By Gregory Zobel
Dr. Clay Spinuzzi is a professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to his numerous articles in technical communication journals and publications and his prolific tweeting and blogging, Spinuzzi has published three books. The first two—Tracing Genres through Organizations (2003) and Network (2008)—were published via traditional academic presses. Spinuzzi’s third book, Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations, was published in 2013 through Amazon.com’s CreateSpace. Given Spinuzzi’s ongoing contributions to scholarship and research in technical communication, I was excited to learn about Topsight’s release. I was even happier to read it and discover how user-centered the book is for individuals new to research and research methods.
During the ATTW/CCCC convention in Las Vegas, Dr. Spinuzzi agreed to an interview that lasted over an hour. Given the interview’s length, the interview that follows here (in the print edition of Intercom) focuses explicitly on providing practical tips to new researchers with emphasis on interviewing and relationship management. The rest of the interview can be read online at http://intercom.stc.org. The first portions of the interview were recorded and can be watched at http://youtu.be/WWE_uULgPJI and http://youtu.be/ggYMgh9aFQU.
Supplemental Material from Gregory Zobel’s Interview of Dr. Clay Spinuzzi
Theme 1: Practical Tips for New Researchers
Do you have enough information?
Gregory Zobel: When you work on research events, how many hours do you invest before you start to feel like you have a good start, a reasonable investment and time? Do you have a rule of thumb that you need at least 10 or 15 hours of observation before you even start trusting what you are thinking about, or is it just some miraculous gut feeling that develops, or is there some kind of time?
Clay Spinuzzi: I don’t have a very good answer to that. A lot of it depends on the case. For instance in a more complex organization like the Telecom Company, I had to spend a lot of time trying to get my head around what each unit did and then relating that to the overall organization, so I don’t think I really felt like I had an idea of where the study was going until very late in the study. I think I was probably about 60 or 70 people in.
At that point, I had this inkling that this organization is not working the way I thought it was going to work, which is fantastic. When you have a very clear idea of how something is going to work, then sometimes you see that happening even when it’s not there. So for me, when I realize that this doesn’t work with my theories, hooray! When you get to really small, simple organizations, say like freelancers or coworking spaces, then it becomes a lot easier and it’s a lot simpler to figure out where things are going.
Lately, I’ve been trying to do a lot more documentary research on the front end before I parachute into an organization. Looking at internal documents when I can. Looking at external documents, looking at social media. These all have really helped me to kind of cut that time down, I think, to ask smarter questions on the front end.
Improving Your Interviews
GZ: Once researchers have practiced interviewing on a friend or two, what is the next stage? Do you have any practical tricks or suggestions how newbies can avoid the interviewer-talking-too-much problem? You do set out a solid foundation, and I was just wondering [because] moving from there to the practice to the human interaction can be shocking or difficult.
CS: It really can. And, of course, if you seize up and get nervous, that person you are interviewing will often have that same reaction. Either that or they’ll kind of take over the interview, and you don’t want that either. I think the most important thing to remember is that the interview really should be a conversation. That’s hard because you have an agenda, you have certain questions that you want to ask, that you want to get to. But you have to be able to sort of weave that into a conversation that the two of you are going to have. If it’s just you firing questions and the person giving answers, those answers are going to become shorter and shorter.
If you treat it as questions that you kind of have to ask but you are really not invested in them, then the answers might get longer and longer as the other person takes over the interview. What you really need to be able to do is to sit down, look the person in the eye, ask the questions, and mean them. Show that you are enthusiastic and interested in their perspective.
The other thing I keep bringing this back to [is] the idea of being non-judgmental, I didn’t realize until we sat down for this interview, how big of a deal that is for me. I think being able to show just genuine interest in what people are going to say and to be able to ask follow-up questions, like “What do you mean by that?” I think that goes a long way to making an interview productive.
I said just a minute ago that sometimes people ask us a question about something we did, we really don’t know why we did it, so we just sort of make up an answer on the spot. We are not necessarily lying, we are just trying to think out loud and understand why we did that. I think a good interviewer will listen and nod and then ask further questions that will probe a little bit more deeply. And suddenly if that person doesn’t know why they did something, you will get into this conversation about it.
