Ethnographic interviews with key informants

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the potential need for boosting the relations and the trust that was built during the spring and summer.

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– as well as during the many weekly car rides between the high schools and the program farm – to use this awareness to let the youth take initiative to work with me as well as taking initiatives to conversation. Another strategy was developed later in the spring internship when I announced to the group my wish to interview and in this way invited youth to consider taking part and to decide to contact me in order to become an informant²¹. Given the decision to interview the same group of youth at different stages of the program participation during the whole period of fieldwork it was also not relevant to do this until the last 3 weeks of the 10 week spring internship where the youth that had applied for the next phase – the summer job training – had been hired.

The strategy of inviting youth collectively proved fruitful in the sense that it made 11 out of the 20 potential youth come to me to ask if they could be interviewed, all of whom I had been talking to regularly in different co-working situations. This group consisted of 4 girls and 7 boys. When the summer program began however, 3 of the girls and one of the boys for different reasons had decided not to join the program any longer. This left me with the challenge to either stay with the remaining group or find youth that would be interested to join. I chose to ask 2 youth that I had both had many good conversations and co-worker experiences with – both of them boys. They both agreed very positively. I was aware of that the group of key informants thus ended up having a gender imbalance that did not represent the general gender ratio in the summer program - which was slightly more boys than girls. I ended up prioritizing the two boys as the ‘newcomers’ to the group due to my impression of their potentials of being ‘good informants’ in the sense that I already had built a high degree of trust and rapport and knew their personalities enough to expect them to be willing to share and reflect on their experiences.

After the oral agreement on being interviewed was made I introduced the youth to the consent/assent forms that had been designed as a part of the approval by UC Berkeley’s Committee for Protection of Human Subjects. I handed over the forms and asked the youth to read them thoroughly and ask me any questions they might have about the specific collaboration as becoming an informant and in the case of the 3 that were under 18 – to discuss it with their parents before signing it and giving it back to me²².

21 This verbal invitation to participate covered the same questions that are structuring the consent forms (see Appendix B), including the offer of paying the youth 20 $ as a symbolic gesture for their time and effort (this was only offered for the spring interviews as they were scheduled to take place after the afternoon program hours).

22 For an example of the consent/assent forms see Appendix B

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Each youth was interviewed once in the spring internship, twice in the summer job training and once in the fall business position. The ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979, Holstein, Gubrium 1995) were prepared on the basis of topics originating from the theoretical perspectives in the research question in as well as relevant topics identified through the observations²³. Additionally, the staff perspective on the pedagogical practice was explored through 8 interviews with staff members. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and subject to open coding (Corbin, Strauss 2008).

Additional ethical considerations in relation to the relationship with the youth have been guided by the awareness of that though the formal consent was agreed upon prior to commencing the first round of interviews in the spring I also acknowledged the need for seeing- “‘Consent in fieldwork studies … is a process, not a one-off event, and may require renegotiation over time”²⁴. The awareness of this need meant that though the youth had agreed to be interviewed several times I actively included asking to their continued willingness to participate before each interview session.

The ethnographic interviews with the staff were performed at 4 different stages in the annual cycle of the program and structured to cover partly concrete reflections on the experiences and challenges in the current program phase as well as more general themes. The general themes were the history of the program, the pedagogical intentions of different program elements, the backgrounds of the staff and reflections on the general role design and management of staff. The first interview was performed in the early period of the spring internship and focused on staff’s perspectives on the recruitment process. The second was performed at the end of the spring internship and focused on exploring the staff’s general and specific experiences with the crew of youth interns at that point in the program cycle. A further interview was performed in the fall and this covered topics around the general pedagogical approach and reflections on the professional role and interaction with the youth. As in the interviews with the youth a general strategy was to invite for answers in the form of narratives that could provide more contextual insights into the topics and events where meaning was constructed and values attached.

The long period of practical participation and building the researcher role from the perspective of apprenticeship provided time to prepare for the topics I wanted the youth to reflect upon in the interviews. I wanted the interviews to be a space for mutual reflection where the meaning of general

23 See Appendix C

24Davies is here quoting Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) (1987) Ethical Guidelines for Good Practice, London: Association of Social Anthropologists, p.3.

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and specific experiences could be explored, described, and interpreted. As Spradley’s ethnographic interview was the main source of guidance for the interviews that were conducted throughout the fieldwork a brief introduction of this specific method is necessary.

The ethnographic interview can, according to Spradley, be examined as a speech event that shares many features with the friendly conversation (Spradley 1979:58). In fact, he recommends seeing this form of interviewing as a series of friendly conversations where the researcher slowly introduces new elements to assist the informants to respond as informants. The exclusive use or too quick introduction of these ethnographic elements will make the interviews become like a formal interrogation – this would be counterproductive to the rapport that is important to build (Ibid).

