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The purpose of this paper is to argue that qualitative researchers have much to learn from conducting methodological analyses of their own talk in relation to research participants in interviews. Yet there are specific difficulties in representing findings from methodological analyses of research interviews.

Although qualitative researchers have for some time followed recommendations to analyze both “how” interview data are generated in addition to “what” is discussed, little has been written about the challenges of representing these sorts of analyses. The paper uses a case to first examine difficulties in the representation of an analysis of interview data that draws on discursive psychology. After discussing the case, the paper further explores the challenges of conducting and presenting these sorts of methodological analyses of interview data to research participants and readers in ways that clearly convey what might be learned by examining how interviews are accomplished.

The paper outlines considerations for researchers in doing methodological analyses of interview data, including challenges, reconciling interpretations of “what” and “how” topics are discussed in research studies, and possible areas of focus.

This paper examines what researchers might learn from examinations of their own interview practice and does not focus on representations of topical analyses.

The paper argues that when interviewers subject their own talk to analysis, they learn about themselves, their craft, and the ways in which knowledge about social worlds are collaboratively produced in research encounters with participants.

By developing expertise in how to analyze their interview interaction methodologically, qualitative researchers can attend to significant features of their interview practice and in so doing, develop a reflexive research practice.

This paper aims to explore qualitative semi‐structured interviews – conducted with NHS mental healthcare patients/prisoners located in one HM Prison Service (HMPS) establishment. The methodological reflections, whilst not directly related to the content of the interviews, seek to offer a debate about interview data in relation to the processes of their creation.

The dialogue is designed primarily for those who conduct, or have an interest in, mental health‐orientated research, particularly those who undertake studies in secure settings with mental health service users as participants.

Regarding interview method as a tool for data collection/creation, methodological foci for discussion include the structure of interview questions, participant unfamiliarity with the process, body language and non‐verbal communication, plus discussions concerning conversational turn‐taking and interviewee agency.

This article stems from a small‐scale empirical fieldwork study in one prison setting and offers a debate about interview data in secure settings with mental health service users.

In qualitative research, it is recurrent to conduct data collection through interviews, which must be first transcribed for the data to be analyzed. Although there is a relationship between the stages of the interview and the data analysis, the link between them (i.e. the transcription) seems to be a neglected methodological procedure. This occurs because, in papers, it is generally reported that “the interviews were transcribed”, without any details about the transcriptions conduction. From this methodological gap, this paper aims to discuss the relevance of detailing the methodological procedures adopted in the transcription in research reports in the management field.

This paper takes the form of a methodological essay.

The discussion focuses on the concepts of naturalized and denaturalized transcription, the relevance of adopting transcription norms and the need for reflexivity in conducting transcriptions – elements that must be explained in research reports to improve the methodological quality.

This paper explores methodological details that management students and researchers can adopt when performing transcriptions. Consequently, journal editors and reviewers will have more subsidies on the methodological quality employed in researches, which contributes to a better evaluation process.

This study demonstrates the relevance of a neglected methodological technique – transcription, which needs to be detailed in research reports, to contribute to the increase of methodological accuracy and to provide essential information to readers, allowing them to evaluate the rigor of the research. Thus, it is proposed that transcription should be considered a quality criterion in qualitative research.

The aim of this review paper is to identify the methodological practices and presentational styles used to report interview-based research in “leading” management and organisation journals.

This paper reviews a sample of 225 articles using qualitative interviews that were published in management, human resource management, organisational behaviour and international business journals listed in the Financial Times 50 list between 2009 and 2019.

The review found diversity and plurality in the methodological practices used in these studies and the presentational styles used to report interview research.

