Abstract
Participatory research that utilises creative methods has become central to understanding children and young people and how they experience the world they live in. We argue here that ‘the interview’, used appropriately, is a useful method, an important member in the researchers’ ‘toolbox’. This chapter offers reflections on the challenges and advantages of interviews and how to make the most of these social events, where power imbalances can be levelled to gain deep insights into the experiences of those we undertake research with. Understanding the population we are working with is key to our success, and we must be reflexive in our use of methods if we are to continue to individualise our approach to the population we are working with. We therefore focus on a range of techniques, used with different populations, and make suggestions on how the interview technique can be ‘adapted’ and ‘added to’, so that it can be individualised to the population in a research study.
The interview is not a single ‘thing’, and there are many different ways researchers can hold ‘conversations’ with children and young people; finding ways to assist in the telling of these stories is what we explore here in this chapter. We draw upon a number of our own studies, offering reflections from ‘the field’, sharing our thinking in terms of preparation and execution of interviews in data collection. These reflections are offered to other researchers working with children and young people, so that you can also learn and add to this body of evidence on methods, so that we more closely match method, to population to research question.
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Gibson, F., Fern, L., Oulton, K., Stegenga, K., Aldiss, S. (2018). Being Participatory Through Interviews. In: Coyne, I., Carter, B. (eds) Being Participatory: Researching with Children and Young People. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71228-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71228-4_6
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