“If I don’t like it, I’ll just pop the phone down!”: Reflecting on participant and researcher experiences of telephone interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about sudden, profound shifts in working practices, including in qualitative research, where telephone or virtual interviews became necessary alternatives to face-to-face interviews given COVID-19 distancing measures. In this reflection, we discuss our group’s transition to using telephone interviews to carry out an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study with 18 older adults living with age-related macular degeneration, a chronic, progressive eye disease causing central vision loss. Rather than focusing on the ‘pros and cons’ of the telephone modality compared to face-to-face interviews, we aim to provide a reflexive account of the telephone interview experience from both the researchers’ and participants’ perspectives within the unique context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Integrating these perspectives, we suggest that telephone interviews can generate rich data while being an accessible, comfortable mode of data collection for many participants. Provided there is reflection on how the context shapes the interview encounter, we suggest that telephone interviews can play an important role as part of a more pluralistic approach to qualitative data collection.