First Web Conferencing Interview

On Sunday, I conducted my first real web conferencing interview for research purposes.  I mention real because I've conducted two online interviews as pilots, however they were through Skype, which my IRB does not approve because Skype calls can be easily intercepted, and therefore I cannot guarantee privacy or confidentiality.  However, with the latest news concerning the US government PRISM surveillance program and corporate compliance, I don't think I can guarantee privacy or confidentiality with any online communication.  The IRB believed that Adobe Connect offered more security than Skype, so I was able to conduct my first web conferencing interview using Adobe Connect.  One reason I chose Adobe Connect was that I had 3 years of experience using the program to assist the Education Policy & Leadership Studies department in the College of Education with their hybrid online courses.

If you're interested in how I did this, I created a meeting on Adobe Connect for this purpose.  When you create a meeting, a link is provided to be shared with guest participants. I shared the link with my research participant who logged in as a guest, and then I helped her set up her webcam and mic.  Before that, however, I let her know the specifications for joining an Adobe Connect meeting.  The only preferred specification that she couldn't meet was avoiding a wireless connection.  Fortunately for us, the wireless connection was strong enough that it was only dropped once during the 2.5-hour interview.

Adobe Connect offers a recording option, but I opted out because I did not want the conference stored in the institution's Adobe Connect account and I did need to capture video.  Instead I captured the audio portion of the interview using Audacity.  Because I was using my Macbook Pro, I could have easily used Garageband as well but I piloted with Audacity, and it demonstrated reliability so there was no reason for me to change.  If I wanted to publish the audio interview, then Garageband would have been easier, but I cannot and will not publish the raw interview.

What did I learn from this type of interview process?

1. Adobe Connect has a greater broadcasting delay problem than Skype.  I have used Skype to communicate with pilot participants and friends in Japan and Germany, and I experienced little to no delay in the communication.  However, Adobe Connect had a noticeable delay for my communication to South Korea.  I do not believe South Korea is at fault for this delay because no country is more wired than South Korea.
2. The technical issues doubled my anxiety for the first 30 minutes.  Not only was I nervous because I wanted my first interview to go well, but my concern for having little to no technical issues made it more difficult for me to focus on my participant.  It was during the first 30 minutes that the connection dropped, so I was a little freaked out at that point.
3. The delay took a while to get used to.  Not only did I have to learn a new way to pace the interview, but I also had to cope with hearing myself delayed on her end.  Every time I asked a question, my echo would repeat that question about 5-10 seconds later.  That echo sometimes helped me figure out when she would start speaking, so I didn't feel uncomfortable with the silent pauses on her end.
4. Even if you want to plow through a lengthy interview, take a break when you get one.  I purposefully divided my interview into 3 sections.  Although I skipped the first break, I took the second one, and I needed it.  After that break, I was much calmer and more confident about the interview process.  That break also gave Adobe Connect a break in that I noticed the echo issue was toned down in the second half or third third.
5. An interview script is your friend.  When I piloted my interview face-to-face, it was easier to let it flow into a conversation.  But because of the irregularities of a web conferencing interview, this flow could not be transferred.  Perhaps if I had more practice interviewing with delayed online communication, perhaps I could discover a new conversational flow.  However, I would prefer to avoid this type of delay if I could.  The interview script always kept me focused when a technical issue distracted me.  The interview script worked well on my computer because I could set up the script next to the video of my participant, so I could maintain eye contact much better than a face-to-face interview.  So that's one positive aspect of conducting an interview online.

Last but not least, I was very fortunate to have a flexible and easygoing participant for my first web conferencing interview.  She was completely understanding of the technical issues and did not get upset if I had to ask her to repeat her responses if I couldn't hear her.  She made it a much more manageable and enjoyable experience.

