The Interview Sample That Agreed With Itself
Aisha is running a qualitative investigation into how students decide whether to disclose a mental health difficulty to a teacher. She conducts semi-structured interviews with 9 students. All 9 were recruited through the school's peer-support leaders group, which she herself coordinates. The interviews run 35–50 minutes in a quiet room she books. In analysis she codes transcripts, finds three themes ('fear of being dismissed', 'trust in individual teachers', 'preference for informal channels'), and reports that 'saturation was reached after 7 interviews'. In her oral presentation she says the themes 'represent how students at this school think about disclosure'. A moderator asks how she knows saturation was reached and whether her role affected the data.
1. Evaluate Aisha's saturation claim and her generalisation claim.
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Saturation. Claiming saturation after 7 of 9 interviews requires evidence: a documented point at which new codes stopped appearing, ideally with the coding log showing the last interviews added no new themes. Aisha has not reported this, and with a homogeneous sample of peer-support leaders, early saturation is expected - they share training, vocabulary, and norms, so themes will recur quickly. Saturation within a homogeneous group does not indicate the phenomenon is exhausted; it indicates the group is narrow. The claim should be softened to 'no new codes emerged in the final two interviews within this group'.
Generalisation. 'How students at this school think' overreaches. Nine peer-support leaders are not representative of the student body: they are selected for interest in mental health, trained in supportive language, and likely more comfortable discussing disclosure. Aisha can claim the themes characterise these participants' accounts and generate hypotheses about other groups, not describe the school population.
2. Analyse how Aisha's dual role as peer-support coordinator could shape the data, and propose safeguards.
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Mechanisms of influence. (1) Recruitment through a group she coordinates creates perceived obligation - students may feel unable to decline, and consent is compromised by the power relationship. (2) Social desirability: participants may emphasise trust and informal channels because those align with peer-support values, and may suppress criticism of teachers she works with. (3) Interviewer framing: her follow-up probes may inadvertently reward certain answers. (4) Analytic bias: she may preferentially code for themes consistent with her programme's philosophy.
Safeguards. Have an independent person recruit and take consent, making clear that participation and content are not shared with her in her coordinator role. Use a second coder on a subset of transcripts and report disagreements. Keep a reflexive journal documenting her expectations before analysis and revisit it during coding. Include negative-case analysis - actively search for accounts that contradict the three themes. Consider interviewing students outside the peer-support group to test whether themes hold. Report all of this transparently in the methodology.
3. The moderator asks whether the three themes are trustworthy. Describe the criteria Aisha should address and what evidence she can present for each.
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She should address credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability.
Credibility (do the themes match participants' meanings?): member checking - send summaries to participants and record agreement or dispute; negative-case analysis; triangulation with a second coder.
Transferability (can a reader judge applicability elsewhere?): thick description of the setting, participants, recruitment, and interview context so readers can assess similarity to their own context.
Dependability (would the process be stable?): an audit trail - interview guides, coding decisions, revisions to the codebook, dated analytic memos.
Confirmability (are findings grounded in data rather than researcher?): reflexive journal, direct quotations tied to each theme, second-coder agreement rates.
She should present these as concrete artefacts in her report and appendix, not merely assert that she was reflexive.