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

Qualitative research in practice
crucial to us that we didn’t pressure them and that we
were giving them as much information as possible
about us and the study. We wanted them to be clear
about what we were expecting from them. The challenge
there was to try to communicate that to them in
one opportunity. But we also had to produce material
that was going to appeal and make sense to a huge
range of different children ...That was the big challenge
there. And, for instance, we thought about
whether we needed to produce different materials for
different ages, whether we needed different materials
for boys and girls, and whether we needed to try to
make them culturally sensitive. We did go through all
those options, but finally came up with something that
we were confident in, once we tested it out with other
children who were about the same age and who were
imagining themselves into the situation of the children
who would be receiving the materials. They gave us
the reassurance we needed that the materials we’d
produced would be acceptable.
The interviews
Dorothy:
Caroline:
You’ve written about adapting the interviewing [for
each child], individualising the interviewing really to
be able to engage and reach this child, rather than
doing it in a standardised way. Is there anything that
you would add to that?
Possibly the book doesn’t convey the differences in
those individual interviews. I mean, from speaking
to a 13- or 14-year-old girl who was extremely comfortable
just talking to me and very relaxed and
articulate—we could have gone on talking for much
longer than two hours—to a little boy who was literally
‘all over the place’, physically and mentally. With him
at one point I ended up playing Bagatelle in the middle
of the interview. Then we went out into the garden and
walked around the garden and played football for a
little while before coming back and doing a little bit
more of the interview. It was sometimes important to
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