The findings were limited to the scope of experiences within a
PhD study with a small group of college teachers. Experiences with larger groups of Vietnamese
participants from diverse backgrounds may be needed to confirm the findings of this paper.
Originality/value – This paper addresses the gap in the discussion of conducting qualitative
research with the Vietnamese. It also discusses several issues that have not been discussed before, such
as the Vietnamese unfamiliarity with the paperwork required for ethics approval and their face
concerns in interviews.
Keywords Vietnam, Conducting interview, Cultural sensitivity, Ethics paperwork, Face,
Semi-structured interview
Paper type Research paper

Cultural sensitivity is a requirement in today’s interactive world and the application of

research methodologies is not an exception. Since most current research methods were
originally derived from a western academic context, their application to non-western
cultures may result in unwanted reactions due to cultural incompatibility (Zhou and
Nunes, 2013). Conducting research with people from an Asian Confucian heritage
culture such as Vietnam has encountered difficulties such as short and simple answers
in interviews (Strumpf et al., 2001; Suh et al., 2009) and unreliable/false answers in
paper surveys (Le et al., 2006). From my experiences in a qualitative research project on
the Vietnamese concept of face (thể diện) I discuss the process of conducting individual
interviews with the Vietnamese, the cultural factors that are worth noting for non-
Vietnamese researchers, and some strategies to deal with these issues.
There has been a lack of literature about cultural competency in conducting
qualitative method interviews in general and with the Vietnamese in particular. Most of
the concern about cultural sensitivity in interview research has focussed on the Qualitative Research Journal
Vol. 15 No. 1, 2015
pp. 35-46
The author would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive feedbacks and Dr Keith Simkin © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1443-9883
(La Trobe University) for his valuable comments and his help in proofreading this paper. DOI 10.1108/QRJ-04-2014-0012
QRJ analysis of interview data, in particular, the issue of translation (Carlson, 2000; Chidlow
15,1 et al., 2014; Choi et al., 2012; Irvine et al., 2006; Larkin et al., 2007; Temple, 2002; Temple
et al., 2006; Twinn, 1997). Few studies discuss the interpersonal issues within the
interviews. Of these few studies, however, concerns about Chinese respondents have
been dominant (Eckhardt, 2004; Kriz et al., 2014; Stening and Zhang, 2007; Zhou and
Nunes, 2013). The only study mentioning the conducting of interviews with the
36 Vietnamese found by the author was Suh et al. (2009), which discusses researchers’
cultural competence during the course of interviewing Asian immigrant respondents in
the USA, among whom the Vietnamese were listed. This pan-Asia view unfortunately
is not able to capture the uniqueness of the Vietnamese research challenge. A focus on
Vietnamese research participants is still absent in the methodology literature.
With the open-door (mở cửa) policy of Vietnamese governments in recent decades
making Vietnam a fresh attractive land for foreign researchers, there has been an
increasing literature on the conducting of qualitative social research fieldwork in
Vietnam. These studies report on constraints, challenges and negotiations that
researchers face in their fieldwork, set against the context of a Vietnam undergoing
rapid socioeconomic and political transformations (Bonnin, 2010; Eidse and Turner, 2014;
Napier et al., 2004; Scott et al., 2006; Szymańska-Matusiewicz, 2014; Turner, 2010a, b,
2013). These papers mainly discuss the authors’ experiences relating to infrastructure,
organizational and administrative issues such as traffic conditions, negotiating
relationships with government officials, host institutions and other gatekeepers,
obtaining official seals of approval to gain permission to conduct field visits and to
access informants, dealing with authorities’ controls on research activities such as what
questions researchers are allowed to ask the participants and how long the interviews
should take, and working with interpreters or native research assistants. Although
cultural aspects in communication with Vietnamese research participants are
acknowledged and discussed as of some importance, they have not been treated as
crucial methodological issues for successful research. This is probably due to the fact
that the authors/researchers of these studies were “foreigners” and they had to work
with the native participants via bridging agents such as interpreters and native
interviewers. Nuances in fieldwork face-to-face interactions with the participants
therefore were not able to be experienced. As a result, there remains a gap in the
existing literature in relation to several crucial aspects of interpersonal interactions in
the methodology of interviews with Vietnamese participants. This paper tries to
address that gap by offering a voice of an “insider” – a western-trained native
researcher – about cultural and psychological issues in interviews with the Vietnamese.
The results in this paper were drawn from the author’s reflection on her experiences
of interviewing Vietnamese college teacher participants in her PhD research about the
Vietnamese concept of face – thể diện. She used autoethnography, “an approach to
research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal
experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 273). Based
on social constructionism and an interpretive paradigm, autoethnography highlights
researchers’ subjectivity as a valid and important channel to knowledge, which is in
contrast with the positivist epistemology emphasizing the detachment of the researcher
from the researched to produce objective and neutral knowledge from scientific
methods. Using a form of self-reflective writing, autoethnography focusses on
exploring the writer’s personal experiences, stories, thoughts, feelings and observations
as a way to understand the social cultural context she is studying. As a result, Ellis
et al. (2011) argue that an evaluation of an autoethnography project is based on specific
criteria, in particular, the “narrative truth” of the product in terms of reliability and Conducting
validity. An autoethnography is evaluated as reliable and valid when “it evokes in semi-
readers a feeling that the experience described is lifelike, believable and possible, a
feeling that what has been represented could be true,” and it has a positive answer for
structured
the question of “whether it helps readers communicate with others different from interviews
themselves or offer a way to improve the lives of participants and readers or the
author’s own” (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 282). The generalizability of an autoethnography also 37
rests on readers’ determination of whether the story informs them about unfamiliar
people or cultural contexts (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 283). This paper is guided by and works
toward those criteria.

