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This chapter illustrates the elicitation of metaphor using clean language interviewing (CLI) from a study with a population of 30 business leaders to find out what they could learn through articulating and exploring their metaphors about leadership. This responded to claims in the literature on leadership that mental models are the key to leadership and yet leaders are largely unaware of their models. The aim of the study was to encourage leaders to pay attention to their metaphors and to understand if this could help develop their self-awareness. The entire phenomenological study was based on clean language principles to guide the research process. The chapter includes an extract from one interview to illustrate the use of clean questions to elicit verbal and visual metaphors. It shows the application of the cleanness rating to the interview as a method to understand the relative extent of clean or leading questions and facilitate researcher reflexivity. Moreover, the chapter illustrates the use of drawings as integral to clean language practice. The chapter concludes with findings from the study about facilitating self-awareness through CLI and shares some lessons learned about using CLI with business populations.

The purpose of this chapter is to enable interviewers to understand how they can elicit interviewee-generated data that are not ‘muddied’ by the researcher. The chapter has three main components. First, we discuss the authorship of data and illustrate how questions may unwittingly affect this authorship. Second, we outline the problem with ‘leading’ questions and introduce three features of leading questions that are relevant to researchers from different research epistemologies. Third, we introduce the ‘cleanness rating’, which is a way to categorise how questions are used in an interview according to the extent to which they are leading or ‘clean’. We conclude with the difference this can make for researchers, including enhancing the capacity for interviewers to reflect on their practice and making their role in the generation of interview data more transparent.

When an individual achieves exceptional outcomes in a particular endeavour - sporting success, academic achievement, business results, creative outputs and more – various influences, such as physiology, education and IQ – play a part. Yet these influences often fail to explain the essential difference between one individual's outstanding performance and another's.

This chapter describes the use of clean language interviewing to research the patterns of beliefs, values, thinking and behaviours of a person who gains consistently excellent outcomes in a specific pursuit. The analysis of the data gathered can be used to create a model of the individual's process which describes ‘the elements, patterns and relationships that are characteristic of a particular ability’ (Gordon & Dawes, 2005, p. 8). Modelling is ‘the process of identifying and describing in a useful way those patterns that make up an ability. Once we know the patterns, we can make them our own and begin to manifest the ability’ (Gordon & Dawes, 2005, p. 5).

The case study presented here focuses on a case manager, Tanya, who worked with neurodiverse (mostly autistic) offenders, supporting them to move successfully into education, training or employment. Tanya, who had attained outstanding results, dramatically outperforming her peers, was the exemplar who became the subject of the research. The methodology involved is described, and the ways in which an interviewee's conscious and unconscious processes were elicited through clean language questions are outlined.

Dementia is characterized by the progressive decline in cognitive and daily functioning. Although the decline is often the defining characteristic of dementia in biomedical models, several scholars highlight the preserved skills of persons with dementia. Identity, or a sense of self, is among the areas relatively preserved in the later stages of dementia. It is the window through which caregivers understand the subjective experiences of persons with dementia.

This qualitative exploratory study highlights the value of social relationships, particularly the role of the Filipino family in recognizing personhood and maintaining identity in dementia care. Preserving identity entails understanding the person’s unique characteristics that reflect one’s sense of self. In a highly collectivistic culture, such as the Philippines, the family is crucial to preserving identity and overall well-being in dementia. This study explores the perspectives of 15 Filipino caregivers as regards caring for a family member with dementia. Participants discuss changes in family structure and the challenges in dementia care. More importantly, they delve into strategies used to preserve identity and encourage life participation in their loved one with dementia. Essential Filipino cultural values in dementia care, such as collectivism, religion, and the values of filial piety and utang na loob (or debt of gratitude) are further discussed.

Underpinning clean language interviewing is a set of skills that allow the interviewer great facility in tracking what has been presented. These skills include minimising personal inference and making an informed choice of what question to ask. They are grounded in the logic of the interviewee's data and the purpose of the interview.

This chapter makes visible four hidden skills I identified through reflection on a doctoral study I conducted using clean language interviewing. These are, how I: ‘parcel out’ sentences in order to build visual-spatial schema; apply content-free codes during the interview; decide what is salient in the interviewee's words and gestures; and use adjacency to navigate my way around the data. Since these skills are applied moment-by-moment during the interview, I refer to them as ‘coding in-the-moment’. I conclude with a comparison between grounded theory methodology and clean language interviewing.

There is currently no case study for how clean language interviewing (CLI) might be useful for journalists. This chapter addresses that gap by discussing the value of CLI in journalistic interviews within the scope of a profile story interview. A profile story is akin to a mini biography, usually of a public figure or an interesting personality. This chapter was written drawing on my experience as an award-winning journalist in Malaysia for 20 years.

The chapter first examines the experience of CLI for both the interviewee and the interviewer. It then considers how the experience is similar to or different from other ‘standard’ media interviews both have been involved in. The chapter concludes that CLI is a method of interviewing that exceeds the criteria for what constitutes a good journalistic interview, within the context of a profile interview.

This chapter explores clean language interviewing for qualitative market research. It focuses primarily on how clean language interviewing was used within a process devised by the authors called ‘value-strings’. The chapter describes this process and how it was used in a client project for a food company that wanted to understand their customers' motivations and decision-making in relation to buying and using tinned sweetcorn.

Value-strings provided insights that went beyond the practical, functional attributes of the product to those that related to the benefits to the respondents of consuming sweetcorn and through to more tacit, often difficult-to-reach information about their values and beliefs. The client used the outcomes to develop a new TV advertising campaign.

The steps of the value-strings process, along with the optional metaphor elicitation steps, are described and illustrated using examples from the project. We show how we integrated opportunities for metaphor elicitation into value-strings, adding to the flexibility of the process and accommodating the client's requirement for the project to provide visual metaphors as well as verbal information.

Time being always in short supply in market research projects, we also describe the quick approach we used to enable respondents to access and generate metaphors. Some findings from the project, along with challenges and learnings are offered.