U7D1-68 - **READ AND FOLLOW ALL INSTRUCTIONS AS OUTLINED BELOW.. Research Methodology Peer Review.

CHAPTER

7 Qualitative Interviewing

The combination of a question mark and an exclamation point is called an interrobang. A sentence ending with an interrobang asks a question in an emotionally intense manner, expressing excitement, wonder, disbelief, doubt, or concern:

You did what

You lost everything

The symbol on the left means

NO interrobanging.

Qualitative interviewing asks questions (?) without the exclamatory bang (!). You may want to insert this symbol on your interview guide to remind you:

NO inexhterrobanging.

Beyond Silent Observation

After much cloistered study, three youth came before Halcolm to ask how they might further increase their knowledge and wisdom. Halcolm sensed that they lacked experience in the real world, but he wanted to have them make the transition from seclusion in stages.

During the first stage, he sent them forth under a six-month vow of silence. They wore the identifying garments of the muted truth seekers so that people would know they were forbidden to speak. Each day, according to their instructions, they sat at the market in whatever village they entered, watching but never speaking. After six months in this fashion, they returned to Halcolm.

“So,” Halcolm began, “you have returned. Your period of silence is over. Your transition to the world beyond our walls of study has begun. What have you learned so far?”

The first youth answered, “In every village the patterns are the same. People come to the market. They buy the goods they need, talk with friends, and leave. I have learned that all markets are alike and the people in markets always the same.”

Then the second youth reported, “I too watched the people come and go in the markets. I have learned that all life is coming and going, people forever moving to and fro in search of food and basic material things. I understand now the simplicity of human life.”

Halcolm looked at the third youth: “And what have you learned?”

“I saw the same markets and the same people as my fellow travelers, yet I know not what they know. My mind is filled with questions. Where did the people come from? What were they thinking and feeling as they came and went? How did they happen to be at this market on this day? Who did they leave behind? How was today the same or different for them? I have failed, Master, for I am filled with questions rather than answers, questions for the people I saw. I do not know what I have learned.”

Halcolm smiled. “You have learned most of all. You have learned the importance of finding out what people have to say about their experiences. You are ready now to return to the world, this time without the vow of silence.

“Go forth now and question. Ask and listen. The world is just beginning to open up to you. Each person you question can take you into a new part of the world. The skilled questioner and attentive listener know how to enter into another’s experience. If you ask and listen, the world will always be new.”

—From Halcolm’s Epistemological Parables

Chapter Preview

This chapter opens with reflections on what it means to be living and undertaking research in what has been called “The Interview Society.” From there, we will move into the knowledge and skills that are essential for high-quality interviewing. It may seem straightforward to assert that interviewing is a skill. Like any skill, it can be done well or poorly. More to the point, like any skill, it has to be learned and practiced. And there’s the rub. A lot of people engaged in interviewing lack fundamental skills, have never been trained, and are actually lousy interviewers—and don’t seem to know it. Does that sound like the start of a rant? It is—and the focus of MQP Rumination # 7 in this chapter: Interviewing as an Unnatural Act: Overcoming the Overconfidence of Incompetence.

This chapter begins by discussing different approaches to interviewing derived from diverse theoretical and methodological traditions, like ethnography versus phenomenology, and different uses of interviews, helping people (the counseling interview) versus finding wrongdoing (the investigative interview). We then move to different types of interview formats: standardized versus free flowing. Later sections consider the content of interviews and skills of interviewing: what questions to ask and how to phrase questions. The chapter ends with a discussion of how to record the responses obtained during interviews. This chapter will emphasize skill and technique as ways of enhancing the quality of interview data, but no less important is a genuine interest in and caring about the perspectives of other people. If what people have to say about their world is generally boring to you, then you will never be a great interviewer. Unless you are fascinated by the rich variation in human experience, qualitative interviewing will become drudgery. On the other hand, a deep and genuine interest in learning about people is insufficient without disciplined and rigorous inquiry based on skill and technique. Here’s an overview of this chapter’s modules:

Module 57 The Interview Society: Diversity of Applications

Module 58 Distinguishing Interview Approaches and Types of Interviews

Module 59 Question Options and Skilled Question Formulation

Module 60 Rapport, Neutrality, and the Interview Relationship

Module 61 Interviewing Groups and Cross-Cultural Interviewing

Module 62 Creative Modes of Qualitative Inquiry

Module 63 Ethical Issues and Challenges in Qualitative Interviewing

The chapter then closes with my personal reflections on interviewing:

Module 64 Personal Reflections on Interviewing, and Chapter Summary and Conclusion

MODULE

57 The Interview Society: Diversity of Applications

The word interview has roots in Old French and meant something like “to see one another.” (Narayan & George, 2012, p. 515)

The word interview has origins associated with the French entre voir, meaning “to be in the sight of” and referring to a meeting of people face to face. It also has Latin origins with the prefix: “inter” meaning among and between and “view” referring to seeing, looking or inspection. (Skinner, 2013, p. 16)

We live in an “interview society” (Fontana & Frey, 2000, p. 646), where “interviewing has become a fundamental activity and interviews seem to have become crucial for people to make sense of their lives” (Gobo, 2011, pp. 24–25). But the very popularity of interviewing may be its undoing as an inquiry method because so much interviewing is being done so badly that its credibility may be undermined. Television, radio, magazines, newsletters, and websites feature interviews. In their ubiquity, interviews done by social scientists become indistinguishable in the popular mind from interviews done by talk show hosts. The motivations of social scientists have become suspect, as have our methods. Popular business magazine Forbes (self-proclaimed “The Capitalist Tool”) has opined, “People become sociologists because they hate society, and they become psychologists because they hate themselves” (quoted by Geertz, 2001, p. 19). Such glib sarcasm, anti-intellectual at the core, can serve to remind us that we bear the burden of demonstrating that our methods involve rigor and skill. Qualitative research interviewing, seemingly straightforward, easy, and universal, can be done well or poorly. This chapter is about doing it well. But as context for the challenges of doing it well, Exhibit 7.1 presents an overview of interviewing used for purposes other than research and evaluation. These diverse uses of interviewing compete with qualitative inquiry for attention, credibility, and utility. Exhibit 7.1 reminds us that the generic word interview covers a huge variety of applications, purposes, and uses, such as the following, each with its own criteria for quality, or lack thereof:

1. Journalism interviews

2. Celebrity television talk show interviews

3. Personnel evaluation and human resource interviews

4. Clinical and diagnostic interviews

5. Motivational interviewing

6. Audit and compliance interviews

7. Interrogation interviews

8. Cognitive interviewing for survey research

9. Cognitive interviewing for eyewitness enhancement

10. Religion-based interviewing

EXHIBIT 7.1 Ten Diverse Purposes and Uses of Interviews in the Interview Society

Qualitative inquiry for research and evaluation is but one of many uses of interviewing in the Information Age, also dubbed the “Interview Society” (Fontana & Frey, 2000, p. 646). Below are 10 types of interviews conducted to achieve a specific outcome other than research or evaluation. These diverse uses of interviewing compete with qualitative inquiry for attention, credibility, and utility. This reminds us that the generic word interview covers a huge variety of applications, purposes, and uses.

SIDEBAR

IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWING

In-depth qualitative interviews are long, ranging from a couple of hours to full days, and in some cases of longitudinal interviews, they are for several days over an extended period of time. Why do people participate in such lengthy interviews?

I am persuaded that the long interview offers the respondent benefits as well as risks. When I proposed long interviews with individuals between the ages of 65 and 75, funding agencies expressed concern that these interviews might prove fatiguing. I, too, was alarmed that my respondents might be dangerously taxed by the experience of answering intimate questions over a long period. Our fears proved unfounded. Almost without exception, respondents proved more durable and energetic than their interviewer. Again and again, I was left clinging to consciousness and my tape recorder as the interview was propelled forward by respondent enthusiasm. Something in the interview process proved so interesting and gratifying that it kept replenishing respondent energy and involvement.

—Grant McCracken (1988, p. 27)

The Long Interview

Distinguishing Qualitative Inquiry for Research and Evaluation From Other Types of Interviewing

Qualitative inquiry can take place in any of the settings where other kinds of interviewing are occurring. So, for example, to study journalism is different from engaging in journalism. Moreover, qualitative research can be integrated into journalism in what Iorio (2009) has called Taking It to the Streets, where “It” refers to qualitative research and “Streets” references where journalists find their stories. In a similar vein, there’s a critical and important difference between doing qualitative inquiry in a clinical setting (Hays & Singh, 2012) versus doing diagnostic interviews in a clinical setting (McConaughy, 2013; Morrison, 2014).Yet to the people being interviewed in a clinical setting, the differences in purpose and approach may not be at all obvious. To them, an interview is an interview is an interview. But the purpose of a diagnostic interview is to arrive at a diagnosis of a patient’s problem and determine a treatment plan. In contrast, a qualitative research interview aims to understand the patient’s experience of the clinical setting.

SIDEBAR

QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWING VERSUS THERAPEUTIC INTERVIEWING

Here are four ways by which qualitative interviewing differs from therapeutic interviewing.

1. Aims and practices differ. “In therapeutic interviewing the functioning of the patient is the object of concern. Whatever the therapist does is, or should be, motivated by the aim of helping the patient. . . . In research interviewing, on the other hand, the interviewer’s questioning is motivated by the aim of eliciting information useful to a study. The

interviewer is without license to produce change in the respondent’s functioning and has no right to give interpretations or advice.”