Recruitment and Interview Update

Within the last week, I have successfully recruited 5 participants, and I've already completed interviewing the third participant.  I still need to interview the first 2 one more time.  I haven't started interviewing the last 2 yet, one of which will be on vacation for the next 3 weeks.  I believe one reason that I'm having a hard time recruiting people is that many of my participants are on vacation or have left the country for good.  July is the month of transition for my target participant population.  Once they are settled back home or back for the fall semester, then I should be able to recruit and interview more.  However, I may not need to do this as I seem to have a sufficient number of participants now.  That being said, some of them may not complete their interviews.

I plan to contact 5 more participants for recruitment within the next week.  I also plan to send reminders to about 5 others that I attempted to recruit a month ago.  The last time I sent out reminders, I successfully recruited one.  If my current 5 participants all complete the interviews within the month, then I am done collecting data.  However, if they do not, then I will plan another phase of recruitment.

One of the biggest changes since my last post was that I decided not to recruit through Twitter as my pilot test failed.  Apparently, a recruitment message can get lost in the Twitter feed very quickly and/or go unnoticed in the contact section for months.  Twitter is also too risky to recruit privately.  Instead I've decided to use YouTube which notifies its users well.  Although the pilot test worked, none of my contacts through YouTube have replied yet.

With regular email recruitment, I've found that most of my respondents reply within 24 hours of my message being sent.  Only one has replied a few days later.  The correspondence with one who declined my invitation spanned nearly 3 weeks!  I was trying to gauge the frequency of blog posting to be roughly equivalent to the frequency they check and/or reply to their email, but I found this to be difficult and usually inaccurate.

As for interviews, nobody has chosen to be interviewed through Adobe Connect, the web conferencing program used at the University of Iowa and Kirkwood Community College.  I'm a bit relieved because that would involve an extra step of transcribing all the interviews.  However, I'm finding that some of my participants answer interview questions on a survey platform quite tersely.  One participant insisted that he send his interview answers via online video.  This will be interesting to see one I receive them.

Recruitment Issues

It's been about a month since my last posting, and I have successfully recruited one participant.  As of today, I have contacted 13 people for interviews with 1 acceptance and 1 rejection.  I just contacted 3 people today, but aside from them I haven't heard from the remaining 8.  What makes my recruitment difficult is that all of my participants are overseas, and I get their contact information from their blogs, microblogs, or vlogs. I assume that some of these bloggers have posted outdated or barely used email addresses.  Another assumption for the low response rate is that many people in my target population are getting ready to leave their host country.  They are busy enough saying goodbyes and preparing for life at home that they are not ready to commit to a series interviews that may take months to complete.

One of the stickiest issues is the method of contacting my participants.  My IRB has approved of contacting them through email, but I have two other methods of contacting them online which IRB may or may not consider "email."  One is through Twitter which allows me to send private messages to my those who follow me and public messages to those who don't.  Both types of messages are limited to Twitter's well known 140-character limit.  This is probably the most difficult to work around as I cannot capture my entire IRB-approved email message within 140 characters.  Currently we are working on solutions.  If I we come to one, then I will be able to contact 8 more people, one of which I probably have a good chance of recruiting.

There are 12 other people that are best contacted through their YouTube channels.  YouTube allows messaging through their service with no character limits.  I wrote to IRB today to see if they qualify this as "email."  In addition, I would like to send a recruitment video containing the same message as the email.  I believe this will be more effective based on the literature I have read and my own feelings since my contacts will be able to see who I am, and it may be easier to build rapport if I don't appear creepy.  Furthermore, I believe a link to my recruitment video would be more effective to send on Twitter as well.  I'd really like to work on this as soon as I know where IRB stands, then I would nearly double the amount of people to contact.

I am fortunate to have the technological capability with high-tech facilities to record, edit, and link this potential recruitment video.  I might as well take the chance since I have this opportunity.

Now Collecting Data

Since my last posting, I started a full-time job, which is conveniently within a comfortable and reasonable driving distance of my home and my university.  The job is thankfully not too similar to my research interest, so I can view my research as a welcoming break from my job and vice-versa.  At this early point in my research and job, I can say that I enjoy them equally.

