Designing Qualitative Interviews (continued)
Theme are statements that explain why something happened or what something means and are built up from the concepts.
Concepts reflect the underlying ideas with which people label their descriptions and understandings of their world.
Rather than ask, ‘What do you mean by empowerment??which might elicit an abstract, textbook type answer, ask the interviewee to compare empowerment in the old and in the new sense:
How does a house really differ from a stop sign, in the empowerment sense?
- Without asking directly for a definition, get: empowerment was an increasing ability to solve personal problems.