Reading Response (Week 9)

This week's G & C chapter 8 talks about interviewing. It is relevant to me because my project involves interviews. During reading this chapter, I wrote down any ideas coming up in my mind on my "qualitative research notebook."

I decide not to take notes during the interview. Because I am not a native English speaker, what I hear will need to be translated to my language in my mind for understanding. If I take notes during the interview, my concentration on the participants will be distracted. I think the better way for me is to take notes immediate after the interview session is over.

I plan to carry out my first pilot study next week, so I also read the Silver's chapter 4. It also talks about the interviews. The other concern mentioned in Silver's book for interviewing is that: we have to be careful about the "voice and experience" issues (Silver, p. 114-116). This issue causes problems if the researcher directly sees what the participants said as the facts or experiences they actually have. Sometimes it is hard to know participants' retrospective account is what it was really like.

This issue reminds me the importance of "triangulation" or "multiple methods" to enhance the credibility of the data. G & C p. 129 mentioned the other way to enhance credibility related to interview technique: to interview a number of different people in different organizational positions (if the site is in a particular organization), and the cridibility of data you gathered is enhanced if it can be confirmed from several sources.

In my project, I also take the same principle into consideration. I try to involve several data collecting methods: observation, questionnaire, interview, and screen mouse activities recording to enhance the credibility. But at fist, seeking for similarities among the data collected by different ways is not my goal. The purpose of the usability testing is trying to find problems. Even though I always got different opinions from participants, I am still successful on the purpose of "understanding the topic." Especially in the stage of pilot testing, I will keep open mind and expect for the diversity emerges.