Approaches to Interviewing Adolescents through WhatsApp

The next speaker in this final ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Kirstie Northfield, whose focus is on conducting interviews with adolescents through instant messaging services. This is in the service of a project on adolescent mobbing. Plenty of work has been done on quality of life assessments for adolescents through parents and teachers as proxy reporters, but these are not always accurate: in parallel reporting tests, mothers’ assessments appear to be most closely matched to adolescents’ actual experiences, while teachers’ reports have not been well tested by by parallel studies.

Who, then, is a reliable judge of adolescent wellbeing? How are adolescents themselves reporting their wellbeing, and to whom? How might nonverbal cues of low wellbeing be incorporated into this, and what are they? This project engaged in semistructured qualitative interviews with young people, but did so through WhatsApp rather than face-to-face; the idea here was to meet them where they are, rather than create an artificial environment that may make participants uncomfortable.

Participants were recruited though Facebook ads and noticeboard advertisements, and this largely sought to bypass parent consent – but the adolescents often actively involved their parents in providing consent out of their own initiative. The project engaged with ten 14- to 17-year-olds from across Australia, from a number of states and various family situations. The WhatsApp process enhanced anonymity, limits or reverses the power differential between interviewer and interviewee, enables young people to set the pace of the interview and withdraw without consequence, and removes the management of nonverbal communication from the interview context (for both interviewer and interviewee).

Participant responses were often fast, detailed, and verbose, and participants were often happy to go past the 60 minutes allocated to the interview. It was important in this to be authentic, allow for pauses between responses, wait for further contributions to the discussion, mimic participant language, use verbal empathy, and accept typos – all of these are inherent parts of the WhatsApp experience. Participants remained engaged, and carefully framed their thoughts. It is still important to provide further support information, and conduct interviews at a time when support services are available. The end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp also provides a further layer of security to both participants.

The results of this work were then coded carefully and qualitatively to allow key themes to emerge; the researcher’s own positionality also needs to be considered in this process, of course. Friends emerged particularly strongly as a support mechanism, and different friends may serve different purposes here. Parents are also important, of course, but mothers’ attempts to fix certain issues are often unwelcome, and immediate judgment is unproductive. Teachers are generally seen as unhelpful. Tiredness, distraction, low energy, and zoning out are especially key indicators of problems.