Your dissertations and some other pieces of work will include some primary research, which you may have conducted yourself, this may be in the form of interviews, surveys, and focus groups. Before you include such information in your work, you should consider that if you are referring to communications which are not publicly available, you must have the permission of the parties involved before you use it.
You should also check with your tutor about the most appropriate way to present the interviews, surveys and feedback in your work, for example including transcripts in appendices.
Appendix/appendices are used for information that may not fit well into the main body of your written work, but which will still be useful and informative. Because appendices are part of your work, they are not required in your reference list, but will almost certainly need to be referred to in the main body of your work, and can be referred to using the abbreviation of the appendix number e.g. A-1.
Participant A (see A-1) states “………” or Interviewee B (see A-2) states “…….”
Interviews were conducted using an open-ended interview schedule (see A-3).
If you need to provide the full reference to content from an interviewee or participant, that has been incorporated into your work, you should reference using the following format:
INTERVIEWEE/OR ANONIMYSED NAME, Year [Title of interview, focus group or survey] (personal communication, day and month)
PARTICIPANT A, 2022. [Focus group on NHS waiting lists] (personal communication, 20th October)