The study context

The project from which most of my experiences are drawn in the writing of this paper
is research on the Vietnamese perceptions of face, a socio-psychological concept
meaning an image of self in social interactions. In particular, I aimed to explore the
indigenous face concept thể diện; what it generally means and how it influences
perceptions and behaviors of Vietnamese teachers in a college teaching context. Fifteen
Vietnamese college teachers in a Teacher Training College of a province in the South
Central Coast area of Vietnam were individually interviewed about their interpretation
of the concept and its behavioral manifestations. The main task of the Teacher
Training College is to provide a source of primary and secondary teachers for the
province in which they are established. The participants were seven males and eight
females aged from 26 to 37 and their teaching experience ranged from two to 12 years.
Their teaching subjects were selected to be as varied as possible and the number of
people teaching science subjects and the number of people teaching social science
subjects were fairly equal.
The interviews were semi-structured with open-ended questions, conducted in early
2011 in Vietnamese and lasting about one hour. Ideas for questions in the interviews
were built upon results of an analysis of a Vietnamese language internet corpus about
thể diện, the researcher’s teaching experiences in Vietnam and consultations with
several Vietnamese tertiary teachers. The interviews covered three main topics,
including face in general contexts, face in relation to gender, and face in college
teaching contexts.
My position in relation to the interviewees was as a female in her early 30s, a
colleague (who does the same job of teaching), a researcher, and to some participants
a friend. My social position of a researcher went fairly unnoticed; rather my positions
as a colleague and a friend, and the participants’ eligibility as experienced college
teachers which was essential for their participation in my study were the relationships
emphasized by them as relevant to and instrumental in influencing the nature and
extent of their responses to my interview questions. My interview experiences with
them have helped me arrive at the findings below.

