Janet Salmons

Welcome to Part 4: Visual and Verbal Interviews: Conducting Research in Meeting or Videoconference Spaces! 
This is a Q & A and discussion about Chapters 8-10. 

The researchers for these chapters chose to use videocalls-- such as Skype- or online meeting spaces- such as Elluminate (now BlackBoard Collaborate) or some combination of technologies.

Videocalls allow researcher and participant to see each other. The researcher may use this exchange to observe the participant and collect data about non-verbal cues, affective responses and/or expressions. The chat area can also be used for posting questions or sharing links or other notes related to the interview.

Or the researcher can simply use it as a free VOIP communication for audio, when telephone interviews are too expensive.

The multichannel meeting space contains all of the above and more, in terms of communications options.It allows for videoconferencing and chat. As well, the shared whiteboard allows for many other interview options.The web tour function allows researcher or participant to view and discuss websites that represent some aspect of the research phenomenon

One element of the E-interview Research Framework is the Typology of Online Visual Interview Methods. This model explains that research participants can share and view images of the phenomena of the study, or generate images within the interview. These approaches can be used to communicate abstract ideas with visuals such as diagrams or visual maps. Visual elicitation techniques common to fields like sociology and anthropology can be used, with images or media generated by researcher or participants. Visual generation, creating images within the interview, allows participants to respond visually to the question, drawing or mapping a response to the interview question. Some of these techniques are used in the interviews conducted by contributors to Cases in Online Interview Research.  

If you are interested in visual interviews, please note that an entire chapter of Online Interviews in Real Time is dedicated to the topic. Also, I recently recorded a presentation made at the TQR conference. You can view the presentation and download the handout.

Please post your thoughts and questions about using live, visual ICTs for research interviews? If you've conducted interviews using these tools-- or are considering it-- please share your ideas so we can learn about them.

This discussion thread offers a place to discusst Chapters 4 - 7 and your examples of research interviews in virtual worlds. Two of these chapters are about such interviews-- let's start by discussing ideas and recommendations for virtual world interviews contained in Chapters 4 and 5.. In Chapter 4, Dr. Cabiria identified some best practices, as well as some unresolved questions about the protection of digital identity of participants.In Chapter 5, Ann Randall looked at potential interviewer effects. (You met Ann this week in the webinar.)

Please post your thoughts and questions about these two chapters, as well as your own plans or designs for research interviews in virtual worlds or games? How are you preparing to interview-- or how have you interviewed-- avatars as an avatar?

Q & A and discussion about Chapters 2 and 3.

The first section of Cases in Online Interview Research contains 2 cases and critiques of studies conducted using data collected with interviews in social media sites. In the first, "Blog Like an Egyptian," Sally Bishai used interviews as well as questionairres and blog post analysis for her study. In the second chapter, "Stranger in a Strange Land," Allison Deegan used interviews conducted with Facebook chat and email.(You met Allison Deegan in the webinar.)

• What questions, comments or thoughts do you have about these very different cases-- or the commentary on them included in the book? 
• After reading these cases and commentaries, what thoughts do you have about data collection using social media?

Use this thread to share links to your own websites/blogs/posted resources, references to your own work and/or other interesting materials.

The first topic we'll discuss is the E-Interview Research Framework, and its use in guiding research design. The Framework is a collection of inter-related models and key questions essential to e-interview research. I will explain the Framework and discuss the models in our synchronous session on Tuesday.

See the Prezi overview and the brief recorded introduction!

Please take a look at the explanation in Chapter 1 of Cases in Online Interview Research. If you do not have the book you can use the free chapter posted on the Sage site.

The first two steps are:
I. Aligning Purpose and Design, and

II. Choosing E-Interviews for the Study.

Thinking about research you have conducted, plan or hope to conduct, share a little about why you want to collect data online and how the interview approach will fit into the research design.