The interviews

Ten interviews were conducted in January and February 2009, one interview was carried out in June 2009 and the final interview was conducted in August 2009. The main focus of the interviews was the research question can the MP3 player function as a medium for musical self-care, and if so, how? To interrogate this inquiry, I posed the following questions: How does the MP3 player work as a medium for 1) management and regulation of mood, thoughts and emotions? 2) management of focus and energy? 3) construction of boundaries around one’s self? In accordance to these questions, I worked out a guide with twenty-something interview questions (appendixes 5 and 6).

The interviews took place in my office and lasted about an hour. I invited the subjects to my office because this is a quiet room where we could work

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uninterrupted. In case this should have been inconvenient for the informants, I also told them that we could meet elsewhere, as long as we would avoid interruptions. One of the informants thus invited me to her workplace where the interview took place in a small conference room. All of the interviews were recorded and transcribed continuously. I chose to finish the transcription of each interview before conducting another in order to be able to improve the questions or make changes to the way I carried out the interview. For this purpose, I chose not to carry out more than two interviews in one week, and to have at least one day “off” between each interview. Not many changes were done, but a few questions were added to the guide and a few were omitted during the interview-process. A question that was omitted concerned the music itself: “What is it about the music that makes you want to listen to it? Is it text, melody, rhythm, mood…?” This question seemed to be out of place regarding the rest of the interview conversation. Another question was difficult for the subjects to understand: “How do you experience yourself in relation to your environment when you listen to music?” This question was therefore simply changed to “How do you experience your environment when you listen to music?” The question “What is the reason behind your music listening? Is there any difference in whether you are at home or outside?”

was simplified to “Is there any difference in how you listen according to whether you are at home or outside?” A few questions were naturally added to the conversations and therefore also added to the interview guide.

These questions were: “Does it happen that you use music to guide thoughts in a specific direction or to block thoughts? How?”; “Is there any difference in the listening experience when you listen to loudspeakers versus headset?”; “If you listen to music for the purpose of experiencing mood or emotions, do you do this to the same extent outside among people as at home? How is the experience of this?”; and “How would it be without the MP3 player?”

The interview guide worked as a guideline to the semi-structured interviews. I began each interview by telling the subjects that there were some topics that I wanted to explore, but that they were free to talk unreservedly about the issue. The benefit to the semi-structured interview is the ability to follow up the answers given by the subjects. This enabled me to explore their stories and reach a deeper understanding of the topic.

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Smith (1995, p. 12) summarizes the advantages of the semi-structured interview like this: “It facilitates rapport/empathy, allows a greater flexibility of coverage and enables the interview to enter novel areas, and it tends to produce richer data”. The flexibility of the interview allowed me to improvise during the interview and focus on certain aspects of the subjects’

stories that appeared interesting. It also allowed me to free myself from the interview guide, asking the questions in an order that appeared natural in the course of the conversation, giving a better flow to the interview. The disadvantages of the semi-structured interview, according to Smith, is that it “[…] reduces the control the investigator has over the situation, takes longer to carry out, and is harder to analyse” (1995, p. 12). In the present case, the advantages of carrying out semi-structured interviews have been appraised as greater than the disadvantages.

Interviews can differ in their focus on description versus interpretation of a phenomenon. Where phenomenology originally has been more concerned with the descriptions of experiences, the hermeneutics emphasize the interpretation of meaning. I am concerned with interpreting the meaning of the use of MP3 players, and parts of this interpretation took place during the interview. Kvale (1996) refers to this as interpreting questions, involving rephrasing an answer; “you are saying that…?” and trying to clarify; “is it correct that you…?” By following up the subjects’ answers and trying to clarify the meaning of what they were telling me, parts of the analysis actually took place in the interview setting:

In such forms of analysis – interpreting “as you go” – considerable parts of the analysis are “pushed forward” into the interview situation itself. The final analysis then becomes not only easier and more amenable, but will also rest on more secure ground. Put strongly, the ideal interview is already analyzed by the time the tape recorder is turned off (Kvale, 1996, p. 178).

An example of such an interpreting question is the following, when I got back to a topic later in the interview, posing a question formulated as “you mentioned that… is this true?”:

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But since we are now on the subject of thoughts, you mentioned that you distract yourself from your thoughts; do you use music in this way?

Yes, I use it to get my thoughts away from work, unwind, because I use a long time to manage to wind down (12: Female, 43 years).

Another example of an interpreting question used during the interviews is the following:

Often, you can be somewhere where [...] there is a kind of atmosphere in the room, either because there are people there or there’s something with the place. Then you can use music to [...] create your own little private room.

Do you find that you can pull back from your surroundings with music, or how is it?

Yes, I think so. Absolutely. Yes, it’s a bit like that. You simply separate yourself from your surroundings (1: Female, 26 years).

