QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS

I have conducted several qualitative interviews with the participating officers as part of the monitoring processes in the Carbon 20 project. Supplementing these interviews I also conducted interviews with several other actors with different roles ranging from other participants in the project, such as companies and energy consultants, to actors influencing the contextual settings surrounding the project, such as the Danish Environmental Agency (Danish EPA), and experts within the field. I have equally also interview actors from some of the similar on-going projects.

Before going deeper into a discussion of how I have conducted and processed these interviews, I first present Nigel King’s (1994) considerations on the qualitative research interview. Nigel King argues that a qualitative research interview is an interview with the purpose of gathering descriptions of the life-world of the interviewee with respect to interpreting the meaning of the described phenomena.

The goal is not to obtain quantifiable responses, but to gain insight into how the

interviewees perceive the research topic and to understand the reasoning behind their perspectives. He adds that qualitative research interviews can include a broad focus on the interviewees’ whole-life-world (ethnographic) or a narrow focus on particular topics and how they are perceived and understood. Similarly they can vary from being relatively spontaneous and unstructured discussions as part of participatory observation research, to using quite detailed, but still flexible and open interview guides (King, 1994). Equal to Bergold and Thomas, King also emphasises that a key element of qualitative research interviews is to include the interviewee as a participant in the research (subject) rather than reducing them to research

“objects” (Ibid).

King (1994) distinguishes between three types of research interviews (ibid):

1. The structured research interview, which equally could be conducted through questionnaires, where the interest primary is to gain factual (even quantifiable) data through asking the same questions to several

respondents (interviewees)

2. The full qualitative research interview focussing on the meaning of particular phenomena of the interviewees (participants).

3. A third type that lies somewhere in between, with some structure imposed, but still open-ended – he calls them ‘structured open response interviews’

where the focus tends to be on factual information and general evaluation comments without exploring deeper layers of meaning. He emphasis that such are not structured enough to allow statistical analysis and testing of a hypothesis, but neither flexible and responsive enough to go beyond surface meanings into more etnografic understanding of the interviewees world view.

When providing guiding for the full qualitative research interview King emphasis the value of preparing a detailed interview guide (especially for preparation and as notes for keeping the interview focused on relevant topics of the research agenda).

The distinction between the two latter of the above listening is thus somewhat blurred. Apparently it mainly concerns whether to solely rely on very open-ended questions or whether also to use more direct questions that address issues specifically.

King (1994) further emphasises that in a qualitative research interview one should aim to record and transcribe the whole text, as it is critical to be very focused during the interview, but also to get the whole picture of the nuances of the response when interpreting the interviews. Conversely, it will often be easy in the structured interview to sit and fill in the answers to the interview (opinion and market preference pull etc.). If recording and transcription is not possible, he recommends

taking brief notes and then as fast as possible sitting down a make a summary and not using too much time during the interview to stop to write the full answers. It is difficult to conduct the interview and take extended notes at the same time (Ibid).

The overall setting of the interview will, in my view, of course differ according to the research field and research agenda. There can be several different research objectives (problem formulations) within the same research field, and the design of the interview will depend on the specific focus in terms of whether one is interested in getting their conscious responses and opinions on a given topic, or if one wants to interpret the specific words used, the unspoken and unconscious behaviour etc. In other words whether: one is going to use the content of what the interviewees are asked about, or one is interesting in also interpreting according to specific ways the interviewee are acting. Such different interest provides different requirement for the qualitative research interview.

Depending on the focus, it will sometimes be useful to ask more direct questions in order to, for example, “provoke” a reaction or comment about specific debates of interest.

As mentioned above I undertook several rounds of interviews with the participant officers as the main informants –knowing subjects – supplemented with interviews of other actors. I used diverse combinations of King’s overall types and approaches to such qualitative research interviews. Generally the focus was mainly on the particular topics of interest in terms of how they perceived and understood the topic of interest in the interview, and not as such their whole world view (ethnographic).

At the beginning of the project, the local project leaders (the officer in charge in each of the municipalities) filled out a preliminary qualitative questionnaire in order to provide a starting picture for the various municipality experiences with respect to facilitating companies on a voluntary basis – what properly would resemble Kings category 1 of the above listening.

The focus of the interviews to the first monitoring report was on the municipalities’

overall experiences so far with respect to, for example, their view of options to include energy etc. as part of their general inspection activities, the process of engaging the energy consultants, which activities they specifically carried out, etc.

