A Qualitative Interview With Young Children: What Encourages or Inhibits Young Children’s Participation?

Abstract

The goal of every qualitative interview is to produce rich data. Inducing storytelling is a challenge in every interview. Interviews with young children (ages 3–6) present an additional challenge because of perceived power differences between children and adults. This research examines how interviewers’ questions and expressions encourage or inhibit children from telling their stories. We extracted 1,339 child interviewee–adult interviewer turn exchanges from a national study on children’s perspectives on risk and protection (N = 420) and analyzed them in two steps. First, we categorized the interviewers’ questions and expressions and children’s responses. Seven categories were found for interviewer expressions and five for children’s responses. We then examined the relationship between interviewer categories and children’s responses. The categories that produced the richest data were encouragement, open-ended questions, and question request. Sequence of utterances and closed-ended questions produced the least storytelling. We did not find significant differences based on a child’s gender with regard to the interviewer categories. The results and implications for researching young children are addressed.