Q 113

Using the telephone for narrative

interviewing: a research note R
Qualitative Research
Copyright © 2010
The Author(s)
http://qrj.sagepub.com
vol. 10(1) 113–121

A M A N DA H O L T
University of Portsmouth, UK

A B S T R A C T Much social science research dictates that the most productive

mode for producing narrative data is through face-to-face interviews,
with other modes of data production assumed to be ‘second best’. This
research note makes a unique contribution to this debate by reflecting on
a research project which used telephones to produce participant
narratives. It draws on data from both the researcher’s field notes and the
participants themselves, who were asked after the narrative interview
about their experiences of participating in a seemingly ‘strange’ research
encounter. Furthermore, it describes the particular ideological,
methodological and practical benefits that using telephones produced and
reflects how such findings speak to Stephens’ (2007) recent work
concerning telephone interviewing. This research note concludes that the
use of telephones should be seriously considered as a preferred alternative
to face-to-face interviews when considering how to conduct narrative
interviews with particular groups of participants.
KEYWORDS: narrative interviews, parenting, participants’ experiences, telephone interviews

In recent years, narrative data has been increasingly produced and commented
upon in the social sciences. There is much disagreement over what ‘narrative
data’ constitutes, but for the purposes of this article it will be defined in terms
of storied data which incorporates the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of experience, as well
as the ‘whats’ (Sarbin, 1986). A key element of narrative is the notion of
emplotment which has a beginning, middle and end (Gergen and Gergen, 1986)
and narrative data is often produced through open-ended and unstructured
interviewing techniques which allow the narrator to produce stories of their
lives which would otherwise be curtailed using more structured interviewing
methods. Many researchers have argued that such interviews produce more
detailed and authentic accounts of people’s experiences (Riessman, 1993) and
enable an exploration of psychosocial identities, since it is through the telling
of stories that such identities are claimed, confirmed and validated (Mishler,
1986). It has also been argued that narrative interviews enable participants to

DOI: 10.1177/1468794109348686

Downloaded from qrj.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 28, 2015
114 Qualitative Research 10(1)

have a greater stake in setting the research agenda (Overcash, 2003) and
may even produce emancipatory outcomes for particular marginalized
groups (Parker, 2005). In response to these points, narrative interviews
were selected as the most appropriate method for this project which aimed to
explore how identity-making processes are involved in parents’ accounts
of their child’s alleged criminal offences and their child’s and their own
subsequent involvement in the youth justice system. These events were experi-
enced over a number of months and, by exploring how participants ‘impose
order on the flow of experience’ (Riessman, 1993: 2) through the use of
narrative, it is argued that it is possible to subject these identity-making
processes to discourse analysis.
When I began this research I did not question the assumption that the most
appropriate method for producing narrative data is through face-to-face
encounters with participants. Similar unquestioned assumptions about ‘what
methods work best together’ are held in social science research more generally.
For example, the majority of telephone research work tends to be left for ‘quan-
titative researchers’ or, at best, semi-structured interviews and the idea that
the telephone (or indeed other technologies) may be as useful or perhaps more
appropriate for the production of narrative data has been left unexplored. It was
only when I struggled to access suitable participants for interview in my local
community that I began to consider the use of the telephone for narrative
interviews as a more practical option for more geographically dispersed
participants. At this point, I did consider that telephone interviews might be
useful in dealing with some of the inherent difficulties of doing sensitive
research, the advantages of which have been discussed previously (see Sturges
and Hanrahan, 2004). I had little control over who was selected to be asked to
take part, as access depended on the considerable help of local Youth Offending
Teams (YOTs) who were working with the parents I wanted to interview. It was
the YOTs who first contacted the participants and asked them if they would
like to participate in the research. If they did, and with their consent, the par-
ticipants’ telephone numbers were passed on to me. After initially discussing
the nature of the research project with them, and posting them a project infor-
mation sheet, we arranged a time and date when I would telephone them to
conduct the narrative interview. The interviews themselves began with me
explaining that I only wanted to know ‘what happened, regarding their and
their child’s involvement in the youth justice system’. As I explained to the par-
ents, I had no other information about them apart from their names and tele-
phone numbers and I explained that I only wanted to know what they wanted
to tell me. Then the participants talked. Once they told their stories, I asked the
participants what their experiences were of being interviewed in this way.
Their responses to this question form the latter part of this article. In total,
20 narrative interviews with 17 parents (three were interviewed twice) took
place over a four-month period.

