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Purpose In “Can the subaltern speak?,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes the important distinction between representation as “Vertretung” and “Darstellung.” She also produces a strong version of whom she regards as a subaltern woman. Thirty years on both the distinction between “Vertretung” and “Darstellung” and the question of who the subaltern woman is, remain extremely important, not least in methodological considerations in cross-cultural contexts. A number of questions may be asked in relation to representation, such as: how distinct are its two meanings in the interviewing context? And how do they relate to the notion of the co-production of knowledge which has gained such traction in the past three decades? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, I draw on cross-cultural interviewing experiences. Starting from the silence of illiterate rural women in a study conducted in Madhya Pradesh, India, in 2011 (Mohanraj), this paper draws on the research experiences of the author and a number of projects reported on in Cross-Cultural Interviewing (Griffin, 2016) to elucidate how one might re-think both representation and subalternality in the contemporary globalized context. Findings The experiences of cross-cultural interviewing I draw on in this paper show that in the contemporary context subalternality may be more productively understood in terms of a continuum rather than as the radical state of unreachable, unspeaking alterity that Spivak proposes. Originality/value The paper contributes new perspectives on Spivak’s notion of the unspeaking alterity of the subaltern in light of globalized developments over the past 30 years and specific experiences of cross-cultural interviewing, as these comment on Spivak’s insights.

This is a reflexive account of a study of the perceptions of young women of African-American descent on gender, race, and class. These abstractions come to life as these young women provide concrete instances of how these stratifications systems affect their everyday lives. The young informants clearly perceive the chal- lenges that these systems represent. In reporting the results of this study, the researcher is reflexive on two counts. First, she reflects upon the implications of her European-American heritage for the quality of her interviews and analysis. Second, she discusses the challenges of writing qualitative research reports. Not only was she inexperienced in how to write reports based on qualitative data, but she also felt constrained by the length restrictions from telling the whole story.

Poverty is linked to disparity in families access to basic human services and an incapacity to fulfill basic needs. The study described in this paper uses a qualitative research design to address the ecology of service use in the family within the broader social and physical environment. While the focus of this paper relates to the methodology of the study, some substantive results are used for illustrative purposes. Through an in-depth study of families in the contexts of their neighborhoods, our task is to search for patterns and their meanings. This process may uncover the motives and beliefs underlying service use and access among the families in our study.

Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques.

Aim The aim of this study is to explore the use of the Questionnaire Appraisal System with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in cognitive interviewing for cross‐cultural adaptation. Design This is a descriptive methodological study. Methods Using the Mandarin version of the Post‐Stroke Checklist as an example, cognitive interviews were conducted with 27 stroke survivors in Guangzhou between November 2020 and February 2021. The Questionnaire Appraisal System was applied as a codebook in focus group discussions to perform quantitative data collections and quantitative content analysis. Results Thirty‐eight problems were proposed in focus group discussions and identified all but four of the 30 questions that emerged in the cognitive interviews. A new item was added to the Questionnaire Appraisal System for better categorization. Four categories and six subcategories of problems in the checklist were revealed.

Background International attention is being paid to the issue of making evidence sustainable after implementation. Developing an identification model is essential to promote and monitor the sustainability of evidence implementation. However, this model is not available in Chinese. This study aims to translate the National Health Service Sustainability Model into Chinese and to verify whether the model is adapted to the Chinese healthcare environment. Methods This study follows the translation and validation guidelines developed by Sousa and Rojjanasrirat. The translations include forward and backward translations and their comparison. Expert reviews were used to validate the content validity of the Chinese version of the National Health Service sustainability model. Cognitive interviews were used to assess the validity of the language in the Chinese setting. Results The translation was conducted by a bilingual research team and took 12 months. Expert reviews were undertaken with eight experts, and cognitive interviews with six participants. The content validity of the model is excellent, but at least 20% of the experts still felt that items one, three, five and nine needed refinements. In the cognitive interviews, most items, instructions and response options were well understood by the participants responsible for the evidence-based practice project. However, some language issues were still identified in items one, three, four, five, seven, nine, and ten. Participants reported that the sustainability results of the model assessment were consistent with their previous judgments of the items. Based on the expert review and interview results, items one, three, four, five, seven, nine and ten require further refinement. In summary, seven of the ten items have been amended. Conclusions This study provides insight into how the National Health Service sustainability model can be used in the Chinese healthcare setting and paves the way for future large-scale psychometric testing.

