Strategically Communicating

Too bad I didn’t read the interview section of Lindlof and Taylor’s book Qualitative Communication Research Methods  and Terry Gross’ intro to All I Did Was Ask several weeks ago. The 13 interviews I did were for Nurses Week and the goal was to honor them on Facebook with a photo and their backstory. I would have taken a more research-oriented tack and added much needed personality; instead I routinely plunged in.  What could have gone better:

1. I failed to ask one nurse when she decided to become one. She asked me, “Don’t you want to know?” It was a fun story of when she was 9 and it made all the difference in her life.

2. I mixed up two nurses when I posted their pictures and profiles because I failed to extract something, anything, that seemed interesting enough to make me remember them.  Instead of becoming engrossed in the person and their story, I was interested in completing the task.

3. I didn’t ask for compelling stories. Instead I requested a gender, age, and experience differentiators. It’s the stories that make people interesting though, not where they went to school and how long they’ve been on the job.

Interviewing is an art and a science and interviewers can grow from each experience, thus subsequent interviews can be better. Next time I’ll do a little more research and ask more compelling questions so that when the vignettes are posted, the nurse are truly honored for their contribution to the patient care.

Interview rapport is a fascinating thing to me. In many cases, an interview effectively involves two people trying to have a natural conversation in decidedly unnatural circumstances. Yet most interviews go well enough. Some are great. Some mediocre. But out of the hundreds of interviews I’ve done during my career (first in journalism, now in marketing), it’s usually the flame-outs that I remember most.

Lindlof & Taylor are dead-on when they talk about the fact that you can have rapport between an interviewer and an interviewee even when the two have almost nothing else in common except the fact they happen to be talking to one another at that moment. It’s relatively rare when you come across an interview subject that sabotages the interview either consciously or unconsciously. In the case Donna cited earlier in the term, Grace Slick interviewing Frank Zappa, it was a combination of “dumb questions” (as the Shel Israel reading might suggest) on Slick’s behalf but also some sly gamesmanship by Zappa. 

On occasion, the interviewer simply isn’t prepared or nimble enough to avoid pulling a Chris Farley Show. But it’s often the best interviewers (like Terry Gross and Gene Simmons or 60 Minutes‘ Mike Wallace and, well, pretty much everybody) who are able to take difficult questions, subjects and (especially) interviewees head-on and be the one left standing with fresh insight and perspective for the rest of us to enjoy.  

I often conduct several interviews a week at work for a variety of reasons including interviewing potential job candidates, probing the business needs of peers and other business stakeholders, and for research with customers or key stakeholders.  It is really challenging to conduct a great interview, especially when preparation time is limited and the  interview itself is scheduled right after another meeting with no ramp up time to switch gears and get into “interview mode.” 

I found the Hermanowicz article, The Great Interview: 25 Strategies for Studying People in Bed, particularly helpful as a guide for conducting great interviews.  While the 25 strategies were mostly based on common sense and may seem obvious on the surface, it’s easy to forget that nurturing interpersonal dynamics is crucial in order to get the most meaningful information.  When conducting an interview in the midst of a busy day, it’s tempting to fall into a mechanical, driving mode in order to get the information and get to the end of the interview.

The strategies were immensely insightful guides to conducting great interviews.  Of particular interest to me personally were the strategies around listening and probing as well as the strategies that dealt with the flow, or how best to “sequence your moves.”  A great interview will leave the interviewer with deep insights and unexpected information, and will leave the interviewee feeling respected and fulfilled the next morning.      

Undercover Boss is a show that gives viewers a peek at what employees do while unknowingly working with the CEO. It uses video to get a glimpse of their daily operations and interactions. While the show may not be considered ethnographic fieldwork, components mimic what Lindoff/Taylor share in chapter 5 of Qualitative Communication Research Methods and can provide insight on employee behavior otherwise not visible to the general public.

Undercover Boss CEOs are what Lindoff/Taylor call “complete participants” in observing employees because the CEOs are in disguise but are being filmed and trained on the workers daily tasks. According to Lindoff/Taylor “the complete participants role thus positions us to use our empathetic and sense making capabilities to understand social action as it “naturally occurs in a setting”(p.145). The presence of the camera is not acknowledged.

