FOCUSED INTERVIEWS 249

approaches even convince victims to misperceive the situation they face: “even
women victimized by their partners report greater fear associated with
strangers” (Gruebbels et al., 1987, in Valentine, 1992).

Day also discovers that although students do notice that places with views
out to surrounding areas, that are well lit, and that have trimmed hedges are
safer, the only design elements recognized as consciously planned to reduce
crime are those Whose “sole or primary purpose” is “safety (e.g., alarms, locks)
and those that required action by students as potential victims (e.g., emergency
phones, badge access card readers)” (p. 277).

Kupritz uses a similarly thorough multi-method interview approach in her
privacy study at the Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation headquarters in
Savannah, Georgia (1998). Employing a careful review of the literature as the
basis for her research and analysis, Kupritz identifies three operational defini—
tions of privacy.

0 Retreat from people
0 Control over information
0 Regulation of interaction

To identify physical characteristics of offices that most influence “priva—
cy,” she carefully develops a linked interview/questionnaire approach to uncov-
er office workers’ definition of the situation in two open-office environments in
the same company. Like Day, Kupritz employs formal content-analysis tech-
niques and triangulates on her subject matter with each of the six methods
described in this book. Her goal is to uncover more individual workspace char—
acteristics of privacy than height, type, and number of partitions enclosing the
workspace, and whether or not there is a door. She adds to this list “what Zeisel
(1984) labels as field characteristics . . . physical elements that perceptually alter
physical context through shape, orientation, size and environmental condition”
(p. 350). She found that:

Field characteristics associated with privacy regulation are considered more
important to Gulfstream engineers than barriers associated with privacy regula-
tion. The two field characteristics, having minimal traffic routed through the
workers area and the workspace located away from the main traffic flow, are
ranked as more important than barriers. Each of these characteristics deals with
orientation of the workspace, and stresses the importance of “functional distance”
(see Festinger et al., 1950; Zeisel, 1984) (p. 352).

She also found that for the engineers she studied, privacy did not seem to
be the most important item in their workspace:

Those design items that are necessary to perform basic job functions are consid-
ered more important: having an adequate work surface to spread out drawings;
adequate storage; easy access to reference materials; and [having] groups that
work together located close together (p. 352).

What methodology did Kupritz use to uncover these findings? Her main
method was a particular type of focused interview, called the Heuristic