Conducting and analyzing interviews was a weird process. Never having been involved in the social sciences until now, I was unaware of just how different interviews are from surveys or any other research method. Coming from a natural science focused background, I am so used to pure quantitative research. The had to be mathematical proofs and statistical analysis in order to describe any relationship. This has also been echoed in every lab we have done so far in this class. There was always surveys, statistics, and quantitative relationships. Qualitative analysis of interviews was complete 180º.
Suddenly, my group was tasked with thinking about why people said what they said and not what they didn’t. There was no correlations to be made or hypotheses to disprove. We had to just figure out what to look for and think about it. We initially wanted to just code their answers and try and analyze them before, but we required a whole new way of looking at research.
This new way to look at research really stretched the limits of what was possible with intensive research. Unlike surveys, which can only give us possible trends and correlations, interviews can better explore people’s feelings and thoughts. For our group, this included seeing if people had a specific definition of wilderness and how they think that was shaped by their environment and experiences.
You can also look at this information so many different ways. You can, like we did, look at words said vs not said, explain the sequencing or content of narratives, or explore the underlying emotions driving what is said. None of this can really present a case for proof of trends or causation, like quantitative research, but it does explore some interesting questions and can show how different people come to certain conclusions. But can qualitative research can stand on its own to present a compelling argument? I’m not so sure. Yet, along with the quantitative survey, an interesting argument can certainly be made.
Interviews also made me very conscience of how questions are asked. We considered this when writing and conducting a survey, but I wasn’t so concerned with it until I was asking the questions and directly seeing the interviewee respond. I wondered if some of the questions were too direct (Do you think there should be a concrete definition of wilderness?), too vague (What do you like to do in wilderness?), confusingly worded (Is wilderness more important to you or your community? Why?), or ordered poorly. Next time, I will definitely spend more time planning the questions.
I learned a lot conducting and analyzing interviews. It was a brand new experience for me, and I’m glad that I can now confidently conduct and better analyze scholarly interviews.