the health of individuals and communities is surrounded by many factors. Whether people are healthy or not, is determined by their circumstances and environment. To a large extent, factors such as where we live, the state of our environment, genetics, our income, and education level, and our relationships with friends and family all have considerable impacts on health, whereas the more commonly considered factors such as access and use of health care services often have less of an impact. An evidence base about the impact that projects, programs, and policies have had on health is required to carry out a health impact assessment (HIA).
oduction of the researcher, according to which it should be decreased as much it is consistent with the interview. Additionally, I wanted to control the interview too much with continuously asking questions, thus not giving time to the interviewee to elaborate more on some topics. This could be considered to be an improper way to conduct an interview since an interview is regarded to be a collaboration of the interviewer and interviewee (Weiss, 1994). The transcription also shed light on which questions worked and which were not that successful. These insights benefit that the researcher gains from the first few interviews (Luker, 2008). For example, it turned out that questions regarding family contacting habits proved to be too general.
To address the weaknesses of the first interviews, I worked on the improvement of both questions and interviewing style. To tackle the dilemma of too general questions and the resulting obscure answers on the central topic, I followed Weiss’s (1994) guidance on how to obtain more detailed responses. In the topic of family contacting habits, I focused more on asking for the explanation of specific incidents, like “Could you walk me through the last time you contacted your family, just what happened?” rather than asking for generalised descriptions, which work better for the topics which are not in the centre of the study, such as introduction or ‘cooling down’ questions (Weiss, 1994). I was also interested in revealing the emotional dimension of communication. Weiss’s (1994) points on helping the interviewees develop information on internal events contributed to my success in this mission. Asking about the feelings in certain situations, like “And how do you feel when you video chat them?” allowed me to gain entry to this dimension. Thus, applying these ideas not only strengthened the quality of the responses but also developed my interviewing style. Furthermore, during my third and fourth interviews, I paid particular attention to wait for full responses and to avoid self-reporting as much as possible. While preparing for these interviews, I memorized the most relevant questions. This strategy enabled me to concentrate more on the interviewee during the interview and be more flexible on the questions.
Even though the development of the second-round interviews is notable, I acknowledged further skills to improve as a researcher. To help capture the emerging themes earlier, next time I should write down my impression right after the interview – what surprised me, what made me worried or upset, what were the circumstances. Luker (2008) argues that this technique considerably shapes the research and facilitates the