Downloaded from qrj.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 28, 2015
 Holt: Using the telephone for narrative interviewing 115

The benefits of narrative-interviewing over the telephone

Stephens’ (2007) recent article in Qualitative Research outlined his experiences
of conducting telephone interviews with ‘elite’ and ‘ultra elite’ participants,
that is, participants who are in ‘a position of power and raised social stature’
(2007: 205), in relation to either the interviewer or the average citizen more
generally. Stephens found telephone interviewing to be a productive and valid
methodological tool, although, like myself, he was initially hesitant about its
use. Stephens noted a number of specific features of telephone interviewing
which also reflect my own experiences: for example, the need to explicitly direct
the conversation because of an absence of non-visual cues and the reduced
concern about low response rates because of an increased availability of
potential participants which telephone-interviewing offers. However, the
present study interviewed participants who occupied a very different social
position to the ‘elites’ interviewed by Stephens, and this opens up new areas of
debate regarding the use of telephone interviews. In particular, the participants
interviewed in the present study were generally lone parents (the majority lone
mothers) who faced multiple social and economic disadvantages.
From an ideological perspective, many academics have commented on
how the research interview may serve as a ‘technology of the self ’ (Gubrium
and Holstein, 2003). That is, another regulatory technique which shapes
subjects in particular ways, since the research interview asks participants to
reflect on their lives and to suggest ‘rational’ and ‘individualistic’ theories to
explain their behaviour. Although clearly not an issue with ‘elite’ participants,
this may be a particular concern when researching participants who are par-
ticularly marginalized and whose lives have already been subject to the ‘pro-
fessional gaze’. In such circumstances, the interview experience may not be
dissimilar from other experiences where professionals have come into the par-
ticipants’ homes and asked a series of questions about their lives. Certainly,
many of the participants in this research had been subject to such ‘interviewing’
experiences from social workers, education officers and other ‘psy’ profes-
sionals, where their communities, homes and lifestyles were made available for
judgement. Thus, the use of the telephone with such participants may at least
reduce the intensity of the ‘surveillant other’ (Walkerdine, 1990: 195) by not
intruding on the narrator’s home, which to some extent, avoids reproducing
such ‘gazing’ practices.
From a methodological perspective, the lack of ‘ethnographic’ information
derived from participants’ homes, communities and, indeed, their ‘selves’,
enabled the subsequent discourse analysis of data to ‘stay at the level of the
text’. I could not add my own ‘contextual’ data to inform my analysis, as there
was not any available. I could only refer to what participants themselves ‘orient
towards’ in making analytical leaps between the material and the discursive,
which is arguably preferable when conducting a critical realist discourse

Downloaded from qrj.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 28, 2015
116 Qualitative Research 10(1)

analysis (Riley et al., 2007; Sims-Schouten et al., 2007). Furthermore, the lack
of non-verbal communication means that, unlike in face-to-face interactions,
everything had to be articulated by both the participants and myself. This need
for full articulation meant that a much richer text was produced from which to
begin analysis, an insight which suggests that the relationship between mode
of data production and method of data analysis is a further avenue for
methodological debate.
This lack of contextual data also has implications for how the researcher and
participants position each other within the interview encounter. In his article,
Stephens (2007) argues for the importance of recognizing similarities and dif-
ferences between participant and researcher in attaining rapport in research
interviews. With the exception of age and status, Stephens recognized many
similarities between his participants and himself, including class, gender and
ethnicity – characteristics which he felt could be read off his voice by the inter-
viewers, and vice versa. While to some extent I experienced this as well (cer-
tainly in terms of age and gender), the lack of more tangible information to
enable the participants and researcher to orient towards each other may be an
issue. This may be particularly problematic when there are many social differ-
ences between researcher and participant (which in the present study included
age, social class, ethnicity and parenthood status). To some extent, Stephens
(2007) was able to manage this issue by drawing on his previous face-to-face
interview encounters with participants from similar ‘elite’ groups, and I had
also had face-to-face interview experience with similar groups of parents from
a previous research project. However, while this experience informed my
awareness of the power relations which structured the interview encounter,
some aspects remained hidden. For example, one mother did not mention her
ethnicity during the interview, and her self-identification as ‘Black Jamaican’
was only made evident to me in the follow-up questionnaire.1 Furthermore, the
use of the telephone silenced my own Whiteness, which I did not mention
during the interview. Thus, while Stephens is right to suggest that some aspects
of researcher and participant subjectivity can be read off and negotiated over
the telephone, the use of the telephone can also serve to silence other aspects
which in turn may silence the potential for researcher–participant engagement
with issues of privilege and power within the research setting.
In a practical sense, while Stephens (2007) notes how telephone interviewing
increases researcher-control of their social space, it also enabled a far greater
degree of control for the participants than a face-to-face interview may have.
If I called at the agreed time, and something had come up for the narrator,
there was no embarrassment or difficulty in re-arranging the appointment
(as there may have been had I turned up at their door). For these particular
participants, who lived very busy lives which at times were chaotic (as one
parent put it, ‘plenty of mayhem going on here, its like London Zoo, with kids’), the
ability to call them back at a more convenient time, whether later that hour,
later that day or on another day entirely, was both appropriate and necessary.

Downloaded from qrj.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 28, 2015
 Holt: Using the telephone for narrative interviewing 117

Furthermore, because of the nature of the conversations, which concerned

aspects of the participants’ family life, the use of the telephone enabled the
participant to control the privacy of the conversation. Many participants were
able to move around their home during the interview as and when other family
members came into their space, and many conversations were interspersed
with comments such as ‘Oh, my son’s just come in, I’m just going upstairs…’. This
flexibility was particularly useful when young children were present, as the
use of the telephone seemed to provide parents with a legitimate reason to
resist interacting with their children in a way which face-to-face encounters
may not. For example, during a face-to-face interview with a mother from a
previous project, her four-year-old son’s presence and demands for attention
were increasingly distracting as the interview progressed. In contrast, the
present study involved a telephone interview with a mother who was overheard
telling her young daughter ‘Ssshhhh, I’m on the phone…’ at the beginning of the
interview, and this seemed sufficient to enable the interview to progress unin-
terrupted. Thus, the use of the telephone provided participants with a resource
to both control their own social space and to protect them from being inter-
rupted by other family members – a resource which would not have been avail-
able in face-to-face interview encounters.

Participants’ experiences of narrative-interviewing

by telephone
Stephens’ article does not include his research participants’ experiences of
telephone interviewing, which would have provided additional insights into
this particular research process. During the present study, I asked each partici-
pant at the end of their interview how they had experienced the narrative
interview and they were also given space to comment on the process in their
follow-up questionnaire two weeks later. In both sets of participant feedback,
most of the parents commented that they found the interview experience very
positive. For example, Bee2 wrote in her follow-up questionnaire: ‘Very enjoyable
to bang on to someone who was actually interested’. In her interview feedback,
Katy described the experience as ‘a bit like a counselling session, that’s the best
way to describe it, you sit down and talk about your problems and the counsellor
doesn’t say a lot to you’. Lyne described the experience as ‘like talking to one of my
mates on the phone’, which she enjoyed because ‘I like to talk, I can talk for England
so I’m used to doing all the talking’. Participants enjoyed the process and it did
indeed produce rich, detailed data: conversations lasted between 21 minutes
and three and a half hours, with the average interview lasting approximately
one hour. This would suggest that, for those who are used to and comfortable
with using the telephone for social intercourse,3 this mode of data production
should not be considered ‘second best’.
However, many of the participants commented on the interactional difficul-
ties in a research encounter where the researcher is deliberately reticent and

Downloaded from qrj.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 28, 2015
118 Qualitative Research 10(1)

where there are no visual cues to compensate for this reticence. As a

researcher, this was a difficult line to tread: I wanted to avoid directing the nar-
rative with my own interjections while at the same time I needed to let the par-
ticipants know that I was still present and listening. This difficulty was also
highlighted by Stephens (2007) and, like him, I attempted to resolve this by
interjecting the narrative with lots of ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’ and ‘yes’s’. Perhaps I
did not do this enough: many of the participants suggested tips for how this
could be improved, and June’s response was typical:
I think it’s a good way to do it but sometimes parents need help with a question
because it can then make you think about an answer and then it can lead to more.
Sometimes if you don’t know what to say or what’s expected of you to say its kind
of like in the wilderness ‘oh god what do I talk about?’ and sometimes it’s ... just to
have a question to kick-start.

June’s response reveals a particular difficulty with narrative interviews which

may not be specific to the use of the telephone. This is that participants already
have an idea of what a ‘research interview’ involves: many of the participants
expected a series of structured questions and such expectations circumscribed
their experience, including their need for a ‘kick-start’ for their narratives.
Such expectations persisted despite my explaining the nature of the narrative
interview and my taciturn role in this beforehand, which perhaps reveals the
extent to which the narrative interview remains subject to and shaped by
the participants’ deference to the assumed needs of the research agenda (even
if these needs are deliberately left unprescribed by the researcher).
The participant’s preoccupation about how they should perform was apparent
in comments such as ‘I hope I wasn’t banging on too much…’ or, as Louise put it,
‘I could waffle on forever, but you need to know what you need to know, don’t you?’
Such comments suggest a participant anxiety about actively appropriating the
discursive space that was offered to them, and perhaps illustrates the difficulty
with purposely offering what Drewery (2005) terms ‘agentive position calls’ to
participants who are frequently excluded from such positions in their everyday
interactions. This suggests that, despite researcher attempts to enable partici-
pants to have a stake in setting the interview agenda, narratives are neverthe-
less circumscribed by an implicit normative ‘research interview’ protocol.
However, again with reference to Stephens’ research, this may be specific to
the participant groups: Stephens did not report any similar participant anxiety
regarding his elite participants, and in contrast, commented on their confi-
dence in ‘dictating the topic’ (2007: 208).
As mentioned above, the success of the telephone narrative interview is
likely to depend on the telephone skills of the researched as well as the
researcher. Certainly, comfort in using the telephone comes into it, which may
explain participants’ diversity of experiences: while June (above) sometimes
wondered ‘oh God, what do I talk about?’, Susan described her experience as ‘well
it seems fine, it’s not been like “oh god, oh no, what am I going to say?”, you know,

Downloaded from qrj.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 28, 2015
 Holt: Using the telephone for narrative interviewing 119

“are you going to make me feel uncomfortable”, cos you haven’t’. Perhaps the best
way of dealing with any discomfort is to include participant reflexivity within
the research process by discussing with them how it is experienced.
Participants then have the opportunity to identify any inherent problems with
using telephones to produce life stories with an understanding of where any
discomfort comes from. As Bee suggested:
It’s almost like you want to keep saying ‘are you still there?’ [laughs], you know
what I mean? So, I don’t know what you can do to get over that. It’s better than
someone just saying ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’. So I don’t know what you can say. You
might just have to make a list of one word things like ‘right’, ‘OK’, ‘Mmmm’. Plus
I think you do sort of think, I don’t know, maybe others won’t, but I think ‘Christ,
I’m banging on a bit here’. And then you sort of lose the way. That’s why I was sort
of ‘erm … right, that’s it’. And then you think of something else, so I don’t know
what you’re going to do to get over that. I think you just have to think of one-word
acknowledgements like ‘right, ‘mmm, ‘OK’. But if you go on for an hour and a half
like me, you’re going to have to think of a lot of words.

Bee’s extract reveals much about how the telephone narrative interview makes
specific demands on both the researcher and the researched, particularly
around the management of uncertainty which may produce anxiety in the
research interview. The resulting ‘strange situation’ (for both researcher and
participant) is perhaps one reason why telephone interviews are commonly
assumed to be incompatible with narrative research. However, feedback from
the participants (discussed above) suggests that ‘strange’ does not necessarily
mean ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ and it appears that resistance to the use of telephone
interviews for the production of narrative is a particular research-specific
practice: after all, life stories are often powerfully narrated through the radio
and the use of telephones is assumed to be qualitatively beneficial in certain
counselling practices such as the Samaritans. Thus, it is only a strange
situation because of its use in this particular setting and my field-notes, made
immediately after each interview, reveal something of how both myself and
the participants relaxed after the initial strangeness subsided. For example,
following Lucy’s interview, my research notes stated: ‘…seemed quite frosty to
start, but actually came out a very positive and joyful story – much laughing and
more and more was revealed as interview developed…’. The gradual reduction in
‘strangeness’ was also evident in the transcripts themselves, as I noted after
transcribing David’s transcript: ‘…re-reading the transcript, the paragraphs get
larger with more gaps between my mmmms, suggest he opened up as the interview
progressed…’. Finally, any concerns over what the telephone narrative inter-
view can produce is perhaps most powerfully evoked in my comment following
an interview with Clare:
…very, very articulate. I felt moved to tears on things. Very easy to talk to, so it wasn’t
that difficult on the phone actually, but my eyes filled with tears at one point, and
there was just so many thoughts…

Downloaded from qrj.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 28, 2015
120 Qualitative Research 10(1)

Conclusions
Contrary to common assumptions about the need to conduct narrative
interviews through face-to-face encounters, this article has argued that there
is no need to consider the use of telephones for narrative interviewing as a
‘second-best’ option: indeed, there may be sound ideological, methodological
and practical reasons why it may be a more favourable mode than the often
‘default mode’ of face-to-face interviewing. However, in contrasting my own
experiences of telephone interviewing with those noted by Stephens (2007), it is
apparent that serious consideration needs to be given of the interview context.
In particular, the nature of the participant group and the planned method of
data analysis shapes how the potential benefits of using telephones for narrative
interviewing are played out in practice. Furthermore, encouraging reflexivity
on the part of the researcher and the participants can be invaluable in providing
insight into a particularly unusual research process which, as the present
study has shown, can provide both ideas for future good practice and can open
up new avenues for methodological debate.