At the majority of the municipalities, the interviews were conducted as focus-group interviews with all the participating officers from that municipality. At a few of the municipalities the interview were solely with the involved local project leader.

Before the interviews, an interview guide was prepared, structured around specific topics and including draft questions of interest. During the interview I generally let the conversation flow and allowed it to take several different directions. The interview guide was (just) used to ensure that I included the topics of interest and to

find inspiration for questions if the interview was not smooth. During the interview I took extensive notes following the structure of the interview guide, but also on any other topics addressed. I also recorded the interviews, but primarily based the summaries on the notes and only listened to passages in terms of getting the content right. This means that these summaries are focused on the content of what was said – not the specific wording.

The interviews for the second monitoring report specifically addressed the progress of each of the participating companies. The officers were, for example, asked about the status of each of the companies in respect to provided screenings, adopting action plans and their implementation, and whether they had encountered challenges and how these had been addressed. Contrary to the interviews before the first monitoring report, these interviews were primary one-to-one interviews with the local project manager. In one municipality I did also for the second round conduct a focus-group interview, and in another municipality the one-to-one interview were carried out with each of the officers involved (having also taking turn to be the local project manager).

In contrast to the first round of interviews, I didn’t prepare a specific detailed interview guide. The interviews did, as mentioned, address the status of each of the participating companies within the municipality, and this functioned as the structure of the interviews. The conversations were managed so as to leave plenty of room and flexibility to follow emerging aspects of interest including following up on topics discussed during the first round of interviews. The interviews were recorded and more or less transcribed allowing capture the more specific wording used.

For the final evaluation of the project, the local project managers of the seven participating municipalities answered a questionnaire with open-ended qualitative questions. A pool of questions was designed to allow the officers to reflect on the process for each of the participating companies. This included specific questions about the process and progress for each company including specific challenges encountered; questions on the officers’ role as facilitator; as well as the officers overall perspectives of challenges and learning to bring forward from the project.

The focus of this questionnaire was thus double (or triple). To get the municipal officers to reflect on their learning and interactions, and collect specific information for the monitoring process (as well as this PhD).

In addition to these interviews some supplementing telephone interviews were conducted with a few of the officers the specific topics of their experiences cooperating with the energy consultants.

Complementing the interviews of the participating officers, several others actors were also interviewed. These included:

1) An interview with an employee at the Danish Environmental Protection Agency that specifically targeted: his perception of the legal basis and possibilities to address climate and energy as part of permitting, monitoring and inspection activities, his view and response to the municipal officer perceptions of constraints on this, and the status of any coming changes and their relationship to the EU framework. The interview was again semi-structured around a prime subject of interest, but still open to follow any emerging aspect of interest. The interview was extensively referenced in the summary (after listening to passages from the recording).

Subsidiary to the interview there was further mail correspondence with several persons from the Danish EPA in respect to whether or not energy was addressed in the Danish Environmental Protection Act and the possibility of addressing energy in a new requirement to conduct

“campaign” inspection.

2) Interviews with four of the participating energy consultants. One directly face-to-face interview with a semi structured interview guide prepared in advance. One ad-hoc arranged interview as an extension of participating in a screening of one of the participating companies, and two telephone interviews on some narrow topics related to the general energy screening offers and participation in Carbon 20. For each, an extensive summary was made. Only the first were recorded and summery based on the listening of it.

3) Eight companies were also interview in extension of participation at the municipalities (primary Allerøds) follow-up meetings with them. The interviews were on a rather ad-hoc basis without any prepared interview guide, but centred on the experiences of participating in such a project. I chose not to record these interviews as judge this could compromise the companies willingness to take part, but made extensive summaries shortly afterwards.

4) I also conducted expert interviews to gather more background knowledge especially in respect of energy saving.

5) I further conducted telephone interviews with represents of the similar projects of Project Zero and Klimaklar as well as more informal conversations with various actors from the NBE project in terms of both the involved colleagues at AAU, the central environmental officer from the municipality as well as the Environmental director at Aalborg Kommune, Michael Damm. Most of the latter is only reported in notes not made electronically available, however I also had access to a student project including extensive interview with Michael Damm (Ozimek, 2013).

Appendix A) is an overview of the majority of the empirical data collected throughout this PhD and where the summaries, transcriptions and notes (my notes and not the official taken) from interviews, conversations and meetings are made electronically available in the provided CD (primarily available for the Assessment Committee and only as the raw un-proofread Danish transcripts, notes etc.). As this

list indicates, those referred to above are just the main input. Furthermore far from all notes have been made electronically available, whereas this list is not even complete.