The findings are expected to help doctoral students, early career scholars and those new to using qualitative interviews to make decisions about the appropriateness of different methodological practices and presentational styles. The findings are also expected to support editors, reviewers, doctoral examiners and conference organisers in making sense of the dissensus that exists amongst qualitative interview researchers (Johnson et al., 2007). These insights will also enable greater “paradigmatic awareness” (Plakoyiannaki and Budhwar, 2021, p. 5) in the evaluation of the quality of interview-based research that is not restricted to standardised criteria derived from positivism (Cassell and Symon, 2015).

To make sense of this plurality, the authors map these practices and styles against the onto-epistemological paradigms identified by Alvesson (2003, 2011). The paper contributes to calls for philosophical diversity in the evaluation of qualitative research. The authors specifically articulate concerns about the use of practices in interview-based studies that derive from the positivistic logic associated with quantitative research.

This paper aims to examine the current practice of reporting on translation issues in qualitative, interdisciplinary accounting research. Based on an analysis of the methodological consideration of the translation of quotations from non-English interviews and additional interviews with experienced researchers, the authors aim to develop recommendations for the reporting on such translation procedures in future accounting research relying on interviews not conducted in English.

The analysis is based on papers published in four highly ranked interdisciplinary accounting journals: Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ), Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS), Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA) and Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management (QRAM). The subjects of the analysis are publications of non-English-speaking researchers who conducted non-English interviews and therefore were confronted with translation issues when attempting to get published in these English-language journals. Additionally, to gain deeper insights into reporting decisions on language and translation issues, the authors conducted interviews with experienced researchers in the field of qualitative, interdisciplinary accounting research whose mother tongue is not English. The authors combine these empirical insights with current developments in translation studies.

As suggested by translation studies, translation is an act of sense making and reconstruction of meaning, and therefore is a complex task that needs to be carried out with caution. However, the findings suggest that in current interdisciplinary, qualitative accounting research, the reporting of language and translation issues, especially with regards to the translation of quotations from interview data, have so far received only limited attention. The authors therefore call for more awareness of and sensibility toward dealing with language and translation issues, which should be reflected in more transparent reporting on translation processes to support the credibility and authenticity of qualitative accounting studies based on non-English interviews.

This paper is limited to the reporting on the methodological consideration of translating quotations from non-English interviews in papers published in AAAJ, AOS, CPA and QRAM between 2004 and 2015. For future accounting research that relies on such interviews, the authors call for more transparency and provide specific recommendations. This in turn should strengthen the awareness that language and translation are factors to be considered and reported.

This paper is the first to develop recommendations for the reporting of translation processes in accounting research studies, which are based on interviews not led in the English language.

This chapter focuses on the methodological implications of producing rich narrative data about higher education at the meso-level. While micro- and macro-level higher education studies often miss out on the nuances of the practices that happen in between, meso-level research straddles these levels, often bringing both ‘structuralist’ and ‘agentic’ tensions into interplay. The chapter highlights the importance of the academic ‘workgroup’ as a unit of analysis in understanding the interplay between the micro-level of individuals in academia and the macro-levels of the university and the higher education sector. The study investigated the practices of a ‘workgroup’ of academics who engaged in a common project over a period of three years. Researching how academics make meaning of their practices requires the use of alternative methodologies which are relatively under-utilised in higher education. The methodologies and iterative data production strategies used in the study are discussed in the chapter, including the processes of grounded open coding and segmentation of the data, as well as the levels of discourse analysis. Finally the chapter provides some reflections on the data analysis process, highlighting the challenges for data production when conducting a meso-level analysis.

This paper aims to explore the methodological and epistemological assumptions that have foregrounded the author's research into discursive activism in Australian feminist blogs, and a discussion of her research methods and why they were appropriate to this study. In particular, it seeks to discuss internet research methods and approaches toward the study of a feminist network online in order to make a case for methodological approaches that are feminist in themselves and aimed toward discursive change. The author recognises the political and personally affective nature of research.

The project design and methodology of the study draws on traditions of feminist online ethnography and feminist standpoint methodology, using a combination of face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews, modified grounded theory, network analysis, and participant observation.

