3.5 DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
3.5.3 Interviews
A research interview is defined by Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2000) as “a two person conversation initiated by the interviewer for the specific purpose of obtaining research relevant information” (p.269). Through interviews I was able to probe the thinking of the
participants, and to extract participant’s personal points of view regarding the strategies used to solve contextually based questions, which I was unable to ‘see’ through their written responses. This point is emphasised by Cohen et al (2000), when they state “one advantage of interviews is that it allows for greater depth than is the case with other methods of data collection” (p.269).
The interview is one of the most (if not the most) common research method in general and can be a rich source of information. Unfortunately there are also some dangers and pitfalls connected with interviews. There is always a danger of them becoming ordinary conversations without any desirable results. From a communication point of view there is a possibility that the interviewee does not give her/his actual opinions and ideas, but rather gives what s/he believes that he is expected to answer. Another drawback is that inexperienced interviewers may not be able to ask probing questions and hence some relevant data may not be gathered. In addition, inexperienced interviewers may not probe a situation.
Despite these drawbacks, the interview as a data source has many advantages.
Some of the reasons why I chose the interview technique for this research are outlined by Anderson & Arsenault (1998, p.190).
People are more easily engaged in an interview than in completing a questionnaire.
Thus, there are fewer problems with people failing to respond. Second, the interviewer can clarify questions and probe the answers of the respondent, providing more complete information than would be available in written form.
The second point is especially important to me as the researcher. I wanted to use the interviews to complement and elucidate the participants’ written responses to the Preparatory Examination and hence obtain a complete picture of how the participants dealt with and interacted with contextual questions. The purpose of the interviews was to probe the thoughts and ideas of the participants. I therefore chose the semi-structured interview as the most suitable for this purpose.
Semi-structured questions allow for interaction with the person, asking for details and clarification, but avoiding forcing the person in any direction, other than keeping their attention on the original topic (Boeree, 1998). Being semi-structured, additional questions
can be asked that may not have been anticipated at the beginning of the interview. It allowed the researcher to explain or rephrase the questions if respondents are unclear, especially when interviewing English second language learners as was the case in this study.
Semi-structured interviews were chosen in order to allow the interviewees a degree of freedom to explain their thoughts and to highlight areas of particular interest and expertise that they felt they had, as well as to enable certain responses to be questioned in greater depth, and in particular to bring out and resolve apparent contradictions.
Interviews with the 10 participants took approximately an hour each. The 10 interviewees were asked the same questions that covered the entire question paper but each interviewee was probed differently in accordance with his/her responses to the questions. This required that ample time had to be set aside with minimal disruption during the interview and the participants’ end of year study programme. The ten interviewees were interviewed individually in no particular order but rather when they became available. A secluded room in the computer laboratory was chosen to conduct the interviews. The room had been set up in advance with a video recorder and audio tape, a comfortable chair and desk, writing material, equipment, the 2009 Preparatory Examination question paper and the interviewee’s written response to the examination paper.
Interviewees were given their answer papers to have in front of them while they talked. The purpose of the interviews was to find out the participants perceptions of the contexts used in the question paper and more about the strategies utilised by the students when answering contextually based questions. I was interested in explaining what may have led the participants to make certain mistakes and what led them to answer certain questions in a particular way.
Interviews were video recorded and later transcribed. Video recording was useful when the learner was asked to point to a given table or part of the given information where he or she looked for the crucial information needed to answer a question. Another advantage of video recording is permanence (DuFon, 2002), which allows for repeated viewing for a thorough analysis so that it can still be studied intensively.
The qualitative data analysis was done using inductive analytic processes. Initially a case of each learner was drawn up using the interviews and the learner’s written responses to each of the questions. This was done for each of the 10 learners. The next step was to identify themes across the cases. There were 15 themes which emerged from the inductive analysis procedure.
These were : Diagrams in contextual questions; Number Grabbing; Relevance of scenario;
Adult related scenarios; Errors in question paper; Shortcoming of question paper; Complexity of scenario; Conceptual understanding; Misinterpretation of question/statement in question;
Assumptions made by Learners; Crucial Information versus Context Information; Experiential Influence; Calculation error; Answers based on scenario and Language used in Mathematics Literacy. Thereafter, after much movement between the emerging themes and the original data, these were collapsed into three main overarching themes of Design of the tasks, learner’s responses, perceptions and experiences of contexts. The 15 themes were then refined into 9 which were then categorized under these three themes.