[Air-L] Interviewing via MSN

[Sue Malta]

Dear Carmen et al....

I recently gave a refereed paper at the Emerging Researchers in Ageing conference which compared the four different interviewing methods I used in my study of late life romantic relationships: face-to-face, telephone, instant messaging and email.  The paper is relatively brief (only 2000 words), but may be helpful to you.

Like Monica, I found IM (I used Yahoo and Hotmail) and email to be particularly good for dealing with sensitive topics, especially in my case as I was looking at issues of love, sex, intimacy and infidelity in older adult relationships - all issues which could be pretty confronting and/or embarrassing at times in the face-to-face and telephone interviews.

Malta, S. (2009) Qualitative Interviewing of Older Adults: Offline versus Online Methods.  Proceedings 8th National Conference of Emerging Researchers in Ageing.  A New Era for Ageing Research: What's in Your Toolkit? pp. 133-137.  www.med.monash.edu/sphc/haru/conference09
 
Kind regards

Sue Malta



PhD Candidate
Social & Policy Studies
Faculty of Life & Social Sciences
Swinburne University

...............................................
Sue Malta
Managing Editor
International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society (iJETS)
Swinburne University of Technology
John Street, Hawthorn, VIC 3122
Email: ijets at swin.edu.au
Or: smalta at groupwise.swin.edu.au
www.swin.edu.au/ijets
>>> "Becker, C. (Carmen)"  28/10/09 5:28 AM >>>
Dear all,

I am in the middle of my phd research/fielwork on media practices of young Muslims in Germany and the Netherlands who are inspired by Salafism. My research involves among other things participant observation in chat rooms and also Internet forums. I have done quite some (offline) interviews with both, men and women. Some men that I know from Islamic chat rooms would like to participate in interviews. However, their understanding of Islam does not allow them to talk to women that are not related to them by family. They offered to talk to me via msn (or paltalk).

I would like to prepare myself and I am looking for some literature expanding on the methodology and ethcial questions of online interviews (via synchronous chat). I would be happy about any recommendation from the list. 

Thanks a lot in advance!

Best,
Carmen



Carmen Becker
-----------------------------------------
research.carmenbecker.net

Radboud University Nijmegen
Postbus 9103
6500 HD NIJMEGEN
The Netherlands

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