Online interviews: Introductory video transcript

Hello, my name's Clare Madge. I'm a senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Leicester and today I'm going to talk to you about online interviewing. There are 2 main types of online interview - synchronous online interviewing and asynchronous online interviewing. Synchronous online interviews resemble most closely the traditional interview in that they're conducted in real time. So these interviews use an internet chat room or conferencing software and all participants - the researcher and participants - are online at the same time. So the interview is real time. In contrast, asynchronous interviews do not take place in real time. These interviews use, for example, emails or discussion boards or list serve environments. An asynchronous interview usually involves the interviewer sending the questions to the respondents and the respondents answer at their own convenience so neither party needs to be online at the same time.

So there are two main types of online interviewing, synchronous interviews and and asynchronous interviews and today we're going to talk about asynchronous interviews.

Now asynchronous interviews - Again there are two main types of asynchronous interviews, individual interviews which are usually conducted using email, or group interviews which are conducted using a list-serve or a discussion board. Email interviews are one of the most widely used internet-mediated methodologies. The interviewer sends the interviewees the questions either embedded within the email or as an attachment - a word attachment - on the email and the respondant fills in the email or the word attachment and sends it back to the interviewer in their own time. There are some advantages of email interviewing. The first one is that the interviewee can fill in the interview at their own convenience and so it has high levels of respondant acceptability and quite high levels of feedback from respondents. Secondly both the interviewer and the interviewee have time to consider their responses and so a more reflexive interview situation can be the result so email interviews can be quite useful if you're conducting sensitive research. Thirdly, because often email interviews involve repeated emails through quite a long time period - for example one email may be sent and then a follow-up email may be sent several months later - and so this type of research tool is quite useful if you're conducting longitudinal research because you can gain different responses through a time period. And lastly, because the interviewee is typing their response, you have a ready-made transcript so this saves you both time and costs for transcription.

A second main type of asynchronous interviewing is using group interviews and these are usually conducted using either a list-serve environment or through a discussion board and I'm going to talk about each of these in turn. Firstly, using a list-serve environment can be a very useful tool because all participants on the list-serve are likely to be regular list-serve users and have a high degree of familiarity with the technology. Because the research is conducted asynchronously, there is no need to set up mutually-convenient chat times. However, because it's not a real-time facility, respondents can post their reply at any time, and as such, the facilitator can't play an active role in moderating the interview and so this may limit certain types of research. And also this means that the level of group interaction is very much reduced and the sense of immediacy is reduced so it may not be relevant for research in which you're trying to get group interaction. Additionally, because the type of interaction is less private than with email interviewing because responses can be seen by everyone on the list-serve, it may be that people are more guarded in the types of response that they give you.

So that's the first type of asynchronous group interview that you can conduct. A second type is using a bulletin board and you can post your questions on the bulletin board and respondents post their responses on the same bulletin board back to you. And again, here responses can be seen by all bulletin board users and so respondents are probably likely to be less candid than they might be in an email interview. However though, this type of interview can be very useful for generating more lively discussions between respondents because different respondents can see different posts from different groups of people so you do get a better idea of group interaction or ranges of opinion on a topic.

Ok - so that's three main types of asynchronous interview that I've talked about today. Asynchronous individual email interviews, asynchronous group interviews using list serve environment and asynchronous group interviews using a discussion board. Clearly, the choice of which interview you use will depend on the specific aims of your research. However, for all of these interview methods, you clearly have to consider the ethical issues involved, particularly at the research design stage. So, for example, there are question that you will have to answer including how are you going to inform your participants about the purpose, the methods and the intended possible use of your research; how will you gain informed consent from your participants?; how can you ensure that your participants can withdraw from the research at any point?; what about the perceived privacy or expectations of privacy that the respondents have and this is very important that you consider their expectations of privacy not your expectations of their privacy. How are you going to discuss this with the community? What about issues of anonymity? How will you ensure that your research participants remain anonymous but the flip side of this as well is for some discussion boards and list serve environments people may well want their words attributed so you may also have to consider intellectual property rights. And lastly how will you insure against any harm to the research participants as a result directly or indirectly through your research. There are of course many other ethical issues that need consideration - these are just some ideas for you to think about. If you have any more questions about ethics then do refer to our module on the website, the 'Ethics module', and do refer the Association of Internet Researchers' guidelines for ethical research. Thank you very much.