GZ: So, in a way, it sounds like it’s helping them to make more explicit that which is the person’s task or knowledge. It’s not just an interview … you are trying to see what artifacts congeal.
CS: Absolutely. I think sometimes, I don’t want to get all touchy-feely about this, but sometimes it can be a self-discovery. When the person says, “Well I never thought about this before, but I do it for such and such a reason.” That’s fine. And then sometimes they will say things like, “I’m not like that idiot down the hall,” and you have to just roll with it and say, “I’m not going to condemn this person for saying his colleague’s an idiot. I’m not going to assume the colleague is an idiot, I’m just going to register that’s how he sees his colleague.”
GZ: That actually segues nicely into the next question that comes back to the point you’ve made multiple times about not being judgmental. I think you partially addressed this. But perhaps to crystalize, what advice can you offer to new researchers so they can avoid making judgments and theorizing too early in the research process. It’s very easy to say “don’t be judgmental, be nice,” but what happens when you walk in and there’s somebody who they just seem to be offensive to you personally? They embody something that you do not like or they have mannerisms that you find disturbing, or your example, everybody seems to say that Phil’s an idiot and how do you remain neutral when those different stimuli or those different forces try to influence you, especially if you are new and not confident in your skills and abilities to navigate?
CS: I think two things. One is that you start realizing that every time somebody talks to you, they are telling you a little story. They are telling you a little story about how they see the world. When you are able to kind of separate that out and say, “Okay that’s this story, that’s this story, that’s this story,” then you can kind of treat them as separate objects. You are realizing also that when you are writing down your observation notes or your memos afterward, you are also telling a story. And, the point is not to say, “Which story is the best?” the point is to kind of lay these stories out and say, “Okay, where do they converge and where do they diverge?” So that’s point one.
It doesn’t get to the, what might happen, just may be you have this feeling of overwhelming revulsion when you talk to somebody. Maybe you just hate the, let’s say, the political stands they take or the jokes that they tell and so forth. I think what you have to do consciously is do something that you did with all of your analysis, which is to play what I call the believing-doubting game. So you lay out certain propositions and you go ahead and try believing them. And you say, “Okay, what happens if I believe this and this and this? What are the consequences of that?” Then you say, “Okay it’s the doubting time. Let’s doubt this stuff. So maybe I believe this is a horrible person and what are the consequences of that? Why did they hire this horrible person? Why do they keep this horrible person on? What is this horrible person doing to keep his job even though he seems like an idiot?”
That is a great way to sort of explore how the whole system is working. Then you switch to the doubting point and say, “You know what: looks can be deceiving. What if he’s not the idiot I take him for?” I should clarify here that I generally don’t think that my research informants are idiots but I’m just kind of [clarifying]….
Theme 2: Relationship Management
GZ: This actually segues nicely into the next question, the next point. You offer some useful advice in Topsight. Particularly, I appreciated that you let new researchers know that there could be negative impacts if the researcher does not properly approach their subjects or the environments that they want to approach. What further advice or practical suggestions can you make about approaching these environments? You give a number of them in the text and I’m wondering if you have any advice perhaps from the negative. Sometimes it’s easier for us to learn from the negative. Do have any brief or brutal anecdotes that you can offer to help cement the point in our readers’ or listeners’ memory and then to perhaps offset that or balance that with a win situation or really good approach?
CS: The example I’m going to give is not from research, and you may have heard about this. A couple of years ago a journalist interviewed the musician MIA and MIA did not like the interview. So, rather than complain to the journalist, she tweets to her thousands of followers, “Hey I’m not happy with this journalist’s story, if you want to talk about it call me,” and then she puts in not her number, but the journalist’s number. And so suddenly the journalist is getting all of these phone calls from all these weird people, her voicemail box is filling up; I think she cancels the number.
Most of us are not going to be interviewing MIA, but we might end up working with somebody or interviewing somebody whose media presence eclipses ours. So I think that’s something to at least keep in mind. That doesn’t mean we can’t ask questions, but I think it does mean we have to manage those relationships, and especially when you are, let’s say, coming from the academy and doing workplace research. You have to manage these relationships because you are going to be seen as an outsider.