2. Focus and substance of research interviewing and therapeutic interviewing are different. “Therapists are likely to encourage patients not only to talk about their internal states but also to find sources in earlier life for current images and feelings. . . . The research interviewer is much more likely to want to hear about scenes, situations, and events the respondent has witnessed. The interviewer in a qualitative research study will want respondents to talk about their internal states only if this would be useful for the study. . . . “

3. Interview relationship is different. “Therapists are responsible to patients for helping them improve in functioning. Because the patient looks to the therapist for help, the therapist will almost surely become an authoritative figure in the patient’s life and thoughts. In contrast, the research interviewer is a partner in information development. The interviewing relationship is defined as one of equals, although interviewer and respondent have different responsibilities. And while therapists remain for some time important figures in the lives of patients, interviewers are ordinarily recognized by respondents as transient figures in their lives.”

4. Compensation differs. “The patient pays the therapist for the therapist’s help. The interviewer is paid not by the respondent but by the study. Indeed, the respondent may also be compensated by the study; at the very least, the respondent is likely to be thanked by the interviewer for the interview.”

—Robert S. Weiss (1994, pp. 134–135)

Learning From Strangers

To emphasize the distinctive niche of qualitative inquiry interviewing, let’s briefly review some diverse interview-based studies to get a sense of what in-depth qualitative interviews can yield.

Examples of Qualitative Interview Findings

• Interviews with homeless youth: Formerly homeless youth told their stories through in-depth interviews and reflected on the factors and principles they experienced in Minnesota shelters and programs that helped them move forward on their life’s journey. The findings have been used to improve programs for homeless youth (Murphy, 2014). See Exhibit 7.20, pp. 511–516, at the end of this chapter for one of the case studies that came out of those interviews.

• Interviews with Native Alaskans: Colorectal cancer is the leading type of cancer among Native Alaskan people and the second leading cause of cancer mortality. Screening has the potential to reduce both colorectal cancer incidence and mortality. Culturally sensitive interviews captured reactions to an innovative colorectal cancer educational program (Cueva, Dignan, Lanier, & Kuhnley, 2013).

• Interviews on the sensitizing concept “respect”: Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (2000) has created powerful portraits of what respect means in modern society based on in- depth interviews. She has also studied “exits”: how relationships come to an end (Lawrence- Lightfoot, 2012).

• Interviews with immigrants: Immigrants to the United States tell stories of how they’ve adapted, including answers to the intriguing question “What’s the smartest thing you did in

your home country that you maintain here and that Americans would benefit from?” (Kolkey, 2011).

• Interviews with new mothers: Mothers report how they learn to cope with their newborn baby’s crying. Experienced mothers knew that the infant’s frequent crying would diminish after a while, whereas first-time mothers had to learn how to respond to the crying. With growing experience, mothers could decipher the reason and urgency of different kinds of crying and used more successful soothing techniques. At the same time, they learned to assess and mitigate their own stress reactions by self-soothing and adopting realistic expectations of normal infant behavior (Kurth et al., 2013).

• Interviews with incest perpetrators: Getting inside the heads of child sexual abuse perpetrators to uncover their complete incapacity for empathy and how they think about and justify their actions (Gilgun, 1994, 1995; Gilgun & Connor, 1989).

• Interviews with elderly people: Five years of interviews with more than 1,000 Americans past the age of 65 yielded 30 Lessons for Living (Pillemer, 2011).

Anywhere there are people there is the potential for interviewing them to capture their experiences, beliefs, fears, triumphs—any and all aspects of their stories. An interview, when done well, takes us inside another person’s life and worldview. The results help us make sense of the diversity of human experience.

Inner Perspectives

Interviewing is rather like a marriage: everybody knows what it is, an awful lot of people do it, and yet behind each closed door there is a world of secrets. (Oakley, 1981, p. 41)

We interview people to find out from them those things we cannot directly observe and to understand what we’ve observed. The issue is not whether observational data are more desirable, valid, or meaningful than self-reported data. The fact of the matter is that we cannot observe everything. We cannot observe feelings, thoughts, and intentions. We cannot observe behaviors that took place at some previous point in time. We cannot observe situations that preclude the presence of an observer. We cannot observe how people have organized the world and the meanings they attach to what goes on in the world. We have to ask people questions about those things.

The purpose of interviewing, then, is to allow us to enter into the other person’s perspective. Qualitative interviewing begins with the assumption that the perspective of others is meaningful and knowable and can be made explicit. We interview to find out what is in and on someone else’s mind to gather their stories.

