Researching Individuals’ Media Repertoires: Challenges of Qualitative Interviews on Cross-Media Practices

Abstract

Researching individuals’ media repertoires is challenged by the problem that respondents are often unaware of their media use because it is part of their daily routines. In an exploratory study, we consider different interviewing strategies that represent varying degrees of explicitness when stating our media-related research interest, different levels of detail in interview questions targeted at individuals’ changing media repertoires and different points in the course of the interview when we state the respective questions. We compare four different strategies based on ten semi-structured interviews with members of the middle class. An interviewing strategy which implicitly states the interest in the respondents’ media repertoires and follows up on this with the help of related enquiries at the end of each sub-theme appears to be the strategy that best suits the purposes. The set stimulus is subtle and, thus, does not dominate the interviewees’ response behaviour; yet it is strong enough to contain the presence of the media topic throughout the interview. Most importantly, this interviewing strategy allows us to capture the respondents’ individual relevance structures with respect to media and media use as part of their daily routines.