Donna Frost

Design and methods 111 4 when presenting back to the other inquiry members during a CCCI group meeting. Interviews and conversations with people outside the inquiry groups Individual inquiry members also undertook interviews and more informal conversations with people outside the CCCI groups. The general goal in these situations was to elicit the experiences and perspectives of people with whom the nurses in the inquiry worked: patients, residents, family members, colleagues and student nurses. The specific goal depended on the situation being explored at that moment. Within the RN inquiry I conducted nearly all of these interviews myself. They were semi-structured and had a semi-formal nature. That is to say, I used a short topic list: after inviting the person being interviewed to tell their story, for example about the nursing encounter witnessed or their experience of care, I tended to return to the topics on the list and ask questions about them if these subjects hadn’t already been covered in the interview. Later in the RN inquiry and throughout the NP inquiry the interviews became much less formal in nature and could better be described as conversations or dialogue. This approach was developed after reflecting on the mis-match between the third methodological principle of this research (see Figure 4 . 5 ) and the reality of conducting more traditional semi-structured interviews. Despite my intention to be person-centred (McCormack and McCance, 2016 ) in the interview process, basing the interview around my starting question and topic list paid too little attention to the needs of the person being interviewed. Altering my approach to these conversations brought them into line with the assumptions of this research: the beginning point was the shared experience of the care encounter, if there was a shared experience, or the point at which the person being interviewed wished to start the story. I asked, for example, what had moved them to participate in this inquiry and what they wished to share with me and, via me, with the other inquiry members. During each conversation personalised agreements were made as to the information that was able to be shared with the other inquiry members. As well, attention was paid to the purpose of the person being interviewed: how did they viewthe process of being interviewed? Howdid theywish to use the conversation, or the record of the conversation, to better understand their experience, for example, to help them process what they had been through or in looking towards the future? It sounds a little long-winded but in practice could be set up quite simply. In many of these conversations I invited the person I was talking with to choose association cards (eg. Bijkerk & Loonen, 2009 ; Stokes, 2011 ) as part of the interview or dialogue process.