Scholars are increasingly calling for research that “makes a difference” through theoretical, practical, societal, and educational impacts. Recognizing that academic research lags behind practitioners’ issues and that most academic writing is inaccessible to those who need the knowledge, some scholars are calling for embedding social impact in the research process itself. We argue that participant reflection can increase social impact by changing the way individuals think, behave, and perform. Research interviews can be interventionist with the potential to facilitate participant reflection; however, the current literature on the topic is fragmented. We combine this fragmented literature with discussions of social impact and interview techniques to propose interview principles to facilitate participant reflection toward social impact. We hope to stimulate researchers across a broad range of disciplines to think more intentionally about the impactful role of a common qualitative methodological tool, interviews, to support research participants and engage in socially meaningful research.

No abstract

This two-phased study sought to understand the challenges Canadian immigrants faced in their workplace and intercultural adjustment as technology mentors and explore intercultural development interventions to address them. Drawing on sixteen qualitative interviews with ten Canadian immigrants and two co-founders of their non-profit employer, I found that technology mentors faced communication, technology, and personal challenges and were concerned with their intercultural and workplace adjustment as well as long term work integration. Clean spinning, a non-directive coaching intervention based on clean language and emergent knowledge principles, was used to facilitate perspective taking and support their intercultural development towards addressing their adjustment challenges. I found that clean spinning supported participants in finding resource(s) to address their topic or reframe the way they understood their topic and their relationship to it. These positive outcomes suggest the need for alternative types of intercultural development that support perspective-taking and self-reflection.