Unstructured Interviews – A Conversational Iceberg

by Azher Hameed Qamar, Postdoc Fellow, School of Social Work, Lund University, Sweden.
Assistant Professor, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan. See a previous Methodspace post: “The Doll’s Marriage: An Ethnographic Encounter with Rural Children and Childhood.”

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“In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It felt like we were in some place your body can't visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments” ― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down (2017)

My Ph.D. thesis was an ethnographic study of childcare beliefs and the social value of the child in rural Punjab, Pakistan. It was based on the perspectives of the interdisciplinary social study of childhood and the social construction of childcare belief practices in relation to the socially valued child. During fieldwork, I collected primary data through participant observation and in-depth unstructured interviews. I found unstructured interviews to be a useful and effective data collection method that connects the researcher with the social and cultural worlds of the participants. My ongoing work on the lived experiences of young adult migrants is phenomenological research aimed at the process of social resilience and social experiences of young adult migrants. I'm conducting unstructured interviews to learn more about the phenomenon's textural (what was experienced) and structural (how it was experienced) characteristics. In these unstructured interviews, I emphasize the migrants' stories, which are powered by their open and free voices. In this brief essay, I discuss the utility of unstructured interviews in phenomenological research.

Unstructured interviews are informal conversational interviews in which the researcher and participant's social interaction develop the substance of the interview through natural and spontaneous conversation rather than imposing pre-determined categories of questions to lead the conversation (Minichiello et al., 1990; Punch, 1998; Patton, 2002; Denzin, 1989; Hammersley, 2007; Spindler & Spindler, 1987). It means there is an extent of flexibility that both researcher and participant enjoy in the unstructured interview. An unstructured interview is a useful data collection tool for ethnographic studies. Prominent and essential features of ethnography include a natural setting (everyday context), unstructured data collection (such as participant observation, informal talk, and interview), a narrow focus for in-depth study (small sample), and interpretation grounded in the socio-cultural context and social construction of situations and processes (Hammersley, 2007). Self-knowledge of the researcher’s position with clarity of reflexivity and biases, thick description of the context, unstructured interviews (without leading or predetermined questions), contextualized, extended, and repeated observation, negotiating multiple identities of the researcher in the field, and interpretative nature of reporting emic and etic perspectives, all contribute to a strong and authentic piece of ethnographic research (Creswell, 2007; Spindler & Spindler, 1987). Though using interviews as a research tool in ethnography is debated among the scholars who restrict ethnography to observational data and the scholars who believe in reaching the participants’ perspectives by giving them a voice in the interviews; however, understanding participants’ perspectives is seen as a traditional ethnographic commitment. In this connection, the ethnographer’s role to conduct the interview is significant to bridge the data collected through participant observation and social interactions (Hammersley, 2007).

Nevertheless, it does not mean that using unstructured interviews as a data collection method is to lose control of specific research objectives and questions. As I experienced in my ethnographic study (Qamar, 2019) and current study (ongoing phenomenological research on young adult migrants’ lived experiences), conducting unstructured interviews requires more skills and preparation to get engaged in social interactions with the participants. It is a social skill, and it requires social and cultural competence to encourage participants to share their stories with the researcher. It is more than holding an interview guide and asking pre-arranged questions with limited and specific probing. Though unstructured interviews require more time and patience, and sometimes more than one session is required to complete the interview; however, the data is rich including the (personal, experiential, perceptual, and contextual) details required to describe, interpret and contextualize the narratives of lived experiences.

Another important challenge that a researcher conducting unstructured interviews should seriously take into consideration is the ethical sensitivity involved in unstructured interviews (Corbin, 2003). During unstructured interviews, the participants share their life experiences in a socially comfortable and interactive conversational environment (Stage and Mattson, 2003). This may reveal personal and sensitive information (comparatively more than the semi-structured interviews). Hence, it adds to the researchers' responsibilities to ensure the confidentiality and privacy of the participants and document this process in detail in ethical considerations. This also implies that a qualitative researcher intending to use unstructured interviews as a data collection method must be professionally trained and experienced to write detailed ethical protocols manifesting their abilities and planning to grasp the sensitivity and complexity associated with unstructured interviews.

 As I experienced as a social anthropologist, I see unstructured interviews as a ‘conversation iceberg’ where the researcher uses the art of social interaction, reflexivity, and flexibility to gain the depth of required data. The conversation is directed by the researcher’s good listening skills and the participant’s trust and confidence to share his/her story. While the researcher uses verbal and non-verbal probes, the conversation takes the researcher deep into the story through its explicit and implicit details (figure 1).

