A Three Interview Series

Phenomenological interviewing requires an understanding of both the context and the meaning a participant associates with a particular phenomenon. Seidman (2013) recommends the use of a three-interview series, in order to delve deeply in the context and to establish trust with the participant. Interview 1 establishes the context of the participant's experience. Interview 2 allows the participant to reconstruct the details of their experience within the context in which it occurred. Interview 3 encourages the participant to reflect on the meaning of the experience. While, interviewing your subjects three times may not be possible, you can still approach a single interview by bringing in characteristics of the three-interview series detailed here.

Interview One: Focused Life History. In the first interview, the interviewer's task is to put the participant's experience into context by talking about him or herself in light of the topic of interest. The interviewer avoids the use of "why" questions, using "how" questions instead. For example, "how did you come to be in an online dissertation program?" By asking "how" you are leading the person to reconstruct the event and place it into the context of their family, school, and work experience.

Interview Two: The Detail of Experience. The second interview concentrates on the details of the participant's current life in the topic area. Here you are collecting details upon which their later opinions will be built. As an example, you might ask online dissertation students what they do each day related to their dissertation. You are trying to get the person to reconstruct the many details of his or her life that make up the experience of interest. Thus, you might ask about the dissertation student's relationships with his or her chair, committee member, other students, spouse or partner, children, work colleagues, and friends. You might ask them to reconstruct a day in their dissertation life from the moment they woke up until they fell asleep. You may ask for stories about their experiences in school as a way to of eliciting details.

Interview Three: Reflection on Meaning. In the third interview, participants are asked to reflect on the meaning of their experience. It addresses the intellectual and emotional connections between the participant's work and life. An example question with an online dissertation student might be: "Given what you have said about life before you started your dissertation and what you said about your dissertation work now, what does completing a dissertation mean to you in your life?" Making sense or meaning requires that the participant look at how the factors in his or her life interacted to bring him or her to the present situation. 

Next time we will examine bias in qualitative studies. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu