In Praise Of Depth Interviews
It’s not that depth interviews get a bad press, they just don’t get much press at all these days. They don’t get Brownie points for being ‘innovative’ and you won’t find research agencies flogging their new, unique, customised, specialist, cutting-edge approach to depth interviews. Of course, they have advantages and disadvantages - but depths are in danger of becoming a fall-back method, used only when group discussions are clearly not appropriate or feasible (for example, for extremely sensitive topics or to include remote rural or house-bound participants).
This article is not intended as a comprehensive guide to when group discussions and depths should and shouldn’t be used: it unashamedly promotes depths. They have significant advantages over group discussions? - and we should use them more often.
Practical advantages. First of all, a reminder of the rather dull list of practical and logistical reasons to use depths: when participants are geographically dispersed and it would be impractical to attempt to bring them together in a group; to include participants in remote rural areas; in small and even medium sized towns when it can often be difficult to recruit a group of people who don’t know each other (which affects what people are prepared to reveal); when potential participants are very busy and it would be difficult to get several of them together at once; and to include participants with caring responsibilities or severe mobility problems/health problems which would make attendance at a group difficult.
The dynamics of the discussion. Aside from the practical problems of getting some types of people together for a group, it is also worth considering the dynamics of group discussions once you’ve got them there. (Let’s not be fooled into thinking that ‘65 people took part in 8 focus groups’ means we have gained a valuable insight into the lives of 65 people).
Keeping the discussion focused. Ironically, it can sometimes be difficult to keep a supposed ‘focus group’ focused on the issue you want to explore. Participants go off at all sorts of tangents. Of course, a skilled moderator can steer the conversation back – but participants have to be allowed some latitude if they are to feel their views are important and they are not being ‘censored’. It is simply much easier to keep a one-to-one interview focused and so, for any given hour of discussion, you will tend to obtain more relevant data from a depth.
The participants who don’t talk. It’s not uncommon in a group discussion to find one or two participants who say next to nothing. In theory, a skilled moderator can bring them into the discussion, but we would be fooling ourselves to pretend that they always succeed. In contrast, it is extremely rare in a depth interview to come across a participant who says very little – some may need a bit more ‘warming up’ than others - but almost everyone will say quite a bit in the end. The amount of data obtained from the quietest participant in a depth is substantially more than the amount of data obtained from the quietest person in a group.
The participants who don’t stop talking. It’s also not uncommon to come across participants who don’t stop talking and who try to dominate the discussion. Again, a skilled moderator will use various techniques to handle this – but these participants can be more difficult to deal with than the ones who don’t talk and they have more of an influence on the rest of the group. Clearly, this is much less of a problem in a depth interview.
Creating a relaxed environment. For researchers and research managers/commissioners, meetings are an everyday experience. But for many people, sitting around a table and talking among a group of people they don’t know, is not something that they do very often at all. It seems an artificial and unfamiliar situation. In contrast, almost everyone is accustomed to chatting with someone in their own home. More people will feel relaxed in a depth interview in their own environment than in a group discussion in a hotel or community centre.
Sensitive and personal information. In a depth, the researcher has to develop a sense of rapport and trust to enable the participant to talk about sensitive and personal information. In a group discussion, the participant has to feel comfortable revealing information not just to the moderator, but to everyone else in the group too.
Social desirability. We are all conscious of the image we project and how what we say will be interpreted and judged by other people. Again, it is much easier in a depth to develop the level of trust and rapport needed to enable a participant to reveal controversial or unpopular views. In a group, participants are conscious not just of the moderator’s opinion of them, but that of everyone else in the group too.
Participants don’t like to openly criticise each other. Linked to the issue of social desirability, it is rare for participants to openly criticise or contradict what another participant has said. It would just be rude. This isn’t an issue in a depth because the individual participant’s experiences and opinions are the only ones being aired. The researcher can get a reaction to a particular point by saying ‘someone else I spoke to said they thought….’ and it’s okay for the participant to disagree because the other person isn’t there.
Focusing on the meaning rather than managing the dynamics. In relation to all of the scenarios above, the advantage of a depth is that the researcher can concentrate much more on understanding the meaning of what’s being said and what to explore next, because they do not have to manage the dynamics of the group at the same time.
The nature of the information obtained
The most important consideration, however, is the nature of the information we are trying to obtain – what do we need to understand as a result of the research? Very often, probably in the majority of research projects, what we want is the type of information that is better obtained from a depth than from a group discussion.
If we need to understand someone’s biography, to know what their past experience has been and how that has influenced their current situation/decisions/views/perceptions, then a depth interview will provide a fuller and more coherent picture than a group discussion. Let’s say we wanted to explore people’s consumption of pre-packaged meals and barriers to preparing meals from fresh ingredients. A group discussion may seem a perfectly legitimate way to explore this and would no doubt identify some of the barriers. But a series of depth interviews will allow us to understand much more about each individual participant’s experiences and how this has influenced their behaviour. We can ask about the meals they had as a child, whether they picked up any cooking skills from anyone in their family or from school, whether they have ever attempted or been interested in cooking from scratch, what their meal habits were at different stages of their life (e.g. as a student, when they lived alone, when they were unemployed, before their children were born), how much time they have to prepare a meal now (e.g. what time do they get home from work, what else do they do in the evening).
Some of these issues could be explored in a group discussion but it would be very difficult to construct a coherent picture of any one individual’s circumstances and therefore what the key barriers were in different situations. And some issues would be difficult to explore in any depth – we might get a general sense of people feeling pressured and having several competing demands on their time in the evening – but only in a depth could we find out exactly when a participant gets home from work, what time they normally eat, how long it takes them to prepare their meal, what time they take their kids to football practice, and so on.
Depth interviews in a participant’s own home also allow the researcher to understand more about their circumstances and see for themselves what the participant is talking about. If they are in the participant’s tiny kitchen they can grasp immediately that there isn’t space to store recycling, or how alarming it was when an abusive ex-partner battered on their back door.
And if we need detailed information, such as exactly what happened at each stage of a process - which is often what really matters in order to identify where things go wrong and what improvements are needed - then a depth provides that level of detail. We are about to undertake a series of depths to explore people’s experiences of trading standards services. Depths will enable us to obtain all the (boring?) details so we understand exactly what the problem was, who they first thought about contacting, why they made contact with the service they did, how many attempts they made to make contact, exactly how long it took to get a response, exactly what the response was, what they did next……
So, in short, depths are undervalued and we should use them more!