Posting Interviews Online?

[Adonia Lugo]

Hi folks, I'm in the process of making a website for a community-based ethnographic research project, and I'm wondering how to format responses from semi-structured interviews for public consumption. There will eventually be responses from 30 interviews on the site. I want to make them interesting to read, which would mean editing them down, but also have the full responses available as a resource. I thought maybe someone on OAC would have experience with this sort of thing. Thanks!

[Adonia Lugo]

Update: This is the website I created

http://seattlebikejustice.com/

I gave demographic information about my interviewees on one page:

http://seattlebikejustice.com/the-interviews/

And their responses to interview questions on another:

http://seattlebikejustice.com/category/what-they-said/

I hope this can be a resource for others interested in making their ethnographic data available to the public online.

[John McCreery]

Adonia, I have no personal experience in this area. It seems to me, however, that the key is to make sure than your interviewees have a chance to see what you have done with the transcripts before they go on line. It may seem a little legalistic (I am thinking like an American), but I envision a process in which you edit a transcript, show it to the informant(s) in question and have them sign off on your putting the edited version on line. 

[Adonia Lugo]

I was thinking about that, too, John. I sent an explanatory email to each of my interviewees about the website, admittedly after I'd posted it, because I think that the anonymity of their responses made it less of an ethical concern. But this concern was what led me to decouple the responses from the demographic information about my interviewees. I am waiting to hear from anyone who objects to their words being online, we shall see. It is my hope that as a community-based participatory research tool, a website like the one I made can be updated and changed through conversation with interviewees and, in my case, a wider audience of bicycle advocates.

John McCreery said:

Adonia, I have no personal experience in this area. It seems to me, however, that the key is to make sure than your interviewees have a chance to see what you have done with the transcripts before they go on line. It may seem a little legalistic (I am thinking like an American), but I envision a process in which you edit a transcript, show it to the informant(s) in question and have them sign off on your putting the edited version on line. 

[Francine Barone]

Hi Adonia,

With regard to how to frame this material on the web, I have a few notes on what you've posted so far. In the first instance, I notice that the demographic info page is a little cumbersome to read. Tables would help to organize the sections.

I like that you've posted each question and the responses, but there is something incongruous about the format of the question and that the answers are then in the third person. Obviously, this is your summary of the interviewee's response and the person's name isn't given due to confidentiality. But I feel like the reader instinctively expects a first-person answer to the question posed. I certainly think it would be a good way to make it more engaging.

Perhaps you could directly quote the best sound bites from each person, and then link it to their "full response" where you have posted their entire interview on a separate page. So each interviewee - anonymized or otherwise depending on their consent - has their own page, but you can select and mix quotes from it for the question summaries or to put throughout other parts of the site.

The issue, especially when you get to 30 interviews, will be presenting the responses so that they're easy to read and follow. Because you decouple the demographic data from the responses, and even randomize the order in which they appear after each question (sometimes start with a he, sometimes with a she), the reader has to play detective to latch on to a personality. When making ethnographic interviews public, the personalities really draw in your audience (certainly for community participants). At the very least, some kind of identifiers would help make it easier to follow individuals, their life stories and their opinions. Maybe occupations instead of names, or pseudonyms/numbers or even color coding. 

Finally, from a site design standpoint, I would reduce the number of posts per page on your 'What They Said' category archive. E.g. if you had only 1-3 posts per page, you could move from question to question instead of scrolling endlessly.