Description of my own interviews Sample Clauses

Description of my own interviews. This chapter will describe my interviewing process, for example how I contacted my informants and how I did the interviews. The first two steps in this process were finding informants and planning the interview themes and questions97. Before planning my own interviews, I contacted two other researchers or research groups who had studied Estonians in Finland and asked whether a part of their data could be used. As it was not possible, I got some advice what kind of questions I could ask from my informants98. The most efficient way to find informants was using my own personal contacts to find the first four informants. After interviewing them, I used “snowball sampling”, that is asking contacts from informants, to find more. I contacted also one choir of Estonians living in Finland after one of my informants had recommended it. There was no answer, however. I planned contacting also some associations of Estonians in Finland, like Soome Eestlaste Liit in Tampere. In the end it was not necessary, as I found enough informants for the purposes of this research otherwise. All of the first four informants happened to be women and they were working either health care or welfare sector. As a result I decided to concentrate on women who are working in these fields or in other occupations that are common for women (for example education and cleaning) because I thought that otherwise my data would have been too biased. I contacted informants either by phone or by e-mail in which I described the purpose of the interview. In some cases I used some time at the beginning of the interview for discussion about the purposes of the interview. In general, I tried to do attending interview as easy as possible for my informants by asking where they would like to meet. Two of the interviews were conducted in informants home, three at their workplace and three in a café or a 95 Hirsjärvi & Hurme 2006, 36.