NOTES

1. This questionnaire requested socio-demographic data, a suggested pseudonym,

participant-feedback of the research process and a request for a follow-up interview
at a later date.
2. All participants’ names are pseudonyms.
3. Research suggests that there may be gender differences in the use of telephone for
social interaction (e.g. Smoreda and Licoppe, 2000) as well as in the comfort and
use of story-telling in research interviews (Emerson and Frosh, 2004). Thus, the
gender of both the participants and the researcher, and the interaction between
both, is likely to impact the effectiveness of its use in this and similar research.
However, the impact of gender on the research interview is clearly an issue regardless
of the mode of research interview.

REFERENCES

Drewery, W. (2005) ‘Why We Should Watch What We Say: Position Calls, Everyday
Speech and the Production of Relational Subjectivity’, Theory and Psychology 15(3):
305–24.
Emerson, P. and Frosh, S. (2004) Critical Narrative Analysis in Psychology: A Guide to
Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gergen, K.J. and Gergen, M.M. (1986) ‘Narrative Form and the Construction of
Psychological Science’, in T. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of
Human Conduct, pp. 22–44. New York: Praeger.
Gubrium, J.F. and Holstein, J.A. (2003) ‘From the Individual Interview to the Interview
Society’, in J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein (eds) Postmodern Interviewing, pp. 21–50.
London: Sage.
Mishler, E.G. (1986) ‘The Analysis of Interview-Narratives’, in T.R. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative
Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct, pp. 233–55. New York: Praeger.

Downloaded from qrj.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 28, 2015
 Holt: Using the telephone for narrative interviewing 121

Overcash, J.A. (2003) ‘Narrative Research: A Review of Methodology and Relevance to

Clinical Practice’, Critical Reviews in Oncology/Hematology 48: 179–84.
Parker, I. (2005) Qualitative Psychology: Introducing Radical Research. Buckingham:
Open University Press.
Riessman, C. (1993) Narrative Analysis. London: Sage.
Riley, S.C.E., Sims-Schouten, W. and Willig, C. (2007) ‘The Case for Critical Realist
Discourse Analysis as a viable method in discursive work’, Theory & Psychology
17(1): 137–45.
Sarbin, T.R. (1986) ‘The Narrative as a Root Metaphor for Psychology’, in T.R. Sarbin
(ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct, pp. 3–21. New York:
Praeger.
Sims-Schouten, W., Riley, S.C.E. and Willig, C. (2007) ‘Critical Realism in Discourse
Analysis: A Presentation of a Systematic Method of Analysis using Women’s Talk of
Motherhood, Childcare and Female Employment as an Example’, Theory &
Psychology 17(1): 101–24.
Smoreda, Z. and Licoppe, C. (2000) ‘Gender-Specific Use of the Domestic Telephone’,
Social Psychology Quarterly 63(6): 238–52.
Stephens, N. (2007) ‘Collecting Data from Elites and Ultra Elites: Telephone and Face-
to-Face Interviews with Macroeconomists’, Qualitative Research 7(2): 203–16.
Sturges, J.E. and Hanrahan, K.J. (2004) ‘Comparing Telephone and Face-to-Face
Qualitative Interviewing: A Research Note’, Qualitative Research 4(1): 107–18.
Walkerdine, V. (1990) Schoolgirl Fictions. London: Verso.

AMANDA HOLT is Senior Lecturer in Criminal Psychology at the Institute of Criminal

Justice Studies at the University of Portsmouth. Her current research involves exploring
the ways in which the mothers and fathers of ‘young offenders’ negotiate and manage
a parental identity within a ‘culture of blame’. Her other research interests include
families and youth justice, critical developmental psychology and issues around
subjectivity in qualitative data analysis. Address: Institute of Criminal Justice Studies,
University of Portsmouth, Ravelin House, Museum Road, Portsmouth PO1 2QQ, UK.
[email: Amanda.Holt@port.ac.uk]

Downloaded from qrj.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 28, 2015