Backstage peformances

I’ve been re-reading Erving Goffman, who wrote a seminal wee book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which Goffman wrote about our daily life as a series of performances – and indeed, a constant shifting between formal performances on the big stage, and informal ‘backstage’ chitchat. I’ve been working on a social [...]

The Dark Art of the Telephone Depth Interview

People aren’t very keen on telephone interviews.    The phone interview tends to be seen as the (deeply) impoverished relation of the face-to-face interview.  There are plenty of obvious negatives: on the phone, you have no eye contact, no body language, and precious little context. It’s true that the lack of visual information is a [...]

Early days in online communities: access and social presence

This is a model of research community socialisation that I developed in a white paper for Virtual Surveys a couple of years ago.   I was inspired by two sources: first, the ‘forming, storming, norming, performing’ model of focus group dynamics that all qualitative researchers have drilled into them; and a similar five-step model developed by [...]

The basic qualitative interviewing kit, part 1

I’m on the road this week, for the first time in a while.  Just packing up and sorting through my supplies.  My current interview kit is so tiny that I’ve had to invest in a bright stripy pouch from Paperchase in order to stand any change of finding it in the bottom of my bag.  [...]

Are we allowed to talk about downloading?

A few months ago I ran some groups with the usual warm-up of discussing mobile and internet use.  The one difference between this and normal practice was that for this project, we rang up the attendees a few days before the groups and had a short conversation with them. The intention was merely to check [...]

What I did while away, in 7 points

One of the curses of doing work that is usually confidential is that – for me at least – it becomes somewhat difficult to blog about it.   Mix up ‘confidential’ with ‘busy’ and you have a bit of an issue, that I don’t think I’ve really solved yet.   The conventional wisdom is that you write about [...]

10 tips for productive online conversations

I’ve been trying to have online conversations for a while now, in different spheres of my life, and here are my top 10 tips for running online forums and groups.  There may be more along later, but these are the ones that occur to me first. 1. Aim for an intimate public conversation Conversational style [...]

Where did all the quallies go?

In getting ready to launch this  journal site I’ve been surfing around to find similar sites.  Although I have found some neat blogs created by web expert types, I’ve found very little on qualitative research.  I was hoping to find the equivalent of one of those anonymous-policemen type blogs which expose the raw underbelly of the job [...]