App-based textual interviews: interacting with younger generations in a digitalized social reality

ABSTRACT

Textual and visual app-based communication is standard everyday interaction. I argue that, as researchers, we have to be better equipped to include various ways of interacting digitally with participants in qualitative research interviews. In this paper, I do a methodological focused analysis of app-based textual interviews (n = 98) with young people selling illegal drugs online. I challenge the earlier skepticism towards interviewing through text, while also placing the interview in a new context of encrypted mobile phone applications. App-based textual interviews prove to be highly flexible and create a socially informal character of semi-structured interviews that interviewees perceive as safe. At the same time, the interviewer’s position is decentered as the interviewee takes full control of the interview context behind the screen. App-based textual interviews proved highly useful when interacting with a younger generation, also on a sensitive topic like illegal drugs. It also introduces several ethical dilemmas for discussion.

KEYWORDS:

• Qualitative
• interview
• digital
• ethnography
• online

Acknowledgments

Thank you so much to all the local students for allowing me to use our conversations for this methodological discussion. I would also like to thank all the anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback, as well as to everyone who gave me comments on early drafts, especially my supervisor Jakob Demant, Mareile Kaufman, Margaretha Järvinen and fellow PhD students.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Wickr is an end-to-end encrypted messaging application with a user-defined burn-on-read settings for you to decide what happens with your communication when sent. They promise that all user content is removed from the device after it expires, and no communication is stored on Wickr’s servers (as well as any unique device identifier). See wickr.com.

2. Slack is an application created for easier collaboration. One can create different work spaces and invite people to join different discussion threads. It is used to communicate through chat within the thread or one-on-one, as well as to share files. Within our project, each country had their own discussion thread where they could contact the project coordinator or principal investigator, as well as a general platform for all project members. See www.slack.com

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Nordic Research Council for Criminology under Grant [20700034].