The objective of this article is to show how narrative methods provide useful tools for international business research. We do this by presenting a study of stories told about the collaboration between a Danish expatriate manager and his Chinese CEO in the Shanghai subsidiary of an MNE. First, we explain and exemplify how narrative interviews are designed and conducted. In this connection, we consider the interviewers' interaction with the interviewees, and clarify our reasons for focusing on the two selected interviews. Second, we demonstrate how narrative concepts and models are able to elucidate intercultural collaboration processes by analyzing how each member of a dyad of interacting managers narrates the same chain of events. We show how the narratological concepts of peripeteia and anagnorisis are well suited to identifying focal points in their stories: situations where change follows their recognizing new dimensions of their conflicts, eventually furthering their collaboration. We explain how Greimas's actantial model is valuable when mapping differences between and changes in the narrators' projects, alliances and oppositions in the course of their interaction. Thus, we make it clear how they overcome most of their differences and establish common ground through mutual learning.

This article describes the use of stimulated recall interviews as a technique for investigating how people approach interactions in a number of different situations. In general, the technique I describe involves interviewing individuals by playing them audio or audiovisual recordings of their own behavior in social situations and discussing different aspects of those recorded interactions. Doing so can help us to understand what signals interactants understand as important, what signals they try to convey to others, and how they choose from various options to act upon the information they receive in interactions. Using the example of jazz jam sessions, I ask why it is that interactions can sometimes go smoothly and uneventfully, or sometimes break down completely. The stimulated recall interviews provide a valuable tool in helping the ethnographer to answer these kinds of questions.

Background Noncommunicable diseases represents long term medical conditions, which often puts the patients under enormous demands when following treatment, exposing them to experiencing treatment burden. The Patient Experience with Treatment and Self-Management (PETS) questionnaire was developed as a patient-reported measure to identify treatment burden of chronic illness, using modern measurement theory and tested in a variety of settings. Developed in English, this set of measures had not been previously translated into Norwegian. The objective of this study was to develop a Norwegian version of the PETS and to pretest the translated measures through a cognitive debriefing methodology. Methods A rigorous translation approach was applied, guided by Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy methodology. Bilingual teams from Norway and the United States reviewed the translation to develop a provisional version, which was evaluated for test content validity with cognitive interviews by probing 12 native Norwegian patients with noncommunicable diseases. The interviews applied both concurrent and retrospective verbal probing techniques, guided by a question route. Audio-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using systematic text condensation. Results Assessment of translatability identified the need for cultural adaptation on several core words, balanced with the need to keep close to the original literal meaning. Seven patients with colorectal cancer and five patients with heart failure participated in cognitive testing of the Norwegian version of the PETS. The analytical process of the cognitive interviews identified two emergent main themes, ‘comprehension and readability’ and ‘relevance of the PETS’, with seven corresponding subthemes. Most items, response options and instructions were well understood by the patients. Revisions were made concerning cultural relevance. Conclusions PETS items were semantically equivalent to the original. The patients with colorectal cancer and heart failure were able to comprehend the PETS and found it to express their experience with treatment burden in chronic illness. Future work will focus on psychometric construct validation and reliability testing of the PETS.

There is an increasing need for cross-cultural qualitative studies in an era of globalization. A focus group of five researchers, who were involved in a large international research project, identified effective strategies and challenges associated with five key domains of qualitative research with key informants: identification, recruitment, preparation, conducting the interview, and follow-up. Content analysis revealed nuanced tactics related to effective strategies and challenges associated with each domain. Examples of effective strategies include interview preparation to understand the specific expertise of the interviewee and allowing the informant to offer additional information beyond the questions asked. Challenges included technical difficulties with virtual platforms and scheduling interviews in multiple time zones. These findings provide practical guidelines for researchers conducting virtual interviews with international key informants.