In the latter example, I reformulated the informant’s answer, using other words, checking if her experience of creating a private room could be described as pulling back from the surroundings. Questions as those presented above can also be understood as leading questions, in the way that it is easy for the informant to simply answer, “yes” to the query. An objection to interview research is that it rests upon leading questions, and is therefore not reliable (Kvale, 1994). Smith (1995) points out that interview questions should be neutral rather than leading or value-laden.

“One may say you are attempting to get as close as possible to what your respondents think about the topic, without being led too much by your questions” (1995, p. 15). This is exactly what I tried to do during the interviews. However, a few times the informants had trouble expressing their experiences or thoughts on the subject. This put me in a dilemma – how explicit could I be about the theme at hand without putting words in the mouth of the informant? I tried to help by suggesting a few alternatives, without pushing the informant. My experience was that they often were able to communicate their experiences more easily after we had spoken for a while. Also, some people are more eloquent than others, which is something I as an interviewer have to accept. One of the informants, a man in his forties, had trouble putting his emotions into words. At the end of the interview, he expressed:

93 Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I can’t think of anything in particular. I think we’ve been through most of the topics.

Uhum. Yes. I think at least I have most of it.

(Pause.) But not everything is easy to put into words.

No.

In a way that I’ve given a lot of thought.

No. A lot of the use is perhaps not so conscious, or perhaps you don’t think a lot about why you, eh

No, it’s not like I think about why I chose that record, or why I did it.

But when I look through the playlist, there is of course something that makes you stop there and choose that, but it’s hard to say exactly what it is (3: Male, 44 years).

This informant was perhaps the one who was the least conscious about the relationship between his music listening and his emotions. At the same time, he was also the one who expressed most explicitly that “music is therapy”. My challenge was to try to understand how and why he felt that music could function as therapy. For this man, who had not given these issues much thought, it became difficult to explain what he meant by such statements. Most of the other informants were on the other hand quite reflected about their music use.

Another dilemma, which occurred to me after conducting several interviews, is that I tried to avoid leading questions perhaps at the expense of exploring the themes thoroughly. Being afraid of leading the subjects made me hold back some interrogative questions. There is always a search for balance between reaching valuable data and pushing the subject to talk about more than she is willing to. I realize that I probably could have pushed the subjects further in some contexts without crossing the line.

These are sensitive judgements, however, and I continually considered what questions to ask and which ones to leave out.

Kvale (1996) points out that all questions are leading. Instead of avoiding them, one should rather be aware of where they are leading, and what consequences this has for the information produced. I also want to shed light on the fact that the subjects did not seem to be so easily led. There are several examples of me posing a question that generated the reply: “No, that

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is not the case.” One example is from when I challenged an informant about possible negative aspects concerning the social aspects of MP3 use:

Do you think there’s something negative with the fact that you all withdraw from one another [when you listen to your MP3 players]?

No. No, I’ve thought a bit about that. No, actually it’s an advantage on the boat, because there you’re extremely closed in all the time. So the fact that you can put on your iPod and withdraw a little is actually just fine when you’re so cooped in (12: Female, 43 years).

In this sense, leading questions could also be used to clarify and challenge the stories told in the interview. Accordingly, it becomes important not to avoid leading questions, but to be aware of them and acknowledge their affect.

4.5.1 Written reports

As a complement to the interviews, I asked the informants to write down an actual experience they had with their use of the MP3 player. I told them to write down concrete details such as where and when, why and how they chose to listen to music in this episode (appendixes 7 and 8). Hatch (2002) points out that the process of writing involves a different kind of reflection than discussing experiences with others. “The most obvious strength of journals as data is that they can provide a direct path into the insights of participants,” says Hatch (2002, p. 141). These data are also somewhat different because they are not developed through the researcher, but come directly from the informant (Hatch, 2002). Still, the researcher has to interpret the data, and the informant is aware that she is writing for the researcher. The quality of the data is nonetheless different, because it is not passing directly through the researcher.

The purpose of the written reports was to supply as well as confirm the information from the interviews. I therefore asked the informants to do the writing subsequent to the interviews. Hence, the informants knew the focus of the research, and could be writing a story in accordance to the research questions in order to please me, the researcher. Consequently, the validity of the reports may have been weakened. Asking the informants to write in advance of the interview could have solved this. Not having such a clear

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conception of what the researcher was after could possibly have led to different stories, focusing on other aspects than what was talked about in the interview. However, my experience is that the informants’ reflections increased during the interview, leading to an awareness of their MP3 use they did not necessarily have prior to our conversation. Thus, some of the informants would probably have had some trouble writing about their experiences before they were asked about them in the interview. This does not automatically mean that writing subsequent to the interview resulted in richer stories. A problem with this method is that many people are more comfortable – and better at – expressing themselves orally than in writing.

This became obvious when I read the reports, of which some were quite short, and lacking the in-depth information I had hoped for. Two of the informants chose not to hand in a written report. One of them was reluctant to write about her experiences, as she was more comfortable talking about them. She thus offered to participate in a follow-up interview instead. The other informant was busy with his studies and felt he had said everything of interest in the interview. Because of the scarceness of the reports, I base the analysis on the interviews, and consider the reports as supplementary.