Methods 2 41 guide, including the acknowledgements of sources, can be found in Appendix IV. In order to stimulate participants to think about their answers, especially in the interview with the two teachers together, I sometimes asked teachers to write down their thoughts about their professional ideals and about the tolerance concept before talking about it. The draft of the interview guide was discussed several times in the research team. Three pilot interviews with primary school teachers from the researchers’ networks (I knew one teacher personally) gave satisfying results. Goals of these pilots were to check whether the questions were clear, whether the right language and tone was being used, whether the questions fostered elaborating on the intended topics, and to get used to interviewing participants. The most important adaptations were splitting the topics over two separate interviews, specifying the questions about religious tolerance and adding questions about professional ideals and the school’s identity. It could not be foreseen that several incidents happened that actually did resonate in the interviews, like the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015 (BBC News, 2015, January 7), the Tunisian beach attack in June 2015 (Amara, 2015) and on the same day the beheading attack in France (BBC News, 2015, June 26), the widespread images of the washed-up body of 3-year-old Syrian boy Aylan in September 2015 (Mackay, 2015), and the assault of a Dutch emergency setting for refugees in October 2015 (ANP, 2015). These incidents put the issue of religious diversity and issues of tolerance on the minds of teachers, especially in the light of radical Islam. Conducting the interviews Almost all interviews took place at the participants’ schools, except for the double interview with Lieke and Sanne (who preferred to be interviewed at the researcher’s office) and the second interview with Teun (as he planned attending the interview before going to another meeting in the vicinity of the researcher’s office). To create a safe atmosphere, the researcher tried to sit down diagonally across the participant, while the participant could see the door. The interview started with questions about the personal school-life story of the participant, to promote confidence with the interview situation. During the interviews there was space for having a coffee break (not included in the mentioned length of the interview). Sometimes the participant invited the researcher to join the team coffee break. In one situation, the researcher suggested having a break because the participant seemed to get ‘stuck’ in his mind. Participants were interviewed for 173 minutes on average over both interviews, with 128 minutes as minimum and 228 minutes as maximum.
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