Virtual Methods

40 • Joëlle Kivits
France . . . which we share with 2 friends, and visit 4–5 times a
year.
Louisa 20 years old, email 2:
Wow, its sounds like you have had a wonderful time!! . . . I too
enjoy travelling my favourite place is Prague and love taking
trips over there. I also lived in spain for six months two years
ago, although I can barely remember the language at all now!! We
are looking forward to visiting Canada next year as my boyfriend
lived there for a while and he would like to go back.
The stage of mutual self-disclosure is essential in setting up the basis of the interview
relationship as it enables participants not only to be more familiar with the
project, but also to ask the researcher personal questions and to add, to the interview
objective, other threads to the email communication. Equally, being more
personally engaged with participants enables the researcher to create a comfortable
and friendly context for interviewing. As the rest of the chapter will demonstrate,
the initial objective of interviewing that was behind the email
communication immediately calls for the development of a personal relationship
that, in turn, progressively becomes the essential condition for completing the
qualitative interview to a high standard.
Between Interviewing and Conversing: The Importance of Reassurance
The online interviewer’s ability to listen, reassure and develop sensitivity is crucial
in preserving a personal relationship with the interviewee (Mann and Stewart
2000). With no clear-cut directions on how to proceed, these interactive skills are
progressively acquired and developed during the interview process, which is constantly
endangered by the online context.
First, the lack of physical presence means that understanding and perceptions of
others have to be negotiated by text (Markham 2004): the simple gestures of
nodding, agreeing or eye interrogation are, for instance, not possible through
email. Such conversational elements must nevertheless be translated into a textbased
context and have to be adjusted to each interviewee, in order to maintain the
quality of the first contacts with each participant or, in some cases, to work towards
better personal communication. Moreover, as each participant has her or his own
style of communicating, the researcher needs to adapt her or his personal online
style accordingly. The use of emoticons, for instance, generally palliating for the
absence of conversational cues (Crystal 2001), may or may not be appropriate
according to the interviewee. In this research project, the exaggeration of punctuation,
capitalization as well as verbal descriptions and paralanguage were generally
good indicators of the tone adopted and proposed by interviewees. 2
Second, every answer sent by interviewees is embedded in a personal life context
that escapes the interviewer, although it permeates the email communication. Busy