Exploratory conversations: reflections on developing a triad interview method

Abstract

Although dyad interviews have become more widely used in research, little has been published about a triad interview approach, in which two interviewers guide an engaged, three-way conversation with an interviewee. We describe our experience of developing online triad interviews within a participatory health research project that explored different stakeholders’ experiences of a young people’s cancer service in the UK. A defining characteristic of this research was the practical involvement of community members with different experiences of cancer, who worked as co-researchers in community–academic partnership. The decision to develop the triad interview method was emergent. It centred upon the connectedness of a clinical researcher, a companion co-researcher and a participant interviewee around a topic of shared experience. We first describe, and then reflexively appraise our development and enactment of this method, exploring how perspectives such as positionality and enhanced rapport impacted our exploratory interview conversations. We suggest that triad interviews are an underexplored qualitative research method, and we propose that, as an explicit practice, they could be highly beneficial in some person-centred research contexts.

Evaluation of the Perceived Benefits of a Peer Support Group for People with Mental Health Problems

“…The evaluation sought to provide evidence-based, credible, and reliable findings to allow PeerTalk to enhance service quality and hence its user experiences. To achieve this, the overarching design of the cross-sectional service evaluation was that of joint/group interviews, an increasingly common method in healthcare research (Szulc and King 2022 [ 33 ]; Green and Thorogood 2018 [ 34 ]), wherein two (dyads) or three (triads) of participants engage in small-group discussions and share personal insights, facilitated by a moderator to maintain focus and ensure all perspectives are captured (Morgan et al, 2016 [ 35 ]; Szulc and King, 2022 [ 33 ]; Finch et al, 2023 [ 36 ]).…”