Convergent Interviewing

CI as an Interviewing Method

In its original form, CI as a method designs the interview process to be guided by a general opening question that sets the boundary for the area of inquiry and ultimately seeks to have participants comment on both the positive and the negative aspects. In that original form, the opening question asks a participant to reflect on aspects that are positive about the phenomenon or issue in question. Once all aspects of that response have followed through their normal course (in other words, the normal prompts asking participants to clarify the points raised or to provide more specific information), the participant is then asked to reflect on any negative aspects, based on his or her experiences, about the phenomenon or issue under study. In more recent variations of CI, the formal prompts for participant reflection on the positive or negative aspects have been dropped, and they are only introduced if the participant has not raised any of these elements in the initial part of the interview. For the second and subsequent interviews with different participants in the project, the interviewer also asks the participants to reflect on the applicability of aspects raised during earlier interviews that had not been already raised. For example, Participant 1 might raise three main issues. Participant 2 might raise two of the points raised by Participant 1, and he or she might bring up two additional points. By the turn of Participant 3, the interviewer will probe for all unique issues that were raised by Participants 1 and 2 but were not already mentioned by Participant 3. This process follows in this continuous and sequential pattern until no new issues are being raised over the entire set of interviews.

CI as a Research Process

This sequential pattern of the interviews is one of the strengths of the CI process as it helps the researcher arrive at saturation (in other words, where no new ideas are being introduced by the participants) more quickly. Moreover, when a project involves more than one interviewer, CI provides a process to ensure that the interviewers are being consistent to the ontology (in other words, recognizing when aspects of interest to the larger study are being identified in a non-directive manner) and epistemology (in other words, capably identifying what counts as ‘knowledge’ for the topic under study) of the project. The process afforded by CI when using two or more interviewers is that by design, the interviewers must have frequent conversations, usually shortly after an interview has taken place, to share the aspects raised by different participants. Equipped with that knowledge, the interviewers can then probe more quickly in subsequent interviews around aspects of convergence and divergence. Effectively, analysis begins immediately after the first interview is conducted. This constant-comparative process permits researchers to [Page 187]test the emerging interpretations with each additional participant. This process can equally work even if only one interviewer is engaged in the data collection process, provided that he or she is systematic in recording emerging ideas to explore in subsequent interviews. The activities of the single interviewer can be strengthened through discussions with members of the research team even if those same team members are not engaged in data collection. Other strengths of the CI process include the ability to engage early with any pre-existing literature (unlike, e.g., Grounded Theory approaches, which may equally encourage constant comparison), as well as its maximum-variation sampling strategy, such that the topic of interest has as many inputs from different perspectives as possible.

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