Ethics approval paperwork – applying western protocol in Vietnamese

context
While the completion of ethics approval documentation, such as consent forms, is
routine in the western research context, it is a foreign concept in Vietnamese research.
When I undertook my first research study several years ago as a new international
masters’ student in Australia, I found myself totally ignorant of and even confused by
QRJ the requirement. I did not understand, at first, why I needed to prepare a careful
15,1 application for what was called ethics approval, why I needed to convince people to
allow me to work with the persons who had already agreed to let me interview them,
and why I needed written evidence of consent for our collaboration? Wasn’t it
enough to have verbal consent between us? Wasn’t this the most important
relationship that I needed – verbal, relationship-based, trust-based consent? Surely
38 this perception is not uncommon to people who have only lived in the Vietnamese
relationship-oriented culture but now have to come into contact with the new context
of Western academic culture.
In my research project about Vietnamese face, my first interviewee, a male friend
whom I asked to help me by being a bridge to other potential participants, gave
me advice he thought would benefit my study. He told me that I should not mention
the consent forms and related issues such as the guarantee of confidentiality of the
participants’ identities and data before I interviewed them. He said that the information
would be unfamiliar to them and may intimidate them since they might think that the
interviews involved something more serious than they thought, hence they may not be
as comfortable in the interviews as they otherwise might be. He explained that since he
had some understanding of the western research model, he understood that this is a
normal routine, but there was a strong chance that the other participants who did not
know much about how western research was carried out would not understand why
these “so-called ethics” forms should be completed before participating in a “normal”
interview.
Apart from the effect on the assumed level of seriousness of the nature of the study,
there was probably another reason to which my participant did not directly refer, that
is, the unfamiliarity of the procedure to the behavioral culture of the Vietnamese. The
belief in trust-based commitment is popular in Vietnam, and is still prevalent in
the business of conducting research in the country. People are invited to be informants
in a certain research study mostly via personal relationships, in the form of “helping”
the people who are in charge of the research. They are less motivated by the nature or
the benefit of the research for themselves. This explains why most surveys or research
invitations delivered via e-mails from unacquainted persons are often ignored (Napier
et al., 2004). Since people participate in a research study to “help” their acquaintances
(either direct acquaintances or ones via their direct acquaintances), written evidence of
their agreement to help seems an unappreciative idea. People often do not understand
why, when they have agreed to help, interviewers still need them to sign paperwork
stating that they agree to be interviewed and know their right to withdraw. In their
culture, this act may make people disgruntled, thinking that their support is not fully
trusted or appreciated. It implies that the interviewer/researcher does not completely
trust you or your words.
I came to adopt an informal approach to this issue. The presentation of ethics
paperwork, such as information sheets, consent forms and withdrawal of consent forms
was conducted as casually as possible in order to minimize their presumed seriousness.
I made clear to the participants that this paperwork was part of the normal routine for
academic research following the western model. Maintaining a casual attitude while
informing people that their information would be kept confidential and they had right
to withdraw from the project was an effective approach. In addition, I made sure
I expressed warmly and often my appreciation for the interviewees’ help and contribution
to the project. This helped minimize the uncertainties discussed above around the
“unfamiliar” paperwork.
Establishing a good relationship Conducting
The importance of interviewers building a relationship with Vietnamese participants semi-
has been a popular theme in the literature (Bonnin, 2010; Napier et al., 2004; Suh et al.,
2009; Turner, 2010b). The building of relationships is important since it affects the
structured
atmosphere of the interviews, and the willingness and openness of the participants in interviews
interactions with interviewers. I discuss here the building of relationships and the
establishment of trust with Vietnamese respondents through the three stages of 39
my interviews: the early contact with the interviewees, during the interviews, and after
the interviews.
To ensure a relationship begins on a positive footing, it is best if the interviewer is
introduced to their potential interviewees via some acquaintance or someone the
interviewees at least know and with whom they have a fairly good relationship. Being
approached by a complete stranger often stirs uncertainty, caution and unwillingness
to the Vietnamese. Therefore, seeking a good bridge, a connection to the participants,
is advisable.
Also, in this early phase of recruiting participants, direct face-to-face contact is very
important if one asks a favor of another, such as being interviewed for one’s study. In a
culture such as Vietnam, relationships need to be built face-to-face, which is different
from people in western cultures, such as Americans or Europeans, who are comfortable
building their relationships via e-mails or phone (Vu and Napier, 2000b). Therefore, it is