The three elements are explicit purpose, ethnographic explanations and ethnographic questions.

The explicit purpose covers the obligation of the researcher to communicate the purpose and make sure that the informant is informed about this. This was met both in the verbal negotiations prior to agreeing about the interview process and was included in the consent and assent forms that were designed and signed by the youth (and their parents in the few cases of youth being under 18 at the time of the collection). It was also guiding the opening introduction at the commencement of each of the interviews in the cycle – reciting the overall purpose of the research and the specific goal of the present interview – often starting with a rehearsal of what we talked about last and thus both communicating the purpose as well as supporting the youth to feel comfortable and to direct his og her thoughts in a productive and expressive direction.

The ethnographic explanations cover the need to continuously offer different forms of explanations that facilitate the process of helping the informant to become a form of teacher for the researcher – who aspires to learn about the culture of the informant - from the informant’s point of view.

Spradley names five different types of explanations. The first is project explanations where the researcher explains to the informant why the researcher is asking the questions – and here was the applied purpose of the research proved valuable in motivating the youth to participate as well as to share their perspectives. The second is recording explanations – here the negotiation around how the researcher will record – in writing or on an audio file - the interview. The third is native language explanations where the researcher encourages the informant to talk in the same way they talk to others in the ‘cultural scene’ – and not to translate it into scientific or theoretical terms but to keep the telling as close to the talk in the situations in focus. The fourth is interview explanations that may occur when the researcher after a longer period have been building the relationship with the informant and the informant has become an expert in providing ‘cultural information’ may begin to

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ask more analytical questions e.g. to draw a map or reflect on a special term that is used in specific situations – and thus needs to be explained as differing form the way the interviews to that point has been conducted. An example of this occurred during the third round of interviews when I asked about the specific meaning of terms that were repeated in the everyday practice of the program by staff (e.g. ‘leadership’) in order to explore the meaning of this for the youth. The fifth is question explanations that cover the importance of explaining the different kinds of questions that are used – remembering that it is the questions that are the main tool to discover the informant’s perspective often just to say – now I want to ask a different type of question.

The ethnographic questions cover three main categories of questions – descriptive, structural and contrast questions.

According to Spradley, Descriptive questions are the easiest to ask and used to collect ongoing samples of informants’ language – and to collect thorough descriptions of situations, events and emotions that are experienced as meaningful or significant for the informant.

Structural questions makes it possible to explore how informants organize their cultural knowledge.

Examples of questions in this category directed at the youth were asking to different kinds of situations where they were making decisions or it could be asking to different kinds of tasks around farming or cooking that they either favored or found challenging.

Contrast questions enable the researcher to discover the dimensions of meaning which informants employ to distinguish the objects and events in their world (Ibid:60). An example of the use of these types of questions was to ask about how the program space or the learning in the program was different from the space or learning in the high school context or it could be asking to the difference in cooking in the program compared to at home.

An additional focus in the interviews was to ask for experiences that for different reasons had been significant for the informant – the earlier described theoretical understanding of identity as constructed in discourse and narrative directed the methodology also to be especially interested in making the informants – staff as well as youth – to give specific examples of important or illustrative situations. This strategy proved very fruitful and a broad range of narratives where collected. The narrative strategy was further elaborated as a part of the follow-up interviews which will be introduced below.

The topics in the youth interviews were: Personal background and school experience; Motivation for joining the program (prior knowledge, reaction to the outreach, role of teachers etc.); Experiences

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and learnings from taking part in the program: farm work, workshops, cooking and eating and relationship to food, interaction with other youth, role of the staff and interaction with them, examples of important experiences (narratives), questions to what the youth had learned from the program and where or if the youth had changed, future plans and ending with an invitation for open-ended reflections.

A specific reflection I made during the preparations as well as during the evaluations of the first round of interviews with the youth that I have labeled ‘pilot-interviews’ is to emphasize that the primary purpose and function of these interviews were twofold. The one purpose was in regard to my own practice of becoming comfortable in performing an interview in English and the other purpose was to make the youth comfortable in the role of being an informant in this more formal situation very different from the informal conversations and small talk during the practical co-working situations.

Specific strategies I followed in the interviewing were to get broad reflections of how youth perceived the program participation, to explore the different experiences of agency through asking to which decisions that were made and to the meaning that was ascribed to the activities. In the second and third round of interviews I had a specific focus also on asking for critical perspectives in asking where and how the program could be improved.

Reflecting and evaluating on the actual experience and outcome of how the interviews turned out, a number of points are important to mention. One was how the quality of the interviews improved over the sequence– in the sense of the conversation made the youth express a range of detailed reflections and thus gave the impression to enjoy the sessions.