Are talking about interviewing sets of three people? If so, I have looked for information on this when writing my book on Dyadic Interviews (Rutledge) and I did not find any.

Hi Dora,

If you are talking about triads during interviews, I have seen this done by people in sociolinguistics...Debra Tannen has used interviews with two informants and Debra Schiffrin has done so in her dissertation and her book "Discourse Markers". I attached another artilce in which she used a triad (herself included). In conversation analysis, Candy Goodwin has used three way conversations to demonstrate conversational aspects of arguements..inlcuding "piggybacking"....I attach one of my favorite artilces from Candy and Chuck Goodwin in this regard.

A bit of a humorous occurrence, after reading David's answer above, I thought to myself that I remember there was an excellent article on "Emergent approaches to focus group research" that might discuss a triad approach....but when I pulled it up from my library.....David Morgan is the author (with two colleagues)....so HE would know best!

I am not certain what kind of methodolgy you are using...but I hope these help a bit.

Jack

Hello Dora,

This could be of interest, but I haven't seen the full text:

Brownhill, L., & Hickey, G. M. (2012). Using interview triads to understand the barriers to effective food security policy in Kenya: a case study application. Food Security, 4(3), 369-380.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256475341

Marcucci, E., Stathopoulos, A., Rotaris, L., & Danielis, R. (2011). Comparing single and joint preferences: a choice experiment on residential location in three-member households. Environment and Planning A, 43(5), 1209-1225.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edoardo_Marcucci2/publication/248386683

Fortin, A. H., Haeseler, F. D., Angoff, N., Cariaga‐Lo, L., Ellman, M. S., Vasquez, L., & Bridger, L. (2002). Teaching Pre‐clinical Medical Students an Integrated Approach to Medical Interviewing. Journal of general internal medicine, 17(9), 704-708.

This is the full text:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2002.00628.x

. . and this is the ResearchGate link:

Teaching pre-clinical medical students an integrated approac...

These are older references:

Warren, C. A. (1985). Clinical research interviewing in sociology. Clinical Sociology Review, 3(1), 10.

https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.co.uk/&httpsredir=1&article=1051&context=csr

Haug, M. R. (1994). Elderly patients, caregivers, and physicians: theory and research on health care triads. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 1-12.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15185671

Have you seen these websites; they might mention something that you have not thought of?:

https://www.orau.gov/cdcynergy/soc2web/content/activeinformation/tools/toolscontent/triads.htm

https://thetriadbook.com/love-interviewing-triads/

http://www.prestigeresearchph.com/our-services/qualitative/dyadtriad-interviews/

https://www.aqr.org.uk/glossary/triad

Very best wishes with your research,

Mary

Hybrid techniques capture the specialist designs which use a combination of approaches - individual, group and observational.

This might include friendship pairs or paired depths where two people who know each other are interviewed together, triads (three people interviewed together). Normally for focus groups, the respondents should be unknown to each other, otherwise you risk unbalancing the group or over-representing one strain of opinion. However, for friendship pairs, its the presence of someone who knows you that helps keep the discussion open and opens the discussion away from the interviewer's lead.

http://www.dobney.com/Research/qualitative_recipebook.htm

Thank you very much for all the responses and good advice. I wanted to get more feedback before commenting . It is true Jack that David and Co said and I quote ...'To succeed at this goal, we need to inspire other researchers to consider dyadic interviews as a viable third alternative to individual interviews and focus groups.' In this vein using triads as 'miniature focus groups' is aimed at inspiring and stimulating the discussion as well as hopefully increasing the richness of data. Notwithstanding, the potential for withholding information by participants because of trust issues etc, it appears that the gap exists between individual and focus group interviews. I have uploaded the research articles, thank you for sharing Mary,Jack and Subhash.