recommended that the Vietnamese are invited to participate in a study via real life
interactions, especially if the people, by age or by professional position, are in a position
of respect in society or a senior in comparison with the persons who contact them.
My meeting places were in cafés, respondents’ houses or their classes, anywhere
that the respondents suggested and felt comfortable with. It is also completely normal
for a meeting to be in a “drinking beer” venue (this is common in Vietnam to
build relationship via this activity, especially between males), or a dining place. The
Vietnamese tend to feel strained with formal “work-like” “research-like” settings in
these situations. It is expected that this first meeting will only be a casual chat.
Background information on my participants, such as their birth place, marital status,
family background and education was collected in these early casual chats since it is
normal for the Vietnamese to talk about this kind of information in their first meeting
to get to know each other. It is also good for warming up at the beginning of the main
interviews with these kinds of casual chats.
During an interview, I paid attention to facilitate the bond with the interviewees by
verbal and non-verbal language cues, such as using gestures and words that showed
understanding or sympathy with what the interviewees said; for example, nodding in
agreement and being attentive and/or using phrases such as “yeah, I understand what
you say,” “I have had the same experience,” giving the interviewees the impression that
I shared what the interviewee said or supported the interviewee’s ideas. While people in
western cultures often look into the eyes of their interlocutors to show their attention
and appreciation to the speakers, in Vietnamese culture, this is not the norm. Eye
contact is limited to an appropriate degree in interactions, especially between people of
different ages and social positions. In order to express an attentive and supportive
listening attitude, people employ normative behaviors such as nodding, looking down
and using words of agreement and support as mentioned. Displaying these behaviors
not only shows an interviewer to be a good and polite listener, it is also an effective
strategy for the interviewer to facilitate the so-called “ingroup” position with Vietnamese
interviewees, where people share common ground in their worldviews. During one of my
QRJ interviews, I even told of an experience of mine that was similar to the one the participant
15,1 had just given in order to support her ideas and boost her confidence. This was received
with an appreciative attitude by my informant, which then led her to elaborate on
her previously articulated idea and provide more related stories, giving me deeper and
richer data.
For the sake of relationships, if possible, I avoided referring to myself as the
40 “interviewer” (người phỏng vấn) or “researcher” (người nghiên cứu), since in Vietnamese,
the connotations may create a sense of authority and a higher position to the
interviewer and hence a formal and serious distance between interviewer and
interviewee. It was advantageous and fortunate for me that I could locate myself in the
position of a colleague (as teacher) to all of my participants and a friend to some of
them. This lessened the distance between us significantly.
The rule of how to address participants should also be noted. In order to create a
relaxed, comfortable atmosphere, my experiences suggest that an interviewer should
address himself/ and the interviewees according to the norm based on gender, age and
social positions of the interlocutors. Addressing someone with neutral formal personal
pronouns such as “tôi” (I) and “bạn,” “anh/chị” or “ông/bà” (you) may create a sense of
distance and seriousness in interviewer-interviewee exchanges, which is likely to
hinder interviewers from obtaining authentic responses from their participants, or
worse, may sound disrespectful if the interviewees are older. Since my participants and
I were fairly equal in terms of social and professional positions, age and gender were
the two main factors to consider. In order to create a casual and relaxed relationship in
our communication, I addressed respondents of younger age as “em,” older males as
“anh” and older females as “chị.” For people of the same age, interviewers can use the
participants’ names for addressing and self-addressing (however, using names to
address older people is considered disrespectful). However, in more complicated
situations, where more factors in the relationship between interviewer and respondents
come into play, interviewers need a more careful consideration of their address terms.
Szymańska-Matusiewicz (2014) provides an interesting reference on the complications
and relationship and power consequences of her adopting the Vietnamese relational
system of terms of address with her Vietnamese research respondents.
As to the post-interview phase, I would like to mention the etiquette of giving gifts to
thank the participants. These gifts do not need to be expensive. Rather, the way that
the gifts are given in the Vietnamese culture is more important. What and how to
compensate for the respondents’ time and data should be evaluated on a case-by-case
basis (Scott et al., 2006). In my project, I thanked my participants with small gifts such
as souvenirs from Australia, key rings or chocolates. It is normal to give a gift to the
participants’ children or their spouses instead of the participants themselves. My
thanks were also expressed via other means such as inviting the participants for lunch
or drinks, or offering to help them to find documents they wanted for their teaching
and/or studying. For a more extensive discussion of the nuances and complications of
money and gift giving in Vietnamese fieldwork contexts, Gillen (2012) is great reading.

