Crossing Cultural Barriers in Research Interviewing

This article critically examines a qualitative research interview in which cultural barriers between a white non-Muslim female interviewer and an African American Muslim interviewee, both from the USA, became evident and were overcome within the same interview. This interview and two follow-up interviews are presented as a \u27telling case\u27 about crossing cultural barriers. The analysis focuses on seven phases of the interview (cultural barriers, warming up, crossing the racial barrier, connecting as social workers, connecting as women, connecting as students, and crossing the tape recorder barrier). The discussion outlines the pre-interview and during-interview barriers and facilitating conditions and related implications for cross-cultural qualitative research interviewing

"Dreaming in colour’: disabled higher education students’ perspectives on improving design practices that would enable them to benefit from their use of technologies"

The focus of this paper is the design of technology products and services for disabled students in higher education. It analyses the perspectives of disabled students studying in the US, the UK, Germany, Israel and Canada, regarding their experiences of using technologies to support their learning. The students shared how the functionality of the technologies supported them to study and enabled them to achieve their academic potential. Despite these positive outcomes, the students also reported difficulties associated with: i) the design of the technologies, ii) a lack of technology know-how and iii) a lack of social capital. When identifying potential solutions to these difficulties the disabled students imagined both preferable and possible futures where faculty, higher education institutions, researchers and technology companies are challenged to push the boundaries of their current design practices

A Qualitative Interview With Young Children: What Encourages or Inhibits Young Children’s Participation?

The goal of every qualitative interview is to produce rich data. Inducing storytelling is a challenge in every interview. Interviews with young children (ages 3–6) present an additional challenge because of perceived power differences between children and adults. This research examines how interviewers’ questions and expressions encourage or inhibit children from telling their stories. We extracted 1,339 child interviewee–adult interviewer turn exchanges from a national study on children’s perspectives on risk and protection ( N = 420) and analyzed them in two steps. First, we categorized the interviewers’ questions and expressions and children’s responses. Seven categories were found for interviewer expressions and five for children’s responses. We then examined the relationship between interviewer categories and children’s responses. The categories that produced the richest data were encouragement, open-ended questions, and question request. Sequence of utterances and closed-ended questions produced the least storytelling. We did not find significant differences based on a child’s gender with regard to the interviewer categories. The results and implications for researching young children are addressed