A Dissertation by GRACE HUI-CHIN LIN Submitted to the Office of ...

months after the training and interview processes had been completed.
Prolonged engagement allowed the participants’ perspectives to emerge, and
the time to develop a greater understanding of the emit perspective (Lincoln & Guba,
1985). This prolonged study not only avoided research bias caused by the trainer and
the students’ misunderstanding of 5 communication strategies, but it also contributed
to long-term cooperation among the researcher, trainer, and respondents. During 11
weeks of training and interview, this study allowed the students’ feelings and
feedback on five communication strategies to emerge. Also, the prolonged
engagement of two 90-minute interviews provided students sufficient opportunities
to recall what they had experienced in class, to manage what they would like to say
and express their perceptions. After the students’ perceptions were conceptualized
into themes from the coded data, the students and the researcher reconfirmed the
findings through email and telephone for about six months to establish even higher
credibility.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality is an important and necessary issue in interviews of
qualitative inquiry. “People in interviews will tell you things they never intended to
tell. Interviews can become confessions, particularly under the promise of
confidentiality” (Patton, 1990, p. 355). So, confidentiality was guaranteed to the
volunteers by the trainer and the researchers before they were interviewed.
Additionally, before the processes of training and interviewing, the participants were
invited to read and sign an IRB (Institutional Review Board) consent form, which
informed them how their privacy would be protected when cooperating with the
researcher. To preserve the confidentiality, the face-to-face interview was conducted
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