Who, Where, and How of Interviewing Peers: Implications for a Phenomenological Study

Research within a phenomenological framework is aimed at understanding the lived experience of participants to capture the essences of their combined stories to provide new insights and truths surrounding a particular phenomenon. Essential to this process is the acquiring of data representative of the experience being researched. The art of unstructured interviews is to acknowledge and value participants’ stories as each participant traverses deeply personal experiences with the interviewer. This article examines the impact of factors that influence the successful interviewing of peers and explores how ignoring the foundational elements of “who, where, and how” may result in lean or even skewed data. Aimed at accessing the essence of a phenomenon through conversational interviews, the authors offer an adaptable framework that considers the additional elements of “space, language, role, and trust” which is aligned with the intent of phenomenological studies.