Lewis Mates

4. The conversational approach can also help make the interview thorough and rich….

 

Having a conversation and therefore making the interviews longer (see Point #3 in Part #1) and more time consuming to process and analyse was important not only in terms of working better with students in future academic years; it also helps the interviewer get a lot out of the interview as well (even if data gathering is ultimately a secondary concern).

This was exemplified by ‘Ed’:

LM: Obviously we've covered a huge amount of stuff. Is there anything that occurs that we've missed?

‘Ed’: No, I think you probably know my personal life better than some of my friends at this point.

 

5. With online interviewing, be careful what platform you choose ….

 

I had to conduct all the first gen. Covid experience interviews necessarily online as things were still dicey that summer.

For online interviews, MS Teams was my platform of choice as I was used to it for teaching and was rather more trepidatious about Zoom (and I knew that Teams auto transcribed; see Point #7; though Zoom does this as well…)

Departmental policy in 2020-21 was to use as few online platforms as possible to make it more straight forward for students. But many colleagues started on Blackboard or Teams but switched to Zoom in the second term. On peer observing one colleague giving a Zoom seminar, I could understand why they had made the switch.

The interview questions related to preferred platforms and I soon found that students often preferred Zoom to Teams or Blackboard for teaching and learning. In one memorable case ‘Harriet’ told me:

I feel bad saying that as we're on Teams, but I absolutely despise it.

LM: Oh, really, why?

‘Harriet’: It's just I mean my laptop hates it for a start.[…] I think after doing the two weeks of the full summer schools completely on Teams I absolutely despise it […] It's like when you share your screen on here, everything just disappears and you can't see anything.

I did one interview on Zoom as I had to (the interviewees were on holiday) and found that no better and possibly less-user friendly than Teams.

In short, Teams was, from my limited experience, as good as any platform, all other things being equal (which, of course, they weren’t; see next point…)

 

6. But even the best/’right’ platform cannot avoid all the potential technical problems of interviewing online…

 

Actual platform notwithstanding, we could not avoid situations like this, sixty-five minutes into a Teams online interview:

LM: … it sounds like for you, you felt like they [seminars] were safe spaces for you to be able to contribute and discuss and speak. […] Would that be right?

‘Amy’: Yeah.

LM: 'Amy', you still there?

‘Amy’: We just… […]

Sorry, one second.

LM: That's alright.

‘Amy’: Alan, you got any earphones I could borrow please?

Are they…?

Let me see if I can get this. […]

Lewis, can you hear me?

LM: Just about ‘Amy’, yeah, but you're much quieter now.

‘Amy’: […] wait, can you hear me again?

LM: Oh, that's much better, yeah!

‘Amy’: Sorry, sorry […] my headphones stopped my laptop, sorry.

LM: Alright, no worries. I mean this just kind of illustrates, doesn't it what you were saying before? [experiencing difficulties with tech in online teaching and learning]

‘Amy’: Yes.

LM: So are you OK to continue?

‘Amy’: I think so. If my headphones start again, I'm really sorry. Umm, yeah, I'm OK to continue for now. Yeah, let's carry on.

LM: Yeah, no worries. OK, let's crack on and see if we can […] nail this but we were definitely motoring.

‘Amy’: […] What was I saying?

 

Another forty-five minutes on this happened:

LM: Are you still there 'Amy'?

‘Amy’: […] Wait, hang on, sorry Lewis. […]

LM: I can hear you fine. Can you hear me?

‘Amy’: OK here.

LM: Yeah, can you hear me though?

‘Amy’: Yes, but […] You're no longer on my speaker […]

Wait, can you hear me now?

LM: Yeah, you're clearer.

‘Amy’: Oh, I see. I see, I see. Oh wait, let me, let me turn my, 'cause you're no longer on my earphones. You’re on my actual computer now.

LM: Oh, OK.

‘Amy’: Oh, I see. OK, right yeah. Sorry this is this is my, this is the computer issues again, I hope, it’s just a bit frozen.

Sorry about that.

LM: That's alright.

Obviously, this disrupted the interview’s flow and made it (and its transcript) longer than they needed to be. ‘Amy’s’ laptop camera also did not work, so I also missed the interviewee’s facial cues. This case was the worst in terms of the detrimental impact of equipment. Even then I don’t think much was lost, as the interview was still of astonishing perspicacity. Several other interviewees, however, did have fairly intermittent or weak Wi-Fi connections which also rendered communication difficult at times and reduced the quality of the auto-transcriptions.

And then there were interruptions like this;

‘Barbara’: And I don't, honestly, I think there's been some really some big….

Sorry, I won't. Hello? I, I'm just on a call with my lecturer.

Sorry. So sorry.

LM: That’s all right.

‘Barbara’: My dad's just come from work

And it wasn’t just the interviewees who had these distractions working from home:

‘Harriett’: … like if you're interested in that kind of thing, you're gonna pick that kind of thing, I think.

LM: oh OK. Yeah, yeah, and probably be one way…. Oh, my daughter just showed me her haircut, sorry, through the window: one of the issues of, sort of, being at home….

Perhaps embarrassingly, reading through the transcripts reminded me at one point that my own laptop was also rather dodgy! When ‘Witta’ was telling me she had experienced lots of problems with a faulty, old laptop I replied:

LM: So, I mean, if it's any consolation, right, mine [laptop] has screws dropping off it now. Bits are getting really loose and stuff. And if I move the screen, like, sometimes it just it shuts it down automatically. So I've got to be really careful…  if I'm not quite happy with how the screen is […] I'm at the moment too scared to move it in case I just shut the whole thing down.

I wonder in this case if that very comment, though, helped a little in reducing the barriers between me as the interviewer and the interviewee; even though they might have reasonably surmised that I could access a new device or fix the old one easily enough.

Interviewees also had to pause their interviews in some cases for avoidable reasons. Several did so as their laptop batteries were running out and they needed to plug in. There seemed to be something of a culture of using a devices’ battery (laptop or mobile phone in some cases) even if it could very easily be plugged in; I remember the same thing happening a surprising amount over the year’s teaching online too!

In doing these interviews online, quite a few of the problems related to teaching and learning online that we were discussing manifested themselves during the actual interviews, reminding us all of the trials we had just gone through and, in an important sense, why it was worth doing this very research in the first place.

In one memorable case, however, the interruption in the interview was not tech-related and was some good news. An hour into the interview with ‘Polika’ this happened:

‘Polika’: The guy who interviewed me is calling me.

LM: Okay. Yeah, I'll, I'll stop the recording…

After telling me that she had just secured her dream placement year job, ‘Polika’ explained:

[…] I've been home all weekend because I can't sleep, but I'm stressed every night, not sleeping.

I've been stagnant for ages, but I was really just, just worried about this. I need to prove to myself that I'm on top of things. And I was saying this, like, if I don't get this, I'm not on top of things.

 

 

 

Dr. Lewis Mates

School of Government and International Affairs (SGIA)

Durham University

lewis.mates@durham.ac.uk