Mastering Bias Awareness: Essential Pre-Interview Strategies for Researchers (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to secret number five, how to avoid biases and leading. Now you might think this part ought to come after learning about interviewing skills, but it really needs to come before and here's why. Here's a little story about clever Hans who incidentally is the horse. Hans's trainer posed mathematical questions to Hans and he was able to give the correct answers tapping them out with his hooves. An early psychologist realised that this was because Hans was actually noticing very very minor cues that his trainer was giving him. Now if a horse can do this, can you imagine what skills people have in order to read each other? Admittedly not everybody uses these very well, but our evolution has taught us that it's valuable to be able to predict the intentions and actions of others. Now bear that in mind and add to that the well-documented confirmation or experimenter bias which leads researchers to get the findings they want or expect while believing themselves to be neutral and scientific. Now in qualitative research, the researcher is the research instrument and asks the questions. So you can see now that it's possible for the researcher to convey his or her biases, albeit unwittingly, to the group just in simple ways such as how the questions are framed or how much emphasis or time or energy is put into certain questions or certain bits of stimulus material. In return, the participants can pick up the signals and respond appropriately. Now at its worst, this effect can completely invalidate the research, but fear not because this is something that researchers manage every day and there are three things you can do about this. One is to become aware of your biases and prejudices before you start so you can consciously set them aside. Next, you can learn about best practice in interviewing which helps you think and be open-minded and avoid being leading. Finally, you can understand how to design a guide and use stimulus materials and techniques that help you maintain neutrality. If you're still convinced that you actually have no prejudices or biases, I strongly recommend that you go to the website and try one of the demonstration implicit association tests. Here is a very quick edited version of the race implicit association test. It's quite hard to game this. It's quite hard to beat the system and as such, it's actually quite a good research technique in itself. So, assuming you acknowledge you have biases and prejudices, there are two things you can do. One is in the short term for each project, surface your hypotheses, expectations and desires for a particular outcome. Then in the long term, you can look at your general attitudes to different socio-economic groups, ethnic minorities, religions and so on and the way in which that is done is to do a bracketing exercise which takes you through the various sources for your biases, helps you consider how you may compensate for them and helps you set them aside. In other words, put them in brackets which is why it's called the bracketing exercise. Moving on to best practice, this relates to some of the thinking developed by Carl Rogers on how to build effective relationships in therapy. He later used the same principles in international mediation and so these are very broadly useful principles. The first one is about building empathy, true empathy with people. Next is congruence or genuineness, just allowing yourself to be natural, to be yourself. And thirdly, being non-judgmental. We'll look at these briefly more closely. Empathy is the ability to recognise and experience the thoughts and feelings of another as if they were your own, but we do have to remember that they're not. So what this does is it makes you focus on your participants experience, not your own personal agenda. Genuineness is simply about being transparent, being yourself, being natural, being authentic. So this is your style of interviewing and what that does is to let other people be themselves, which is exactly what you want in research. And finally, the advice is to be curious but not judgmental. There is nothing that shuts down people faster than being judgmental. Now another word about curiosity, it's the drive to acquire knowledge and so it motivates creative and insightful questions. It stops you accepting easy answers and again keeps your focus on your participants. They will sense your interest, they will sense your passion to know and they will get your ability to listen even to things you may not want to hear. What we've done is we've covered how to deal with your biases and prejudices before you start. We've looked a bit at best practice in interviewing but there will be more on that in the next video showing you actual practical techniques and then there'll be a further video on guides, stimulus materials and techniques that will help you maintain your moderator neutrality. For a final thought, just remember that the best way to avoid leading is to start with an open mind and minds are like parachutes, they work better when they're open. Thank you for listening.