Using instant messaging for semi-structured interviews

Many guides on how to do qualitative research assume that the semi-structured interview is going to take place in person, i.e. face-to-face. But often,  particularly when the geographic location of the participant and interviewer are different, this isn’t possible. In these cases other methods, such as phone or Skype calls are common.

Much less common is the use of instant messaging (text-chat) for conducting interviews. My first experience of this was actually as a participant in a project: New Geographies of Learning  run by Professor Sian Bayne and the Digital Education Research group at Edinburgh University. I concluded that if they use it, then it must have something going for it! So, I’d like to make the case for offering participants the opportunity to conduce their interview through instant-messaging. I will also discus briefly both the advantages and the disadvantages of this method.

Over the past year I’ve carried out interviews for two different projects, in which I’ve talked to both students and members of staff at Edinburgh University. For both projects I offered participants three options a) A phone call, b) Video Call (Skype), c) Instant-messaging.  There are many ways of conducting text-chats- I chose to use Skype as it is fairly universal and provides an easy way to copy and paste the discussion afterwards. Around a third of participants across the two studies chose text-chat. Perhaps unsurprisingly all of these were students, who perhaps were more familiar with communicating in this way.

As with any qualitative methodology it is important to be aware of both the advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

• Creating distance between the interviewer and participant makes the participant freer to express their thoughts, leading to more considered responses. This is particularly important if the subject is something that is likely to cause embarrassment or is very personal.
• Reduces any unintended influence that the interviewer may have.
• An interview may be easier to schedule (as they don’t have to travel to a particular location) and feel less onerous for the participant.
• If participants are nervous about talking to a stranger, text-chat can feel less demanding.
• An advantage for the interviewer is that it is possible to review what the participant has just said in real-time, making it easy to pick up on points for further clarification or follow-up questions.
• A final advantage of this technique is that there is no need to transcribe the interview, resulting in a substantial time and associated cost saving for the interviewer.

Disadvantages:

There are ofcourse disadvantages to be aware of:

• The interview itself takes longer, as typing responses is slower than speaking,
• Participants may not be used to expressing themselves in this format, and the interview may lack depth
• The lack of information from body language makes establishing a rapport more difficult. `

In the interviews that I conducted students chose instant messaging for a range of different reasons, many of which wouldn’t have occurred to me before hand. One student had a speech impediment, and as I was investigating the interactions that the students had had during learning, being able to include this student’s perspective was particularly valuable to the research. One student was a non-UK national, whose English was spoken with a strong accent and therefore preferred the medium of text-chat to ensure their thoughts were communicated accurately, and another was a carer, who found the flexibility of text-chat fitted better around those responsibilities.

My personal preference is to conduct interviews on the phone or with video conferencing, but my experiences during these projects has led me to conclude that offering text-chat is important. In some cases without this option participants would not have taken part in the research and if that had happened these voices and their perspectives would have been lost.

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this!

Further Reading:

Pearce, G., Thøgersen-Ntoumani, C., & Duda, J. L. (2013). The development of synchronous text-based instant messaging as an online interviewing tool. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 1–16.
Stieger, S., & Göritz, A. S. (2006). Using instant messaging for Internet-based interviews. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9(5), 552-559. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8a86/39b5608edd64ccd19a05cae4f62fe651ca35.pdf
Voida, A., Mynatt, E. D., Erickson, T., & Kellogg, W. A. (2004, April). Interviewing over instant messaging. In CHI'04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 1344-1347). ACM. http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/Voida_CHI01_InterviewOvrIM.pdf

Using instant messaging for semi-structured interviews by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.