Qualitative interviews: design, recruitment, ethics and conducting

Our first Research Gym has now been adapted to an online format.  We have a limited number of spots. Please register early so you won't be disappointed.

About the workshop:

Qualitative interviews engage the researcher and the participants in conversation which is a fundamental mode of human interaction for getting to know others’ experiences and feelings. Interviews--posing and answering questions--allow participants to speak in their own terms and to describe their accounts and situations in various ways. Interviewing is also a self-conscious social ‘performance’ in which various social interpretations transfer from one acting individual to another through both verbal and nonverbal channels and codes. It is, therefore, crucial to learn the art of interviewing through which the researcher and participants mutually construct and produce intersubjective knowledge.

This half-day workshop will deliver step-by-step techniques of conducting interviews and discuss the ethical and methodological perspectives that underpin these techniques. The discussions will be followed by hands-on exercises.

The workshop will cover the following topics:   

• Qualitative Interviews: stages of interview method and the politics of knowledge production
• Ethics and Requirement Strategies: consent, ethical conduct of research and selecting interview respondents
• Interview in Practice: checklist for preparation and the art of interviewing

 (PDF file) Workshop outline

Workshop leader:

Marshia Akbar is a Senior Research Associate with the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) program in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University. Her research broadly encompasses how social inequalities and settlement policies shape the labour market integration of migrants in Canada. Marshia earned a doctorate degree from York University with a focus on migration and settlement studies. As a post-doctoral research fellow at York University, she analyzed settlement policies and integration challenges in Ontario and Quebec through a comparative lens. Her current research examines the policies about eligibility for permanent residency and settlement services and their impacts on the employment outcomes of different categories of temporary migrants in Canadian cities. The research will advance knowledge of location-specific labour market challenges for temporary residents and help identify required policy interventions. Analyzing qualitative data using NVivo and large quantitative data sets using SPSS and STATA is one of her strongest skills.

Workshop fee:

Regular price $100 (discounted fee for students $20)  

Due to these uncertain times, we are offering these workshops free of charge.