Janet Salmons

Great. I will post the date and time for the Readers' Garden event once it is set-- it will be after this seminar. (www.vision2lead.com or twitter/einterview.

aka Opal Zabaleta

I am delighted to hear that you are a fan  (I didn't know I had "fans"!)

Lurk away, post your ideas or perhaps recipes (catering?)

Your description of your own research (auto-ethnography? heuristic?) suggests visual elicitation with the maps-- an approach that could work as the basis for some or all of an online interview on a platform like Elluminate.

Thanks for joining in the seminar!

Janet

Hi Bronwyn,

I was struck by your comment:  "i would like to start to formalise understandings and skills which to date have been largely intuitive." Yes, that was my motivation for writing this book!  

I conducted two studies using interviews conducted in Elluminate, using the shared whiteboard for what I describe in Chapter 8 as visual elicitation and visual collaboration (for those reading along ). When I would discuss my research, people would stop me before I got to talk about what I found because they were fascinated by this kind of online interview. I looked and looked for literature about synchronous interviewing online and found very little-- there are some articles out there about emailed interviews, which researchers also term "e-interview" or "online interview." Clearly brave and creative researchers are conducting interviews using the Internet in various ways-- they just aren't writing about the methods per se. I sincerely hope my stab at formalizing, organizing ideas and approaches will be helpful to researchers-- and those who teach, guide and assess them.

What is your interest in terms of video?

Lots to think about!

Janet

Interesting that you both collected data in the same sort of way, through SKYPE interviews (what I refer to as "video calls" in the book, to minimize use of brand names ). But you analyzed your data very differently-- one focusing more on audio, one more on text, but neither on the visual data from the SKYPE camera feed.

In literature about interviews, much is made of visual and eye contact, as well as on non-verbal communications. Four modes of nonverbal communication are as follows:

1. Chronemics refers to the use of pacing and timing of speech, and the length of silence before a response in conversation.

2. Paralinguistic communication or paralanguage describes variations in volume, pitch, and quality of voice.

3. Kinesic communication includes facial expressions, eye contact or gaze, body movements, or postures.

4. Proxemic communication describes the use of interpersonal space to communicate attitudes (Gordon, 1980; Guerrero, DeVito, & Hecht, 1999; Kalman, Ravid, Raban, & Rafaeli, 2006) .

To some extent we get Chronemics even in text-based interviews based on timing of responses. A big advantage of rich synchronous communications that you have the ability to bring more visual and non-verbal dimensions into the interview-- as compared to a text-based or email interview where questions are posted/sent and responded to in writing.

That said, as you both have noted, you got what you needed from the verbal-text responses. Again, the whole point is to match technology with purpose. If the camera is a distraction for what you are trying to do, turn it off altogether or use it for a quick get-acquainted hello then turn it off.

On the other hand, you have another set of data that you might later decide you want to look at, analyze and discuss.

We are on a new frontier here and thoughtful discussion of experiments is useful for moving this kind of data collection forward.

Thanks for sharing-

Janet

Gordon, R. L. (1980). Interviewing: Strategy, techniques and tactics. Homewood: Dorsey.
Guerrero, L. K., DeVito, J. A., & Hecht, M. L. (Eds.). (1999). The nonverbal communication reader: Classic and contemporary readings. Prospect Hills: Waveland Press.
Kalman, Y. M., Ravid, G., Raban, D. R., & Rafaeli, S. (2006). Pauses and response latencies: A chronemic analysis of asynchronous CMC Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1), 1-23.

I created a "Study Site" to accompany the book. I see current posts as just the beginning-- I will continue to add and update it to reflect changes in technology options as well as publication of other books or articles of interest. (In other words, suggestions are welcome!)

Check it out: http://www.sagepub.com/salmonsstudy/.