Interrogating inter/intraviews

Interviews are the building blocks of most qualitative research projects. Ethics committees check that the researcher has a clear plan and understanding for pulling out key data through analytic frameworks such as themes and subthemes. These structured classifying frameworks and processes are possibly facilitating us missing important issues and thus inadvertently strengthening the gap between theory and practice.

Referring to Karen Barad’s work, there seems to be scope for digging differently. Rhizomatically thinking, we ought to be able to create more tunnels like earthworms, as suggested by Barad (2014:168) thereby “iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew”.

Peterson (2014, citing Stainton-Rogers) suggests we move away from static data that focus purely on human interactions. There needs to be a broader appreciation of the dynamic construction of knowledge through time, matter and space. Interviews should rather be considered as intra-views that consist of “a set of material-discursive intra-actions” (Peterson 2014:41). Data can be replaced by “creata”. Furthermore, by embracing Barad’s concept of relational performativity where matter matters, Peterson recommends that data be transformed to “relata” - what relates. Relata emerge through the intra-actions that form part of phenomena within the apparatus of the interview situation.

Using You Doodle on the iPad, the image above demonstrates my shifting understanding of meaning-making from interviews. The rectangular shape at the base represents the structured and linear classification of findings used in conventional interview data collection processes. The blurred circle of colour floating under the text shows where I am moving. The middle shape was created by cutting, pasting and swirling the patterns to form a different image indicating how we can work through and with an intra-view that then releases relata.

Barad, K. 2014. Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax. 20:2:168-187.

Peterson, K.S.  2014. Interviews as intraviews: A hand puppet approach to studying processes of inclusion and exclusion among children in kindergarten. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology. 5:1.