The author used a community‐curated online “carnival” to minimise problems of researcher navigation, and explore the pitfalls of insider research, and she discusses the success of looking for contradiction as a method of privileging disagreement in research.

The original contribution of this paper is toward the uses of disagreement, contradiction, discursive rupture, and dislocation in modified grounded theory analysis. The theoretical perspectives discussed in this paper are compatible with a view of subjectivity that allows for discursive political agency, and also encourage an ethics of listening and respect for difference that includes considerations of affect, inequality and power relations in the study of online communities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and incorporate personal narratives as a new methodological tool into the qualitative research of complex organisational issues such as identity. Particularly, this study provides a fresh methodological perspective on organisational identity exploration by using personal narratives to examine multiple identities that occur in dynamic organisational contexts.

In order to examine multiple identities, personal narratives found in the 43 semi-structured in-depth interviews collected were analysed. These narratives were examined following a textual and performative analysis.

The paper furthers methodological discussions in organisations in three ways. First, it responds to the need for a methodological approach that allows multiple identity exploration in organisations while it presents personal narratives as a valuable methodological perspective within organisational research. Second, it extends the methodological use of personal narratives for the in-depth qualitative study of complex organisational issues such as identity. Finally, the study stretches the boundaries of mainstream organisational research by illustrating that personal narratives can be used as a methodological approach to explore organisational identities.

This research integrates personal narratives as a methodological tool into the qualitative research of dynamic organisational issues. Employing personal narratives has allowed the exploration of multiple identities that take place in organisations in a manner not previously achieved in organisational studies. The study, therefore, challenges previous organisational research and expands the boundaries of organisational identity studies, offering a new qualitative methodological account for identity exploration in organisations.

Technological advancement and the expansion of resources are key propellers of methodological innovations in scientific research. The virtual field is gradually occupying a larger space in scientific research, particularly regarding qualitative research. There are numerous tools that help in accessing the field of study, collecting data, recruiting of subjects, and providing support in processing and analyzing data. Low cost, time saving and access to otherwise inaccessible groups are the main potentialities pointed out in the literature. This chapter aims to enrich methodological discussions regarding information and communication technologies (ICTs), as well as to improve data collection methods mediated by ICTs used in qualitative research. Through a review of the body of literature on internet mediated research (IMR), production on the topic was characterized. The most widely used data collection methods are identified and discussed. Discussions originated from the review were broadened and deepened through contributions emerging from a study carried out by the authors. The results reinforce the contributions pointed out by the analyzed body of work and highlight the contextual, relational, and data validity dimensions. In an interconnected way, these dimensions allow for the production/obtaining data with specificities deriving from a new relation of individuals with time and space. Finally, attention is drawn to the idea that the background for methodological discussions about IMR is the same as the one for methodological discussions regarding science in its most different approaches – the demand for strong methodological, epistemological and ontological coherence.

This paper aims to study the kinds of methodologies used in studying “doing gender” in working life and organisations. To do so, articles that use empirical research materials from different academic peer-reviewed journals have been analysed. By methodologies, both data gathering tools and the analysing techniques using and concerting the data have been largely understood. In the articles analysed, interviews were the main methodological tool in extracting the “doing gender”, while studies using naturally occurring data, e.g. historical materials and methods in relation to this type of data were in the minority. The following question has been proposed for further exploration: What impact does the domination of interviews as a research method have on the concept of “doing gender”?

Qualitative content analysis, close reading and data were collected from academic peer-reviewed journals with the applied principles of literature review.

The research methodologies adopted in the articles on “doing gender” mostly deal with interview data and their analysis. Interview data are used most often as the primary source for ethnographic analysis. These method choices limit the potential interpretations available for the analysis of the conceptual idea of “doing gender”.

The limitations of this article relate to the journals chosen for the analysis.

This paper contributes toward a deeper understanding of the “doing gender” approach, particularly by exploring the research methodologies that have been used when studying “doing gender” approach empirically.