Interviewing over instant messaging

Abstract

Interviews are a cornerstone of human-computer interaction research. As a research method, they can both be deeply valuable and distinctly challenging. Pragmatic challenges of interviews include the travel that may be required to meet face-to-face with a respondent or the time necessary to transcribe the exchange. As a tool for conducting interviews, instant messaging presents some compelling potential benefits to mitigate challenges such as these. And yet, over the medium of instant messaging, the genre of the interview takes on a different character. Drawing from our experiences conducting interviews over instant messaging, we reflect on the implications of using this new medium for conducting interviews.

A Guide to Using Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) for Researching Distributed Populations

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“…Although previous work proposed remote strategies via instant messaging [40], email and phone [14], and video chat approach [22], * Corresponding author. Email: hemacleo@indiana.edu there has been little discussion on remote group-based methods.…”

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“…As an online project, Galaxy Zoo is likely to attract a technically literate audience. With this audience, we thought that interviews using a technical medium like instant messaging might be appropriate, and some research shows that instant messaging can be an effective medium for conducting interviews in human-computer interaction research (Voida et al 2004). Some subjects were not comfortable using instant messaging software, so phone interviews were conducted with these subjects.…”

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“…Thus, contents were elicited through semistructured interviews. Interview is a valuable qualitative data collection method that provides deep understanding of the situations being scrutinized (Voida et al, 2004;Bogdan and Biklen, 1998).…”