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

Tailoring data collection
Dorothy:
Caroline:
Dorothy:
Caroline:
let go of the ambition of covering all that I wanted to
cover, and to try to find just a little bit of the adoption
process that the child could talk about.
What was most challenging about the interviewing
itself?
Possibly sometimes feeling as though I was moving
into territory that I didn’t want to explore and having
to put the stoppers on—putting boundaries up to
discourage disclosure about certain experiences that
really we weren’t interested in. That was quite challenging
. . . On one or two occasions I had to respond
to the children’s distress about what they were talking
about and wondered whether I had done that well
enough. I wondered how the child felt after the interview
was over and whether the adoptive parents
would be able to pick up on any issues that were left
over. So that was challenging. And I think that though
I say that the need to be adaptive made the interviews
interesting, it made some of the interviews extremely
challenging. Sometimes it was hard just trying to
follow the child, trying to get something from the
interview for the study but at the same time not
exploiting the child . . .
It’s interesting that your concerns are not really about
the research as a researcher but your concerns were
fundamentally about the children as children—was
that the hardest part, the most challenging area of the
research?
I think so, but it helped that after just a few interviews
I was confident that the children’s material was going
to be rich enough for us to say some interesting
things . . . so I was able to put aside people’s concerns
that we wouldn’t be able to get something useful from
the children.
Tim and Wendy Booth—Parenting under pressure
Tim and Wendy Booth’s biographical study of the parenting experiences
of people with learning difficulties was funded for two
years by the Nuffield Foundation and is published as Parenting
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