Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

Qualitative research in practice
within interviews (such as asking children to make up a story or
draw a scene, or to play ‘let’s pretend’). Similarly, Backett and
Alexander suggest, ‘Keep the interviews open, flexible and structured
around the daily experiences of the child’ (1991, p. 35).
Whatever choices are made about how to interview children,
contextual issues should be discussed thoroughly and transparently
in reports on the research. This includes anything about
the way the research was conducted that could have affected the
children’s responses or performance, such as the timing of the interviews,
the venue, the activities, what choices the children had, or
who else was present.
Siegert (1986) raises some interesting issues in relation to the
process of interviewing children and the nature and quality of data
obtained. In discussing research on children’s social competence, he
argues that an interview between an adult and a child can legitimately
tell us a lot about children’s competences in adult–child
interaction, in contexts defined by adults, but it is questionable
whether that can be generalised to other contexts, for example with
peers. Siegert suggests that a combination of participant observation
and group discussions among children would be more appropriate
ways to gather data about peer interactions.
In research on children’s perspectives, it is important to take the
lead from the child as to what they find interesting enough to talk
about (Beresford, 1997). This avoids making assumptions about
what the researcher thinks might be most interesting and relevant to
them or holding too firmly on to one’s own topic list of what seems
to be important. Beresford also suggests taking the time to establish
the words and phrases used by the child at the beginning of the
interview and using the child’s language.
In the context of child abuse investigations, Steward, Bussey,
Goodman and Saywitz suggest that in order to maximise children’s
communication:
The interviewer should listen to the child’s narrative report, not only
for the content, but also for the child’s spontaneous use of language.
The interviewer should then match his/her own sentence length and
complexity to the child’s in order to maximize the communication.
Interviewers can assume that the younger the child, the shorter the
sentences the child will comprehend, the fewer verb-noun units per
utterance, the fewer syllables per word and the more they will
depend on familiar contextual cues to glean meaning (Steward et al.,
1993, pp. 32–3).
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