Interviewee

Dr Elizabeth Peel, Lecturer, School of Life and Health Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK.

Article

Peel E., Parry O., Douglas M., & Lawton J. (2006) 'It's no skin off my nose': Why people take part in qualitative research. Qualitative Health Research, 16(10): 1335-49.

Summary

Michael Bouwman talks with Dr Elizabeth Peel about research she has done exploring why people take part in qualitative research. Michael and Elizabeth discuss Elizabeth's motivation to do this work and, as well as why she chose a qualitative methodology to explore these issues. Elizabeth also speaks about the insights her findings provide into the role of nurses in the research recruitment process and the important factors that drive participation in research.

Transcript

Michael Bouwman: Introducing Dr. Elizabeth Peel, Elizabeth is a psychology lecturer in the School of Life and Health Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham UK with expertise in qualitative methods, critical health psychology and sexualities. Elizabeth’s current research centers on the management of chronic illnesses, especially diabetes, users’ understandings of health related technologies and same-sex relationships and families. I’m speaking with Elizabeth about her article, ‘It’s no skin off my nose: Why people take part in qualitative research’, which she co-wrote with Odette Parry, Margaret Douglas and Julia Lawton. Hi Elizabeth, welcome to IPP-SHR Podcasts, our congratulations. This is important work that presents empirical findings on the process of doing research. Most researchers are so focused on the topic they are exploring they rarely take the opportunity to collect data on their process. The study that your findings are based on examines patients’ experiences and views on diabetes self-management and service provision. Could you share with us the reason why you chose a qualitative methodology to explore these issues?

Elizabeth Peel: Conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews really allows participants’ voices to be heard and particularly in the context of people with diabetes this is really important. In the UK and probably elsewhere as well, patients’ perspectives about services are often lacking in the design and delivery of those services and really listening to the perspectives of the people with diabetes themselves was at the heart of this research. Now qualitative methods are incredibly suitable for looking at what people say themselves because you’re focusing on the language, you’re focusing on how they talk and you’re spending time analyzing their own words. Another big advantage of qualitative interviews is that you gain such rich data and as an interviewer you can follow up issues that emerge as data collection progresses, you’re not just dictating the framework that you’re going to use and what you’re going to focus on in a kind of a priory way. So to give you an example, we didn’t initially ask participants about their experiences of self-monitoring levels of glucose but they raised this issue spontaneously in the first round of interviews that we did with them. So we then thought, right let’s develop questions that probe what they think about blood glucose monitoring in the subsequent interviews so it’s a great way of exploring issues that come up spontaneously and a systemically qualitative interviews are interesting as well because you can look at the ways in which the interviewer and the interviewee co-construct meaning. In other words, how is it that the questions that are asked, how do they then shape the responses that people can give and vice versa, so looking at that co-construction. So all in all I think qualitative methods are really valuable in health research.

Michael Bouwman: You note in your article that the literature documents the therapeutic aspect of qualitative research. Could you elaborate on this for our listeners and outline how your findings affirm this notion?

Elizabeth Peel: Certainly our participants talked a lot about how the interviewing process had allowed them to get things off their chest. Now whether providing a listening ear so to speak within a research interview does function therapeutically is a bit of a moot point and I certainly wouldn’t want to claim that these interviews function as a form of therapy per se. I don’t think they did but participants themselves did make reference to the kind of therapeutic aspects of the process so they made comments such as, ‘I’ve really enjoyed talking these things through with you’. Now some of the participants juxtaposed the constraints of health service provision, so the very short interactions that they were having with health professionals, feeling as though they had to rush quickly through their issues within a consultation - with the length and depth of the interviewing context, which I think points certainly for some participants to a an unmet service need. The overall sense from our participants was that by providing this listening ear function and giving them space to talk about how they felt about their diabetes within the interviews, what was happening was that they were being offered something that they weren’t getting from their health professionals. So there was a sense of an unmet service need from participants.

Michael Bouwman: And altruism and a sense of the innocuousness of qualitative research are also recorded in your findings as important factors driving participation. Could you elaborate on these findings?

Elizabeth Peel: Altruism tended to be manifested in comments like, ‘if you can learn anything off me it’s maybe going to help something else’ or ‘it’s a good thing if something comes of it’. What really struck me about these types of comments was that they were rather vague altruistic references. Very few people suggested that the research would be useful for other diabetic people specifically. In many ways this makes sense because like most research participants, our participants weren’t given any specific information about how the data was going to be analyzed, what the key findings that were emerging our how we were going to disseminate the results. Now notions of altruism weren’t in the philosophical sense of putting other’s needs above your own in a kind of self-sacrificing way. Partly because participants conceptualize qualitative research as inherently innocuous which I’ll talk about in a moment. What we felt was that the theme of helping others was prevalent in part because the study emphasized diabetes services and participants were asked to account for that participation at the end of the study. It might have been rather troubling for participants to suggest their contribution to the study was after three interviews over a year, pointless or unhelpful. So although altruism tends to be normative in account for the research participation we found that it’s not provided by the participants themselves in a straight forward way. Participants also suggested that the interview process was inherently innocuous and they made comments like, ‘there’s no harm talking about it’. Some of them made an explicit contrast between their experience of participating in qualitative research with the potential harm that they perceived in taking part in randomized control trials and as one participant said that we quoted in the title of the paper, ‘it’s no skin off my nose’.

Michael Bouwman: Wonderful, well Elizabeth thank-you so much for talking with me today. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Elizabeth Peel: It’s been a pleasure.