Figure 1. Unstructured Interview – A Conversational Iceberg

I use the ‘conversation iceberg’ metaphor to describe the three layers of conversation (in unstructured interviews). The tip of the iceberg is explicit information, such as demographic information, everyday life, and the so-called ‘plot’ of the story that the participant is going to share. This part (or layer) of the conversation interconnects the researcher and participant in a comfort zone to let them go deep into the story (of the participant). The next layer emerges when the participant starts telling the ‘texture’ of the story that includes the incidents and events of the participant’s experience. The third layer provides the ‘structural’ information about the ‘texture’, that is how did the events/incidents take place? This is the researcher’s skill (that includes good listening, reflexivity, patience, intelligent probing, attentive body language, and empathy) that how he/she gains an interconnected understanding of these three layers of the conversation iceberg. The researcher must make sense of the conversation in-line with the participant’s explicit and implicit meaning-making process as it emerges in each layer of information.

Four good reasons to choose unstructured interviews when exploring lived experiences.

1.     Unstructured interviews are the ideal method to engage in real conversations with the participants without necessarily positioning the researcher in a role of an interviewer with an interview guide. In other words, using unstructured interviews I get benefit from the power of conversation that opens space for me to get connected with the participant’s social world through his/her stories without controlling or interfering with the spontaneity of narratives through pre-determined and pre-arranged questions.   

2.     Unstructured interviews give freedom and provide space for the participants to share their narratives the way they perceive. Also, they can share a lot more other things that may not seem as directly relevant to the researcher’s research objectives but may be a great source of contextual knowledge about the participants’ oral stories.

3.     As the researcher is open and flexible in unstructured interviews, he is ready to listen to whatever the participants want to share without restricting them to framed questions. This flexibility and openness benefit the researcher to know more out of the box. Particularly, unstructured interviews are good instruments to collect data on sensitive topics where the researcher needs to listen more to understand more.

4.     Unstructured interviews offer a detailed participant-centered perspective, grounded in the thick description of the participant’s experience embedded in his/her social and cultural context.

Human beings live in a multilayer and complex social world. Like an onion, these layers are stuck together and interconnected with the meanings and meanings of the meanings that are constructed and co-constructed in the social world. This is the job of a researcher to peel off each layer and report the phenomena of interest while revealing the intersectionality of the person-environment interaction and subjective experiences embedded in this intersectionality. To elaborate and interpret their experiences, the researcher needs to know, recognize, and understand the ‘What, When, Where, Why, and How (W4H)’ of these experiences, and this is demanding, sensitive, and complex. Hence, the researchers should choose a data collection method that can help them to get close to the data and its context. I found unstructured interviews as a means to get close to the participants, giving them space to be open, and getting a detailed insight into their lives.  Concluding this note, I recommend the unstructured interview method as a useful approach to describe and interpret data in its surface and latent meanings, particularly if the researcher is interested in investigating sensitive and complex phenomena.

Learn more!

My Ph.D. ethnographic study, in which I used unstructured interviews along with participant observation, includes five publications. Four of these publications are data-based, and one is about my reflections on the whole study as a native anthropologist, in which I also talked about the use of unstructured interviews in this study. Here is the list of articles:

Qamar, A. H. (2020). At-home ethnography: a native researcher’s fieldwork reflections. Qualitative Research Journal. 21(1), 51-64. 

Qamar, A. H. (2018). The social value of the child and fear of childlessness among rural Punjabi women in Pakistan. Asian Journal of Social Science, 46(6), 638-667. 

Qamar, A. H. (2017). The Postpartum Tradition of Sawa Mahina in Rural Punjab, Pakistan. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 11(1), 127-150. 

Qamar, A. H. (2016). Belief in the evil eye and early childcare in rural Punjab, Pakistan. Asian Ethnology, 75(2), 397-418. 

Qamar, A. H. (2015). Tona, the folk healing practices in rural Punjab, Pakistan.Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 9(2), 59-74. 

References

Corbin, J., & Morse, J. M. (2003). The unstructured interactive interview: Issues of reciprocity and risks when dealing with sensitive topics. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(3), 335-354.

Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Denzin, N.K. (1989). The sociological interview. In The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 102-120.

Hammersley, M. (2007). Ethnography: problems and prospects. Ethnography and education, 1(1), 3-14.

Minichiello, V., Aroni, R., Timewell, E., & Alexander, L. (1990). In-depth Interviewing: Researching people. Hong Kong: Longman Cheshire Pty Limited.

Patton, M.Q. (2002). Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Punch, K.F. (1998). Introduction to Social Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Qamar, A. H. (2019). Infant Healthcare Belief Practices and Social Value of the Child in Rural Punjab, Pakistan [Doctoral dissertation, Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim Norway].

Spindler, G., & Spindler, L. (1987). Issues and applications in ethnographic methods. Interpretive ethnography of education: At home and abroad, 1-10.

Stage, C. W., & Mattson, M. (2003). Ethnographic interviewing as contextualized conversation. Expressions of ethnography: Novel approaches to qualitative methods, 97-105

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