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The Art of Interviewing: Online - (2 days)
From conversations to focus groups, this two-day intensive will help professionals, researchers and evaluators create careful and impactful interviews.
Instructor
Dr Claire Farrugia is an expert in applied qualitative research, working in areas of gender-based violence, LGBTIQA+ health and wellbeing and workplace anti-racism. They have a PhD in Sociology from Macquarie University and have led large-scale, participatory projects with the Australian Human Rights Commission, Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission and other national partners. Claire brings over a decade of experience in ethical qualitative research including ethnography, interviews and focus groups and works to translate findings for policy and practice impact. They are particularly interested in the ethics of qualitative research, how to safely include the lived experience and stories of marginalised communities and how to combine academic theory with real-world practicality.
Course Level
This master-class is designed for professionals, researchers and evaluators who want to deepen their skills in collecting, managing and analysing qualitative interview and focus group data. Across two interactive days, you’ll move from theory to practice—considering the politics and ethics of qualitative research while learning how to recruit, design meaningful questions, build rapport, facilitate engaging conversations and analyse your data. Interviews and focus groups can be intimidating for everyone involved. This master-class will help clarify the steps to take before, during and after engagement to maximise the quality of your work. We will look at a range of questions that arise, including: how we balance the need to fill a particular research, policy or practice gap with slow, considered and ethical engagement, how we best work with interview transcripts to bring our insights to life, how we help ensure what people share with us contributes to change. This course is for you if you:
- Are working to better understand a research or policy issue
- Want to improve your stakeholder engagement and community engagement skills
- Want to understand how interviews can contribute to evidence-based policy and practice
- Are a researcher, evaluator or policy maker or studying an honours, masters or PhD course.
The course will run over the following sessions each day:
- 9.30am - 11.00am - session 1
- 11.30am - 1.00pm - session 2
- 2.00pm - 3.30pm - session 3
Day 1 - Interviewing in context: Why we interview and what we have to consider
- Qualitative research in context: ethics, politics and researcher position
- When do we choose interviews? When do we choose focus groups?
- Planning: Recruitment, rapport and preparation
- Crafting purposeful, open-ended questions
Day 2 - Focus Groups and Data Analysis
- What makes an effective engagement?
- Transcribing and managing interview and focus group data
- Thematic analysis: from coding to interpretation
- Knowledge translation for impact
There are no pre-requisites for this course but it is helpful if you have been involved, (or are in the process of creating) a project that has used interviewing, focus groups or lived experience engagement.
Recommended reading will be sent a fortnight prior to the course.
Hard copy notes will be posted in advance of the course to your nominated 'shipping address'.
The amount of information was just right - the first day focusing on the theory and knowledge about interviewing, and the second day on the practical tips and actually doing the interview. I found the content of the second day especially helpful.