Using email interviews in qualitative educational research: creating space to think and time to talk

Abstract

The paper explores how the Internet and email offers space for participants to think and make sense of their experiences in the qualitative research encounter. It draws on a research study that used email interviewing to generate online narratives to understand academic lives and identities through research encounters in virtual space. The paper discusses how the asynchronous nature of email helps to facilitate this by allowing research participants to contribute to research in their space and according to their own preference in time, and engage in a process of reflection and interaction. However, it also argues for the construction of more collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge their right to use the temporal nature of space and time that email offers to construct, reflect upon and learn from their stories of experience in their own manner, and not merely to the researcher’s agenda. It concludes by recognising the importance of email as a research tool for capturing the complexity of social interaction online