Drawing on two methodological approaches: A collaborative approach to interview interpretation

Carmel Patterson
University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Suzanne Macqueen
University of Newcastle, Australia

Explicating interview approaches is significant for education research in understanding how the nuances of meaning from personal narratives uncover challenges and opportunities for investigating the lived experience across contexts. This paper considers interview approaches that focus on the reflexivity and meaning-making possible over a longitudinal timeframe for researcher and interviewee. Two methodological frameworks enabled a narrative oral history interview and a phenomenological lifeworld interview to establish variation in individual meaning-making, whilst eliciting understandings of shared social phenomena. We elucidate examples shared from the experience of teachers deemed as expert and interrogate the deliberations taken throughout a three-interview process. Reflexivity and the researcher's attendance to language, timing and open-ended prompting are some techniques considered for clarifying meaning in a small-scale Australian study. We argue that interrogating interview approaches for accessing deeper meaning-making of teacher professional learning further develops our understanding of interviewer-interviewee dynamics and the application of analytical frames.
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Authors: Carmel Patterson PhD (corresponding author) is an Industry Fellow of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She presents and publishes in her research areas of qualitative methodology and teacher professional learning. Carmel encourages Enacted Personal Professional Learning (EPPL), consulting to schools, universities and private enterprise. Email: carmel.patterson@uts.edu.au https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3383-9764 Suzanne Macqueen PhD is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle and a member of the Global Education and Research Team. Her research focus is on equity. She has published on between-class achievement grouping in primary schools, and the experiences of non-traditional students at university. Email: suzanne.macqueen@newcastle.edu.au https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4453-4015 Please cite as: Patterson, C. & Macqueen, S. (2021). Drawing on two methodological approaches: A collaborative approach to interview interpretation. Issues in Educational Research, 31(1), 188-203. http://www.iier.org.au/iier31/patterson.pdf