I can’t count the number of times, well I probably could but it would take a while, that I went into an organization, I would explain what I’m doing, and then somebody else would come up and the person I’m shadowing would say, “Oh yeah, this is Clay; he’s like Jane Goodall with the chimps.” Or “He’s the efficiency expert; he’s trying to make us more efficient.” I have to step in and manage that relationship, and say, “Well, no, no, no; I’m trying to see how this system works.”
When you are setting up a relationship like that, I think you really have to mean it. And that means, sometimes, that you decide that you can’t report on specific anecdotes, or specific pieces of data, or have specific quotes, because they are going to out somebody who is not necessarily doing a good job. You have to be able to say at the very onset, “I’m not going to be talking about specific peoples’ jobs; I’m going to be talking about how the whole system works, and here are safeguards I’m going to have in place for the individuals and for the organization.” That might lock your data up in different ways, but I think it’s part of protecting yourself, protecting the organization, and just being sort of a good citizen. I should say here, that doesn’t mean you change your findings. It never means you change your findings. It just means you figure out which places to focus on.
GZ: In phase two, you offer specific shifts or changes in language to lessen respondents’ defensiveness. Thank you by the way for actually providing examples and concrete stuff there. Do you have any insights on key words or phrases to not use or to avoid like the plague?
CS: I think you don’t want to—here’s the classic example and they always tell you this, but I’m going to tell you again. When you approach somebody in a research study, you don’t say, “I’m studying you.” What you say is, “I want to see how you and other people work in the organization.” And, just that shift, I think, is huge. Because you are not really—I mean number one you’re not really studying that person.
You are not going to write an entire study about them and study them psychologically and so forth and take their weight and ask them to give you a blood sample and all that. You just want to see how they work within that larger system. I think being able to give them that message and give that to them often and say, “I want to see how this whole system works. I want to see the challenges that you face,” or “I want to see how the information does or doesn’t flow.” And, make sure that it’s not about them and make sure that they understand that they are helping you. And, ideally, helping you to bring insights back to the organization so they can improve their lives. I think that’s a message that really needs to get out there.
I tell my students the point isn’t just to study a place and see how it works. The point is: how do we go beyond that and recommended changes that are positively going to affect everybody in the whole organization. I think if you can keep that mindset, if you can convey that mindset, that goes a long way to avoiding those problems.
Dr. Spinuzzi continued his discussion of relationship management a bit later in the interview.
CS: One thing we like to tell students in technical writing is to be “you oriented.” I think you have to be “you oriented” with all of your interactions with your individual participants. Rather than saying, “This study will help me learn” or “This study is going to help me to graduate” or whatever, you say, “Here’s how I see the study helping you and the rest of the organization.” Make sure they are invested in the study: partially by telling them what’s going to happen; partially by monitoring what sort of language you use. And when I say that, it sounds like you have to think about this stuff all the time. I don’t. I set a mindset and everything flows from that.
A Few Final Words
CS: There are a lot of good methodology books out there. I’ve read a lot of them; I’ve reviewed a lot of them on my blog. One of the problems that I have with these books though is that they don’t really get at what I think is the fascination and excitement of the—I’m going to sound so cheesy here—but the joy of actually going in and doing research. You know it shouldn’t be drudgery to go in and see how people do things. It should be exciting, because people are endlessly inventive.
Whenever they hit a problem, they come up with a solution. It might not be necessarily a well thought out solution. It might not be a very generalizable solution, but they are going to come up with something even if it’s like bailing wire and chewing gum. They are going to come up some sort of inventive solution. Being able to go out there and talk to them about their solutions is always fascinating. Really, the easiest way to get somebody talking during an interview is to say, “Hey, I noticed you are doing such and such to solve your problem. Tell me about that.” They will tend to light up because people like solving problems, and they like being recognized for solving problems. I think being able to understand that and, in a sense, being able to sort of admire what people have been able to do, I think that brings you a long way toward doing research that you enjoy and you will be able to stick with.
Supplemental Material from Gregory Zobel’s Interview of Dr. Clay Spinuzzi
Gregory Zobel (gz7comp@gmail.com) is an assistant professor of educational technology at Western Oregon University. Trained in technical communication, usability, and rhetoric, he supports and trains educators employing technology to enhance and enrich learner engagement, accessibility, and content delivery in person and online.
