I sometimes miss the slowness of the qualitative projects I worked on as an academic, particularly those earliest in my career. The studies that gave me time to luxuriate in every detail, write copious field notes following each interview, offering me the space to reflect analytically after every interview.

I often reflect on how ‘speeded up’ online interviewing is and how it seems to plummet both researcher and participant straight in to the subject of the interview without much preamble. There is no chit-chat while making a cup of tea, looking at family photos, meeting the family pets, before getting down to the actual interview. I really miss that about face-to-face interviews – the rapport building and important contextual information about people’s lives that you are able to elicit. I have been wondering how I can slow things down a bit in online interviews. Recently thinking about the use of pre-meetings or pre-interviews (see my last post) to provide that opportunity for informal chat and pre-amble. 

Writing field notes immediately after interviews was also a really important part of my work analytically. I either scribbled them immediately in my notebook or, if I had to drive a long distance or take a long train journey I recorded myself talking into my Dictaphone. These notes helped:

• Ensure I had a detailed record of any unrecorded relevant interactions that I had with participants before and after the audio-recorded interviews.
• Identify common themes I identified as emergent within and across interviews (i.e., the beginnings of analysis).
• And I think this is the most important one – help me identify the unspoken, unarticulated things I was able to observe, which I could then begin asking about and making more explicit.

This was all really good training for the speeded-up version of qualitative research I later had to produce as an academic and now as freelancer. I still make these observations in every project I work on, but there are not the resources to offer the luxury of lingering on the details.

But those early projects taught me to be on the lookout, meaning they are automatically being woven into projects I work on.

My observations are built into the questions I ask in interviews, in the coding frameworks developed collaboratively and in the analytic work developed. This kind of quality is really important to me to preserve, however fast I have to be in producing a piece of work.