Focus on qualitative methods: Interviewing children

Abstract

The focus in health-related research on children has shifted from seeking information about children to seeking information directly from them. Children, even as young as three years old, can give graphic descriptions and have excellent recall of experiences related to adverse events, such as illness and hospitalization. Children use scripts as the primary means of anticipating, comprehending, and re-creating real-life experience. The content, timing, number, and structure of interviews will influence the completeness, accuracy, and consistency of children's recall of events. Although at times conflicting, the findings from recent scholarship on children's narrative competence will assist researchers to select the interviewing strategies most likely to yield faithful representations of experience.

The impact of Drama on students with learning difficulties, career choices in a special school

“…Despite Doherty and Sandelowski () stating that children are the best sources of information about themselves, my experience observing the interviews contradict this. This could partly be due to the nature of students’ learning difficulties; they were not always able to understand what the interviewer was asking them.…”

‘I felt a little bubbly in my tummy’: eliciting pre‐schoolers' accounts of their health visit using a computer‐assisted interview method

“…Most of the children's emotional statements were general, as they described themselves as being happy during the whole visit. This follows what is known about how children use scripts to describe certain experiences, based on a generic memory system of what usually happens during similar events (Docherty & Sandelowski ). In addition, several children described how their emotional state changed during the different events of the visit.…”

Children’s experiences of attitudes and rules for going to the toilet in school

“…The design of the study, with individual, open interviews made it possible to capture the children’s genuine experiences (19). It became apparent that there were difficulties concerning interviewing as described in other studies (20). In this study, the four open questions often needed to be supplemented with support questions of a more structured nature.…”