I NTERVIEW AS HUMAN INTERACTION

When using interviews as a research method, ordinary people are the targets and sources of the information, and the interview situation is discussion and interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee. However, certain guidelines and best practices are useful to follow in this interaction situation, and the researcher must be aware of them in order to successfully conduct research by interviewing. (Hakkarainen, 2012.) Openness and sharing information to the interviewee about the research is a key element to conducting ethical research. The interviewee must consent to the interview and remain the right to withdraw or change his/her mind about his/her consent at any time. Also, a level of anonymity must be guaranteed to the interviewee and the researcher must remember this promise when analyzing and representing the research data. (King, 2010.)

It is good to have a clear goal for the interview, and the roles for different people and parts of the interview situation should be clear to all participants. It is essential for the researcher to be clear about their role in the research situation: they can be a data collector, researcher, a reassuring listener, or a neutral person in the interview situation.

There are also other factors that can possibly have an influence on the interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee, such as power distribution, personal chemistry, mutual language and trust. These are all factors the interviewer should take into consideration already when getting ready for the interview situation, so that in the actual interaction they would not come as a surprise. The basic order of the interview should be question – answer – acknowledgment. This minimizes the interviewer’s influence on the results of the interview and further clarifies the roles of the different parties. The researcher must also bear in mind that there are various issues of research ethics to be considered before entering the field and interviewing people. (Hakkarainen, 2012; Ruusuvuori & Tiittula, 2005.)

To be able to detect the possible cultural differences between the interviewer and the interviewee, the researcher must make their own positions visible and analyze their influence on the research process. The researcher must be aware of the possible positions that could influence the research and its results and include this notion in the research text. (Ruusuvuori & Tiittula, 2005, p. 94-95.) Whether the clear positions of a local and a tourist result in conflicts is, of course, a matter of individuals. In this research, no such conflicts occurred – on the contrary, the tourists seemed more often to be genuinely interested in encountering a local person during their holiday. This tourists' willingness to get to know the culture and meet the local people has also been recognized in tourism research (see i.e. MacCannell, 1999; Rovaniemen matkustajaprofiilit, 2012), and seems to be a lasting interest of some tourists.

In this research, I clearly positioned myself as a researcher, explaining the interviewees the purpose of the research (to study the definitions of “arctic”) and my role as the person conducting this research as my Master's thesis to the field of tourism research studies. The interviewee's consent to recording the interview was always asked, and their anonymity was guaranteed. First after the explanatory introduction to the research was made, I moved on to ask the research interview questions (see Annex 1) based on the theme of the interview, the term “arctic. The dimension of power distribution should be discussed, since in the research interview position I was a local interviewing tourists:

a setting which might (or might not) influence the answers provided to me by the interviewees. Also, differences in age, gender and cultural backgrounds are elements that could possibly have influenced the interviews, since I was a young Finnish woman interviewing tourists of different ages, genders and backgrounds. I did not, however, detect any hesitation or judgment being passed in the interview situations of this research. This could be explained, for example, by the rather homogenous group of respondents, coming from the countries of the U.S.A., Spain, Lithuania, South Korea and Australia. All of the interviews were conducted in English, which inevitably affected the amount of respondents, and the formation of the homogeneity of the group of interviewees. Although in this research the amount of Anglophone interviewees is

big, it does not mean that most of the visitors encountered in Santa Claus Village during the field work came from English speaking countries – rather, the English speaking people seemed to form a minority on both field work days (in winter and summer), but most of the remaining visitors to Santa Claus Village were reluctant or unable (i.e.

language barrier, lack of time) to participate in a research interview in English.

When conducting an interview, the researcher must take into consideration the uniqueness of each interviewee and interview situation as well as the surrounding factors that may influence it. In some cases, a language barrier may occur and complicate the interaction and interview process. When interviewing people from different parts of the world, the researcher must be prepared for a situation like this that can complicate the interview situation. However, since it is practically impossible for the researcher to be completely prepared to face all possible cultural differences and their consequences for the interview situation, the existence and meaning the cultural differences have on the research project must be analyzed as a part of the whole research project (Ruusuvuori & Tiittula, 2005, p. 93-94). As the goal in this study was to interview tourists visiting Santa Claus Village in Rovaniemi, it was impossible for me as a researcher to predict what nationalities or cultures the people I will interview are going to represent. However, acknowledging the possibility that I might face such challenges on the field enabled me to response better in such situations.

The fact that the research interviews were conducted in Santa Claus Village on the Arctic Circle inevitably has an effect on the answers: as in any location, the experiences and tourist accounts are therefore analyzed as encountered in this specific location of the tourist destination of Santa Claus Village. I realize that in the context of this specific location the references to Santa Claus as something “arctic” can be common in the interviewee's accounts, and will examine such accounts in close relation to the 'lived experience' situation of the tourists in that specific location.