Occasionally CEOs make spontaneous decisions to fire an employee or temporarily close a business. They do this when egregious situations arise, and often, they come out of disguise to immediately stop the inappropriate actions of an employee.

Lindoff/Taylor argue that contemporary fieldworkers do not embrace the role of complete participant for four reasons; lack of freedom of movement in the scene, worry about blowing their cover, losing analytic detachment, and it is an ethical challenge. On Undercover Boss Lindoff/Taylor’s concerns are part of what makes the show interesting, although the ethical challenge isn’t addressed and it isn’t considered scientific research. Ultimately, the CEOs and the employees are changed due to the information collected during the show.

A statement in chapter 5 of Qualitative Communication Research Methods was troubling to me. Page 141 contains this statement, “…as a matter of self-protection, all fieldworkers will inevitably practice some deception, although the types, extent and frequency will vary.” Lindlof and Taylor go on to say that the most important thing is to pay attention to your motivations as a researcher and the consequences for participants. I strongly disagree that outright deception on any kind is appropriate while conducting research. There may be circumstances where researchers passively observe people in a public setting or need to use a different name, but that’s the most “deception” I would ever tolerate.

This reminds me of the McCaskey case study we read for Brian’s class recently. In the article, a researcher at a market research firm in her late 20s named Martha McCaskey poses as a consultant for a start-up semiconductor manufacturer in order to obtain insider information for her client. Initially, McCaskey has reservations about resorting to deception to access trade secrets, but after pressure from her superiors and clients, she gives in against her better judgment. Brian still hasn’t shared with us what exactly happened to Martha, but it didn’t look promising. Deception simply has no place in the professional world, whether academic or corporate.

What do you all think? Is “some deception” a necessary evil or completely off limits when conducting research? When does some deception become too much?

It seems clear, pretty much from the outset of L&T’s Chapter 5, that the ethical boundaries of ethnographic research can be both a moving target and a particularly sticky wicket. As the authers reference, qualitative scholars are effectively “professional strangers” often simultaneously detached from–but inextricably tied to–the individuals, cultures and communities that they study. In citing Punch (1986), L&T acknowledge the view that virtually all fieldworkers “practice some degree of deception,” establishing murky boundary lines of empirical research.

In my mind, the delineation between the four “types” of ethnographic researchers (complete participants, complete observers, participant-as-observer and observer-as-participant) brought to mind certain hallmarks in journalism/literary nonfiction. From John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) and Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me) to Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and Hunter S. Thompson (Hell’s Angels), there is a pop culture totem that brings the kind of undeniable insights and uncomfortable realities that can accompany qualitative ethnography.

To what extent does a researcher’s participation influence or bias the “data” gathered through their study of individuals or groups? Could the same insights and observations be obtained without “immersion” techniques? Depending on the context, I suspect the answer is both “Yes” and “No.” However, in participatory ethnographic research, at what point do the ends ultimately stop justifying the means?

My area of research interest is primarily focused on children and how they interact with peers as well as with companies that are trying to market to them online in social media communities (e.g, Facebook).  The readings this week, especially the reading by Boellstorff, T. et al. (2012), reinforced my interest in ethnography as a relevant and useful tool in order to study the interactions of children in social media spaces.  However, the definition of virtual worlds as defined by Boellstorff, T. et al. (2012), excludes those spaces such as Facebook that don’t reflect “worldness and embodiment.” This exclusion makes sense when dealing with older subjects, but I wonder if children, who have always had Facebook and other social media as part of their daily lives, may view the lines between the physical and virtual worlds in different ways.  I would like to study this more and explore any research that has been done on children and their definitions of virtual worlds.

Another area to further explore to support my area of research interest is around how to conduct field research with fragile or impressionable populations such as children.  Identifying the most appropriate type and degree of participation when conducting field research, as described in the Lindlof and Taylor (2011) text, with children will be an especially interesting challenge that I look forward to exploring further.