My new job has/had a large learning curve, so I decided to take a one-month hiatus from my research and focus solely on the new job.  However, one week after my first month I went to Canada for a 5-day business trip and so I couldn't dive back into my dissertation until returning and recovering from the Canadian trip.

Although I officially wasn't collecting data, I was reading a book written by a potential participant in my study.  I decided to read it during the 5-week hiatus to keep my brain interested in my research topic.  I did not want to lose complete interest in my dissertation because that would have terrible consequences.  For the most part, the pressure to continue my strong work ethic from my co-chairs and my committee is off.  Actually, the book really got me excited about participant selection and data collection, so I was ready to start when I got the chance.

When I selected my first participant, I realized that I forgot to contact IRB to make a change to my invitation email.  One sentence had to be removed because it no longer applied to my study and it would confuse my participants.  Fortunately for me, it took an hour to make the change and two days for IRB to approve the modification.  By then, I was six weeks into my job without collecting any data.

This past week is when I started collecting document data from my first participant.  I still need to collect interview data, but I already have about 800 pages of document data from the first of up to fifteen participants.  That appears daunting, but I would say about 1/3 of those pages do not directly answer my primary research question.  I cannot describe anymore than that without violating confidentiality.  It's also somewhat less daunting because I have a framework set up to start initial coding.  The deeper digging will begin once a pattern emerges from the initial coding process.

Although I have just started collecting data, reading the documents from my first participant and the book by the potential participant (who I may not select at all for reasons I cannot disclose) has been personally rewarding.  Doing this research is rewarding professionally and emotionally because my participants have had similar life experiences as me.  If I do not complete this research project, I will have gained enough to be personally satisfied.  However, I do not intend to give up because I would also like to be professionally satisfied with a PhD, evidence that I can conduct research at a research-intensive university.

Research Proposal Meeting

I haven't written much in the past two months because the only thing I had to do concerning my dissertation was schedule and hold my research proposal meeting.  If I weren't job hunting in that period of time, I would have considered those past couple of months as an extended break.  During this hiatus, I received some advice of how to constructively occupy the time and I took some of that advice.

Hiatus Advice

1. Submit some manuscripts to scholarly journals.  A colleague and I had been planning to submit our co-written paper to a journal for a few months, and this hiatus provided the best opportunity to finally submit it.
2. Begin another research project.  I played around with this idea, coming up with different research questions involving the same population under investigation in my dissertation.  I limited myself to brainstorming research questions and doing some preliminary literature searching.
3. Submit proposals to conferences.  In my case, the deadlines for proposals for many upcoming conferences had already passed.  I spent a little time brainstorming ideas for proposals for conferences during the 2013/14 academic year.
4. Work more on the pilot study.  I already had two opportunities to work on my pilot study since August, and I didn't want to adjust or add anything more being so close to the research proposal meeting.

I spent a great deal of my hiatus in the job hunt, and incidentally I accepted a position just the day before my research proposal meeting.  To sum, the last month was an emotionally draining one filled with anticipation.  Along the way, I received a couple other job rejections and requests for interviews.

I also spent the last month brushing up on my Spanish skills using Duolingo, a free online language  learning software program.  I did this for a number of reasons both personal and professional, and I found it more enjoyable than I expected.

One of the more useful ways of spending my hiatus time was working on my professional blog.  I took the opportunity to explore my ideas about incorporating multiliteracies into second language education, a second research interest of mine.  I wanted to practice my skills of curriculum development with this new idea as well as learn more about the development of education technology and its effects on learning and pedagogy.  This exercise actually prepared me for the job I just accepted.

Research Proposal Meeting
On my birthday, February 14, my co-chairs gave me the green light to schedule my research proposal meeting with my dissertation committee: 3 faculty from my department, 1 from another department within the College of Education, and 1 from my cognate area of Sociocultural Anthropology.  I used Doodle to schedule it, and found that March 7 was the best earliest time for everyone.

