The Morrissey Method

August 2024

I’ve conducted a couple of pilot interviews, the aim being as much to get feedback on my technique and the questions I was asking as it was to learn how to use my shiny new voice recorder, practice my interview skills, reflect on things I need to improve, and then play with the results.

The interviews were incredibly useful in terms of reflection, feedback, and making tweaks along the way, and as a result, I’ve dropped one of the ‘warm up’ questions: what are your gaming habits? Both participants said the same thing, along the lines of 'Ooh. That's a hard one. You've put me on the spot there.' This is not a gentle way of making someone feel at ease, and their gaming habits will come up in their responses to other questions. I also reframed one of the final section’s questions around unintended consequences, as both interviewees thought future participants' negative association of the phrase could lead to an ever-growing list of the negative unintended consequences experienced.

Participant 001

I didn’t have an up-to-date version of NVivo when I interviewed and analysed my first interview, so I uploaded the audio from my voice recorder to my laptop and listened to it, pausing the recording along the way to make notes of anything that I felt were of note. This approach was completely unscientific and 100% emotive using gut instinct, empathy with my participant as a gamer (and friend), and my own gaming experience to ‘sense’ that there was ‘something in’ some of the words and phrases 001 was saying.

After listening to the whole interview, I had a collection of insights in the form of words, phrases, and quotes that had given me pause for thought. With no knowledge of how to do proper coding but feeling the need to do something with what I’d collected, I did what every professional researcher does, stuck a picture of Morrissey on a radiator, and provided him with a speech bubble asking my research question.

Around this, I started organising Post It notes with the ‘areas of interest', quotes, and concepts I had drawn out of the interview. Here’s the finished result:

When I showed my supervisor what I’d done, he didn’t laugh or ridicule me, and instead decided to call this ‘The Morrissey Method’. He pointed out that this was neither forensic nor analytic at a scientific level, so not grounded theory. It was, however, qualitative research in a broad sense, and could form a complementary method; an emotive element of my research based on my participation within my own study, and a link to the analytical brain that is procedural and forensic grounded theory research.

My supervisor even suggested that this could be an embryonic Maslow-like model, or a Bloom-like taxonomy, or some sort of figure that I can literally and metaphorically draw from this, which may develop further when I interview my participants as a legitimate part of the study. I find that rather exciting!

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