Face as an important concern

There is an extensive body of existing literature on the importance of face in
Vietnamese people’s communicative behaviors (Pham, 2007, 2011; Smith and Pham,
1996; Tran and Harding, 2009; Vu and Napier, 2000a; Yates and Nguyen, 2012).
Therefore, it is not surprising to see that face plays a significant role in interviews with
the Vietnamese. In particular, the fear of losing face and the constant consciousness of Conducting
maintaining face are very likely to restrain the participants from expressing their semi-
personal opinions, what they really feel and think; rather, these concerns drive them to
say what they think they should say so that they sound good or give the interviewer
structured
what she wants to hear (Suh et al., 2009, p. 196). They tend to say things that they think interviews
appropriate for their position, for example, as defined by their gender, profession or age
in relation with the interviewer. 41
I experienced this face concern from the Vietnamese interviewees in my minor thesis
for a masters’ degree, where I examined the passivity of Vietnamese students in
Australian university classrooms. When I asked my Vietnamese participants to
evaluate their participation in their Australian classrooms compared to western or local
students, none of them said that they participated in classroom discussions less than
western students. Rather, the students tended to talk about their individual efforts to
participate in the classroom activities, creating the impression that they were just as
active as students from other nationalities. However, they talked about the “passivity”
of the Vietnamese students in general with ease, as if they were not members of this
group, or as if face loss would be mitigated if it were not individual.
During my research project on Vietnamese face, this issue also came to my notice.
For example, in an interview, one male interviewee seemed to be concerned about
saving his own face when answering my question “What things/incidents do you think
are most likely to make a teacher lose face?” His opening reply was: “In my 10 years of
teaching, I have never encountered things that can be said to make me lose face, but
through my knowing of other colleagues […].” It can be seen that the participant tried
to distance himself from the examples he was going to give. Another example, more
common, was that the interviewees were often hesitant to give their personal opinions
and evaluation of a certain issue. They often articulated their evaluation in the form of a
general social evaluation of the issues. They tended to say “our society often considers
that […],” “people often think that […]” rather than “I think that […].” Even when they
said “I think that […],” the idea was often neutral and cautious rather than honest.
Their concern about face also undermined interviewees’ answers in other cases. For
instance, to my question of what they understood about notions such as thể diện and sĩ
diện (terms which refer to the concept of face in Vietnamese), the participants seemed to
express reluctance and difficulty in voicing their understanding of the concepts since
they were afraid that their understanding might not be right; in other words, it might
not be true to the “dictionary” definition of the terms.
Therefore, it was important to have techniques to minimize the participants’ concerns
about face so that I could elicit authentic responses. In many situations, I depersonalized
the questions. Instead of asking how one would feel and what one would do in a
certain situation, I asked how they thought an average person would feel and act.
By making the issue impersonal, the interviewees were less likely to fear that
they would be judged. Or, in the specific case of my question above about things
that made a teacher lose face, I told my participants that examples they provided
were not necessarily about themselves, but could be about people they knew or from
the media. This was to prevent their concern that face loss examples they gave were
to be understood by me as their own experience, which could be quite a face loss.
This seemed to work well since, in those interviews where I used this technique, the
interviewees talked more.
In other cases, when I wanted to know the personal opinions of interviewees, I gave
them a reassurance. In particular, I emphasized that their words were not subject to any
QRJ right-or-wrong evaluations, that I deliberately sought their personal opinions, and I did
15,1 not expect any certain point of view on the issue. For example, in order to elicit their
understanding of the concepts thể diện and sĩ diện above, I explained to them that
I wanted to know their personal thinking and feelings about the concepts, and this was
not a check on their knowledge of them. In addition, to make it easier, I suggested that
they write down any words or phrases that they thought related to the concepts, that is,
42 anything that popped into their minds when they thought of the concept. I specifically
emphasized that they were free to write anything that made sense to them, without
worrying if they made sense to me. After viewing the results, some further clarification
was required and from this, the interview content was gradually developed. I found this
approach particularly effective since it helped the participants overcome the reluctance
that face-to-face exchanges often cause.
Overall, interviewers need to be sensitive to their participants’ face needs and be
proactive and flexible to accommodate these in a timely manner during the course of
their interviews.

