Structured interviews
- Focus: Researcher’s concerns
- Fixed questions
- Little flexibility
- High(er) reliability (another researcher will ask the same questions)
- Comparable information
Semi-structured interviews
- Focus: Interviewee’s point of view
- Items instead of questions
- Flexibility
- Lower reliability (but see techniques to address this)
- Rich information
Open interviews
- Focus: Interviewee’s point of view
- Prompts
- Flexibility
- Lower reliability (but see techniques to address this)
- Rich information
Preparing for the semi-structured interview:
The interview guide (=item list=topic list=topic guide)
- List of topics (not questions!) that you want to address
- Logically arranged, but allow for flexibility
- Running from ‘easy to answer’ to ‘difficult to answer’
- Formulated in a way that helps answering the research question
- Not too general, not too specific
- Introduction and conclusion
- Background info/contextual information (personal data etc).
Topics
- Management responsibilities
- Management decisions
- Decision-making process
Questions
- What is your main responsibility as a manager?
- What kind of decisions do you make?
- Do you experience any decisions to be more challenging than others?
- What is challenging about…?
- Can you describe what information you use when deciding about…?
- How do you get the information you need?
Order
- General and descriptive
- Personal experiences
- Going into detail
Before the interview
- Addressing expectations
- Providing information and instructions
- Build rapport
During the interview: the interviewer’s double role
- Engaging in the conversation (asking questions and listening to answers)
- Managing the interview (keeping your agenda in mind)
- Rapport & sensitivity in dealing with emotional responses.
Mapping questions
Suppose you do research on people’s motivations to engage in sports, one of your topics is about the benefits people derive from sports.
Question types: Probes
- Tell -me-more probe
- Silence…
- Uh-huh…
- Specifying questions, such as asking for examples
Question types: Prompts
Ask people to react to something: an idea, a common opinion, what other interviewees have said…
Body language
- Active listening
- Interview as an occasion for observation
- Proxemic communication: spatial arrangements
- Chronemic communication: pacing of speech, length of pauses
- Kinesic communication: movement of body posture
- Paralinguistic communication: tone, pitch, quality of voice
- The interviewee observes you, too! (Dress etc.)
Proxemic communication
spatial arrangements
Chronemic communication
pacing of speech, length of pauses
Kinesic communication
movement of body posture
Paralinguistic communication
tone, pitch, quality of voice
Listening is evaluating answers
- Clear (room for interpretation?)
- Complete (does it cover everything?)
- Relevant (for your research)
If not: probing!
To be avoided
- Closed questions
- Leading questions
- Unclear questions: Long questions, Too general questions, Double-barrelled
questions - Avoid jargon and technical terms
- Do you sometimes feel alienated from work?
- Is tourism a kind of escapism to you?
Projective techniques
- To uncover feelings, beliefs, attitudes and motivation which many people find difficult to articulate
- Discover the person’s characteristic modes of perceiving his or her world and how to behave in it
- Enter the private worlds of subjects to uncover their inner perspectives in a way they feel comfortable with
- Common in market research (consumer motivations), origins in psychology
Vignettes
short stories about hypothetical characters in specified circumstances, to whose situation the interviewee is invited to respond
Three main purposes vignettes
- interpretation of actions in context
- clarification of individual judgements, often in relation to moral dilemmas;
- discussion of sensitive experiences: commenting on a story is less personal than talking about direct experience; participants can determine if and when they introduce their own experiences to illuminate their abstract responses
Used in surveys (often multiple vignettes), interviews and focus groups
Photo elicitation
People react on photographs:
- Taken by themselves outside research contexts
- Taken by themselves on request of researcher
- Taken by the researcher
- Existing images
Purposes:
- Retrieve memory
- Evoke reactions (when studying opinions for example)
- Provide people with opportunity to show what is
important to them (=photo voice)
