6.1 Research Paradigms
6.2 Research Strategies
6.2.1 Basing a Study on a Particular Theoretical Perspective
6.2.2 Theory Shaping Analysis
6.2.3 Ethnomethodology
6.2.4 Contextual Inquiry
6.2.5 Participant Observation and Action Research
6.2.6 Grounded Theory
6.3 Mixed Methods and Staged Approaches
6.4 Responding to the Situation
6.5 Summary and Checklist: Study Shaping Issues
7.1 Communicating Quality through Reporting
7.2 Summary and Checklist: Reporting a Study
8 Ensuring Quality in Qualitative Research
8.1 Starting with the Basics
8.2 Building Quality into the Process
8.3 External Validation: Inter-rater Reliability, Triangulation and Respondent Validation
8.4 Summary and Checklist: Quality of Qualitative Research
9 Conclusions and Further Resources
9.1 Qualitative Research: A Space of Possibilities
9.2 Further Resources
9.3 Going behind the Scenes
Acknowledgments
This book owes its existence to the many students and researchers we have worked with over the years. It builds on an earlier chapter on Semi-Structured Qualitative Methods published by the Interaction Design Foundation (Blandford, 2014), and a few sentences from that text may have made it through into this one unscathed.
We cannot list everyone who has shaped and challenged our thinking about qualitative methods: there are too many, and we would be sure to forget someone important. We thank you all. Suzanne Amos, Ellie Burgess, Imogen Lyons, Nikki Newhouse, Olga Perski, Sheila Pontis and Kathy Stawarz gave constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this text; many thanks! Paul Cairns, Marc Hassenzahl, Jesper Kjeldskov, Helena Mentis and Mark Perry have made excellent suggestions for improving this manuscript; we have addressed as many as possible of their recommendations, but remaining limitations are our responsibility. Emily Blandford and Smaragda Magou have delivered illustrations that surpass our rather limited graphic design skills. Aisling O’Kane and Atish Rajkomar have given permission to include photographs from studies led by them. Our research has been funded by EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, SSHRC and NIHR.
Preface
The motivation for writing this book came from several different directions. The key driver was that there has not been a good text that we could direct our students to that resonates with their interests and the problems they are addressing. There are some excellent texts from the social sciences and from healthcare, but they do not deal with problems of interaction design, user requirements or user experience when interacting with technology. Conversely, there are many excellent HCI texts that focus on observation, task analysis or research methods, but none that focus specifically on qualitative methods. We intend that this book should plug that gap.
A second motivation comes from the perennial question or challenge: what constitutes quality in qualitative HCI research? Is it even research? We should raise the quality of the discourse on what constitutes valid, reliable and valuable qualitative research in HCI. We should also raise the quality of that research, so that it becomes more valuable and has greater integrity.
We have chosen to draw on the analogy of going behind the scenes when making a documentary. Our main sources of inspiration for this have been Dom’s experience of making short films to communicate our research and Ann’s delight at watching “behind the scenes” footage on the making of wildlife documentaries (BBC, 2014). Of course, a qualitative study is expected to have a scientific rigour that is not expected of many documentaries, but they both share issues in gathering data, creating a narrative and representing some aspect of reality to inform an audience. Our focus on going behind the scenes means that we draw a lot on our own experiences, because we know what went on behind the scenes in our studies. So long as there is little tradition of reporting these details, that information is not accessible for other researchers’ projects, and it is difficult to be reflective about the work of others when you don’t have the insider knowledge. So we hope this book will encourage you to consider taking readers of your own research “behind the scenes”—providing them with useful detail and justification on what you did and why.
In this book, we are pre-supposing a good general knowledge of HCI, but less detailed knowledge of qualitative methods. Our primary audience is Master’s and Ph.D. students in HCI and related areas who are planning their individual projects. Other audiences include HCI practitioners who are planning in-depth studies, or people with a background in qualitative methods but who are new to HCI. We hope that this book will help you design and conduct excellent qualitative HCI studies.
Ann Blandford, Dominic Furniss and Stephann Makri, February 2016
Glossary
The following abbreviations are used in this book:
| DCog | Distributed Cognition |
| DiCoT | Distributed Cognition for Teamwork |
| GT | Grounded Theory |
| HCI | Human–Computer Interaction |
| QDA | Qualitative Data Analysis |
| SSQS | Semi-Structured Qualitative Study |
| TA | Thematic Analysis |
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
BEHIND THE SCENES
Qualitative methods play an important role in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI): in requirements gathering, in acquiring an understanding of the situations in which technology is used and might be used and in evaluating how technologies are used in practice. Although there are scores of texts on qualitative methods in the social sciences, there are surprisingly few in HCI. The concerns of HCI are somewhat different from those of the social sciences, with a focus on technology use for informing the design of interactive systems, rather than on social phenomena between individuals, in organisations and in society more generally. Our aim in this book is to take you behind the scenes, to give guidance on how to plan, conduct and report qualitative studies in HCI. Throughout, we draw on the metaphor of making a documentary to bring to life important issues, and to make producing something a more tangible part of the activity. Going behind the scenes allows us to examine important considerations for qualitative research in the field of HCI that have seldom been discussed elsewhere.
The emphasis we place on different topics is inevitably colored by our own experiences. Our research has been in two main