Dealing with a lack of elaboration

A reason for Vietnamese people’s half-hearted responses, which may not come from
concern for face or a lack of bonding with their interviewers, is their assumption that it
is simply unnecessary for them to elaborate on their responses. Sometimes, my
Vietnamese interviewees tended to speak very briefly about certain issues because they
assumed that there was not much to talk about, or the issues were so obvious that
they did not feel the need for further clarification. As illustrated in my interviews, when
I asked what could be the most losing-face incident for teachers, the participants all
pointed out cases of teachers involved in sexual abuse with students. However, none of
them went any further with an explanation of their choice, since they seemed to think
that it was obvious. Probably, they were dumbfounded that anyone would ask the
question “why.” Eckhardt (2004) notes a similar phenomenon with Chinese respondents.
She wrote:
[…] it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get a level of disclosure that can be achieved in
interviews in a Western context. It is not encouraged in the educational system as people
grow up to develop individual opinions and are able to express them in a complex and
well-developed manner. No matter how well designed the interview questions are, how
comfortable the respondent is with the interviewer, how informal and/or unstructured
the discussion between the respondent and researcher is, it is typical to receive one- and
two-sentence answers to most questions.
The author also suggests strategies that I found useful. These include avoiding asking
general, abstract questions, and instead specifying the context of the questions, and
employing fieldwork observation as triangulation. The context of a question can be
specified as one that relates to the participants’ living or working context, for example,
a situation that happens to themselves, their family, friends or colleagues. In the
situation of a teacher’s sexual offence with a student, I related a real incident that had
been made common knowledge via the media so that the participants would have a
concrete example on which to elaborate.
Observation also revealed things unsaid. There were situations in which the
participants’ real attitudes toward a problem were expressed via their body language
and tone rather than the content of their words. To illustrate, in the discussion about
face in a husband and wife relationship, one of the participants said that she did not
think that it was reasonable for wives to go to their husbands’ work place to raise an Conducting
issue of their husbands’ infidelity (since it meant that the wives were not mindful of semi-
saving face for their husbands and their family). But her reluctant smile and the
hesitation in her voice revealed that she was not relaying her true opinion. This was
structured
reinforced later when she returned to this topic, claiming that husbands who betrayed interviews
their wives, and their mistresses deserved to lose face in public, implying that she
agreed with the wives’ actions. It was common to find similar contradictory opinions in 43
the interviews, since interviewees’ answers were often based on specific contexts, not
only the contexts of the situations in the questions but also the context of the
relationship between me interviewer and themselves. Some of my male interviewees
said that they supported the idea of equality between men’s and women’s roles and
power in the family, i.e. both genders should have the same influence in family
decisions, probably because their listener was me a female teacher and researcher.
However, later it was revealed to me that they actually believed that men should hold
the decisive role in their family. Observation, close attention and sensitivity in these
situations were important since they tell me what needed to be pursued for further
confirmation.

