Dissolving interviews into conversations: Participating in the everyday life of international migrants

Connectivity between source and destination points is an inherent aspect of international migrations, and in the contemporary age, the use of the Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) links "here" and "there" in a daily basis. This paper explores the strategies for data collection in interactions with and between international migrants and their descendants in synchronous CMC systems, such as webchat and instant messenger. An important aspect of these systems is the interest of people to talk rather than being interviewed, and another is that as communication through these systems differs from that face-to-face, a different etiquette is required of the researcher, that should avoid that the act of posing questions during the written communication resembles an interview. Thus, the interview and its features must be dissolved into conversation. However, this method requires the establishment of contact with many people over a period of time and the ability of the researcher to talk and to ask open-ended questions in order to obtain spontaneous responses, unexpected revelations and stories. The advantage of this method is the maintenance of contact with people, which enables the grounded theorist to participate in the everyday life of international migrants or their descendants, combining data collection and data analysis.