By request, I sent 4 committee members a digital copy of my proposal (the first 3 chapters of my dissertation) and 1 member a hard copy in a 3-ring binder.  They all received their copies within a week of February 14.

A series of winter storms swept passed Iowa, about one a week, leading up to my proposal meeting.  One of these storms prevented one of my co-chairs from attending the meeting, but the meeting proceeded well without her.

I spent the first 10 minutes presenting a synopsis of my research proposal, ending it with some of my concerns.  And over the next 80 minutes, I discovered that my concerns overlapped quite well with my committees.  Nobody's questions or concerns took me by surprise, and I was very happy to receive such constructive feedback.  I'm not sure how typical this is for PhD candidates as I haven't met many who like to share details about their meeting.

By the end of the meeting, I had a good idea of how to make changes to my first 3 chapters before collecting the data.  At that time, it seemed like these changes would take a few months and I could start collecting data by mid to late summer 2013.  I was surprised after reconnecting with my co-chairs that I did not have to make as many drastic changes as I was ready to make.  The best outcome for me is that it seems that I do not need to go through IRB again.

Today, I just submitted my action plan to my co-chairs.  And if all goes well, I should be able to start collecting data as soon as late spring/early summer 2013.  In the meantime, I will be starting my new job, which will most likely slow things down.  I don't mind as much now that my family and I are more financially secure.

An Interesting Tweet

This past weekend, I received a tweet (on Twitter) to participate in a study that is similar to mine.  The researcher is also a PhD candidate, but she is from a university that I just learned about from a job position announcement last week.  Although the job announcement is mostly irrelevant, I am very interested in this candidate's study.  I am not too worried about our study being too similar because our participant populations have a very low chance of overlapping.

I agreed to take participate in her survey and found that we asked roughly the same demographic questions, but the other research questions differed a little.  Although I am using survey software, my research is more like an interview.  However, at the end of taking her survey, I was asked if I would like to participate in an online interview via Skype.  I agreed and was a bit jealous that her IRB allows her to use an easier method of data collection, although there is a greater risk of losing confidentiality through Skype.

Our studies are also similar in that I assume that we would both qualify as participants in our own studies, meaning I could in mine and she in hers.  However, I am not sure if she would qualify for mine.  We are also similar, I believe, in that I assume that she has worked in the same English Language Fellowship I have.

I wonder about the ethical and other implications of interviewing a participant like me who may know the research theories and frameworks quite well.  How would this benefit or contaminate her data collection?  It is her choice to make as I felt it was my ethical duty to let her know I was conducting research on a similar inquiry.  Perhaps this is someone I can collaborate with once our dissertations are defended and our PhDs earned.  It would be interesting to compare and contrast our studies once completed.

Email Interviews

I have learned an interesting detail about conducting asynchronous online interviews.  Last year, I read through the literature on online interviews to learn that the most common method of asynchronous online interviews was via email.  Many studies have used this approach to collect all or some of their interview data.  However, the Internal Review Board at the University of Iowa acknowledges that email is not a secure method of data collection.  Therefore I run the risk of losing confidentiality through this process.  The literature also mentions this risk; nonetheless, the researchers were able to conduct email interviews.  However, the IRB does not advise this method, and I am not too surprised.  Although I agree that email is not the most secure method of collecting interview data, the risk is not much lower with other methods.  And the University of Iowa's IRB is known to be more cautious than most others.  The main issue here is not contacting participants or sending them questions via email; it is the receipt of written responses.  It is my responsibility to provide my participants with a secure method of answering my interview questions.

My alternative plan is to use a web survey software program supported by the University of Iowa.  This program is widely used by researchers, so I assume that IRB will find this a safer alternative to email.  Although this plan will consume a little bit more of my time, I will be building research skills associated with the utility of web survey software programs.  Perhaps it will end up saving me time at the end of the data collection process.  The lesson I learned is that even though most of the literature reports mostly positive results of a certain data collection method, it may no longer or may not be the safest or best possible way.