The interviewer as “insider”

It is quite apparent that having same-ethnicity interviewers to work with the
respondents in fieldwork is desirable, if not essential (Adamson and Donovan, 2002;
Eckhardt, 2004; Suh et al., 2009). This is particularly true with the Vietnamese since
they strongly distinguish between ingroup and outgroup relations (Vu and Napier,
2000a). They are often not willing to open their inner world to outsiders or strangers
since outgroup situations increase the concern for self-face (Oetzel, 1999). In contrast,
comfort, trust and openness are found with ingroup members. As for an interviewer,
being considered an insider by the interviewees enabled the interviewer to gain
an advantage in that they were more likely to be accepted and trusted. This is an
advantage in relation to building trust and relationships, being familiar with each
other’s cultural face concern, understanding cultural norms of behaviors and being able
to catch subtle cues in interactions. Their shared language in the interviews means a
sharing of not only the meaning of the words but also other cultural and social codes
(Suh et al., 2009). The interviewer is then able to identify hidden, implied meanings from
the responses to enable a timely reaction for better data elicitation, not to mention
better results of data analysis in a later phase. The common perception of ingroup
members has often been in terms of an ethnic or national cultural group, but it can be in
terms of other groups such as gender or a professional group. This role of insider
should be constantly sought and strengthened in the interviews whenever possible.
I intentionally expressed in my interviews that I shared the role of a teacher, or a
mother, or a female with the interviewees when appropriate, which helped me
strengthen the bond between us and thereby extract more reliable data. The supporting
verbal and non-verbal language mentioned previously, such as nodding in agreement,
showing understanding and support to what interviewees say, reinforced this
ingroup status.
A further reason why an interviewer should be a cultural insider with Vietnamese
participants is that the Vietnamese like to use proverbs, idioms and other folklore as
evidence in their speech. Scott et al. (2006) mentioned that using sideline anecdotal
information such as idioms, proverbs and popular jokes can be useful in research in
Vietnam since they may reveal insightful information about the people’s perceptions
QRJ and realities. Sometimes the interviewees’ meaning is expressed succinctly, as in an
15,1 idiom. If an interviewer does not have a certain understanding about this repertoire,
they will miss important cues and hence miss the chance to further facilitate and
develop the interview. To illustrate, one of my participants talked about the situation in
which teachers cheated in their exams and she used the idiom “cá mè một lứa” (fish of
the same school). This idiom is a disapproving reference to people who view each other
44 or behave in relation to each other without hierarchical respect; in other words, it hints
at a disapproving attitude and a belief that a social hierarchy should matter in the
situation of cheating teachers. I then asked her further about the situation and how
she thought social hierarchy would be involved. This opened an opportunity to
examine the participant’s perceptions about the relation between face and social
status in Vietnam.

Conclusion
In this paper, I have discussed several aspects that are very likely to occur in interviews
in a Vietnamese context. The materials are mainly drawn from my experiences of
interviewing 15 teacher-training college teachers in Vietnam. These issues include the
Vietnamese unfamiliarity with ethics approval paperwork such as consent forms,
the need to establish a relationship, the Vietnamese face concern and the lack of
elaboration in the interviewees’ responses. I have also argued that being a cultural
insider enables an interviewer to be more easily accepted by their interviewees and also
enables them to catch subtle cues in the interviewees’ responses. My personal
experience has shown that a sophisticated understanding of Vietnamese cultural
values and norms in communication is a great advantage and assistance to researchers
in conducting interviews with the Vietnamese. In addition to this, an interviewer needs
to be sensitive to detect any subtle cues that emerge, and be flexible enough to adjust
the interview questions in a timely fashion and employ suitable techniques to adapt to
these changes. I hope these experiences and reflections benefit novice researchers who
plan to undertake qualitative research in this culture.

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About the author

Dr Thi Quynh Trang Nguyen completed her PhD in Education and Applied Linguistics at the La
Trobe University (Melbourne) in March 2014. She is a Lecturer at the Nha Trang Teacher
Training College in Vietnam. Dr Thi Quynh Trang Nguyen can be contacted at:
[email protected]

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