Tough Teens: The Methodological Challenges of Interviewing Teenagers as Research Participants

Encouraging a teenager to have a conversation in a semistructured research interview is fraught with difficulties. The authors discuss the methodological challenges encountered when interviewing adolescents of European Canadian, African Canadian, and Punjabi Canadian families who took part in the Family Food Decision-Making Study in two regions of Canada. The researchers were interested in how family members made decisions about food choices. In all, 47 adolescents from 36 families agreed to an interview. The authors found recruitment of teens, locating a quiet space for interviews, the silencing effects of the tape recorder, and asking about abstract concepts to be constraints on adolescents' conversational abilities. Although each interviewer encountered many of the same challenges, some of those challenges played out differently in different ethnocultural groups. This article intersperses discussion about the challenges encountered with the four interviewers' reflections on their interviews with teens and with data from the interviews. (Contains 1 note.)