I’ve started my epistolary interviews. I have two tutor groups on which all the students and at least one tutor have agreed to me archiving their FirstClass conference, so I’m now interviewing all members of those groups who agreed to an epistolary interview. I got my first response in less than an hour, and I now have two responses. Hoorah!
No sooner do I vent in my blog about my interrupted epistolary interviews than both interviewees get back to me with answers.
🙂 🙂 🙂
My pilot interviews are throwing up lots of things that didn’t happen last year. I guess, as I’m adding about 25% to my knowledge of this technique, that that is only to be expected.
Gill sent me web links and attachments – thus demonstrating that you can use these interviews in that way if you want. She also replied to my questions from a laptop in Canada, thus demonstrating clearly that the interviews are neither time- nor place-dependent. (The photo shows where she emailed me from. I downloaded it from her Flickr site, and it’s copyright Gill.)
So that’s the good stuff. On the other hand, I filed one of Sali’s answers in the wrong place, and then thought she hadn’t answered so sent her another copy of the question and then found she had answered so sent her another question. Then the OU server went down. So now I’m not clear whether she got fed up with me messing things up and decided to stop participating, or whether she did get back to me – but Outlook didn’t pick it up. So that’s annoying. Specially bad timing because now it’s awkward to email her without looking as if I’m nagging her. And I don’t want to nag her – if she wants to stop being interviewed that’s fine. On the other hand, if she thinks I’ve just stopped then that’s no good either 🙁
And I’ve been back to look at my Outlook archive of my interviews. It’s lost Martin’s responses to two questions, and a couple of my emails. I can access them via Google Desktop, but otherwise they’re not there. So, again, Martin may have responded and his reply may just be lost in the ether. Luckily, I’ve only sent him that question once, so I’ve just emailed him again to explain what’s happening. Hope he gets back to me, cos we’re up to question seven and it would be good to have a complete interview.
Inspired by Anesa’s recent blog posts, I have started to write up my thesis!
Karen did suggest a couple of months ago that I could bank some sections of my PhD which I was feeling confident about. Accordingly, I’ve written 1000 words on the ethics of online research, which wasn’t too complicated, as I drew heavily on last year’s U500 presentation. Then I dragged out my mini-viva presentation to use the section of units of analysis. That needs to be added to – I’ve got a couple of articles that I need to reference. Oh, and I’ve done a piece on episolary interviewing. It needs to be tidied up but most of it is in place.
That’s 3000 words or so – hey, I’ve written 5% of my thesis. How cool is that?
Just so that I don’t lose it – Here’s Margaret Debenham on epistolary interviewing:
Finally a number of Personal Interviews were undertaken to complete the main study by exploring inferences drawn from the earlier studies through direct interaction with the participants. Eleven students were interviewed in total. This phase of the work was undertaken in two parts, using two different interview techniques. These were ‘face-to-face’ interviews and on-line interviews by asynchronous e-mail, a novel method introduced in this thesis, termed epistolary interview. This latter method was adapted for text-based communication from the type of semi-structured conversational format described by Wilson (1996) as a suitable research tool for in depth exploration of interviewee experience in a face-to-face situation. Both sets of interviews were based on a similar framework of interview questions. (p. 11)
Debenham, M. (2001). Computer Mediated Communication and Disability Support: Addressing Barriers to Study for Undergraduate Distance Learners with Long-term Health Problems. Chapter 1 p 11. Doctoral thesis. Milton Keynes: The Open University. John added:
If anyone is interested in accessing Margaret Debenham’s PhD thesis in an electronic form, it can be found through the following site:
The url of the web page is http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mjdebenham/MDpage2.htm.This will normally be accessed from a link on my home page at: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mjdebenham/MDpage1.htm
People were interested in response rates, what time people responded to the emails, whether people went on to the end with the email.
Advantages I hadn’t necessarily spotted before are that you can start the analysis early and that you can use a grounded theory approach.