Program evaluation interviews, for example, aim to capture the perspectives of program participants, staff, and others associated with the program. What does the program look and feel like to the people involved? What are their experiences in the program? What thoughts do people knowledgeable about the program have concerning program operations, processes, and outcomes? What are their expectations? What changes do participants perceive in themselves as a result of their involvement in the program? It is the responsibility of the evaluator to provide a framework within which people can respond comfortably, accurately, and honestly to these kinds of questions. Evaluators enhance the utility of qualitative data by generating relevant and high-quality findings.

SIDEBAR

THE ART OF ASKING QUESTIONS

One of the first books ever written on asking high-quality questions was by Stanley L. Payne in 1951. Drawing on his experience as president of Interview Research Institute, a pioneering market research organization, he wrote a short and insightful volume titled The Art of Asking Questions. He opened the book by describing why he thought it was needed. His rationale remains relevant today as a justification and context for this chapter.

What is the need for this first book on question wording? If it all boils down to the familiar platitudes about using simple, understandable, bias-free, nonirritating wordings, all of us recognize these obvious requirements anyway. Why say more?

Oblivious of the Obvious

One reason for elaborating on the subject is that all of us, from time to time, forget these requirements. Like some churchgoers, we appear to worship the great truths only one day a week and to ignore them on working days. Or we remember a certain example, but fail to see how it applies to other situations. In combatting our very human frailty, a more provocative set of examples and a detailed list of points to consider may be more helpful than the isolated examples and the broad generalities which we now so often disregard. (Payne, 1951, p. 3)

A Lecture on Taking too Much for Granted

If all the problems of question wording could be traced to a single source, their common origin would probably prove to be in taking too much for granted. We questioners assume that people know what we are talking about. We assume that they have some basis for testimony. We assume that they understand our questions. We assume that their answers are in the frame of reference we intend. Frequently, our assumptions are not warranted. (Payne, 1951, p. 16)

Any interviewer faces the challenge of making it possible for the person being interviewed to bring the interviewer into his or her world. We enter the interviewee’s world through what he or she tells us. As eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1986) insightfully observed, “Whatever sense we have of how things stand with someone else’s inner life, we gain it through their expressions, not through some magical intrusion into their consciousness” (p. 373).

Rigorous and Skillful Interviewing

I know how to listen when clever men are talking. That is the secret of what you call my influence.

—Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928) German dramatist and novelist

The premise here is that the quality of the information obtained during an interview is largely dependent on the interviewer. This chapter discusses ways of obtaining high-quality information by talking with people who have that information. Skilled interviewing is about asking questions well so that interviewees want to share their stories. An interview is an interaction, a relationship. Every interview is also an observation—a two-way observation. You, as the interviewer, are being watched and assessed, even as you are observing the person you’re interviewing and assessing the responses you’re hearing. Establishing rapport matters. Being nonjudgmental matters. Being authentic and trustworthy matter. Interview skills include asking genuinely open-ended questions; being clear so that the person being interviewed understands what is being asked; asking follow-up questions and probing, as appropriate, for greater depth and detail; and making smooth transitions between sections of the interview or topics. Skilled interviewing requires distinguishing different kinds of questions—descriptive questions versus questions that ask for interpretations or judgments. It means distinguishing both questions and answers that are behavioral, attitudinal, or knowledge focused. And skilled interviewing involves the art of listening, and really hearing. These and other interviewing skills can and do affect the quality and meaningfulness of responses. Exhibit 7.2 sets the stage for this chapter by providing 10 principles of and skills for high-quality interviewing. We’ll examine these in more depth later in the chapter.

EXHIBIT 7.2 Ten Interview Principles and Skills

An interview is an interaction, a relationship. The interviewer’s skills and experience can and do affect the quality of responses. Here are 10 skills and competencies to cultivate.

MQP Rumination # 7

Interviewing as an Unnatural Act: Overcoming the Overconfidence of Incompetence

I am offering one personal rumination per chapter. These are issues that have persistently engaged, sometimes annoyed, occasionally haunted, and often amused me over more than 40 years of research and evaluation practice. Here’s where I state my case on the issue and make my peace.

Study after study shows that we tend to be overconfident about our competence. In experiments, people who perform poorly on a variety of tasks are typically quite confident about their competence. In fact, they’re often more confident than those who actually perform well. This phenomenon has been dubbed “illusory superiority” (Hoorens, 1993). Certain overconfident people are “unskilled and unaware of it” (Dunning & Kruger, 1999). Their difficulties in recognizing their own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments—”an absence of self-insight among the incompetent” (Ehrlinger, Johnson, Banner, Dunning, & Kruger, 2008). Incompetent people also lack the skill to recognize competence in others.

Illusory superiority is rampant in interviewing. Many people who think of themselves as good interviewers are unskilled and unaware of it. They display an absence of self-insight about their interviewing incompetence and lack the skill to recognize interviewing competence in others. They don’t know what they don’t know. Who are these people, and what evidence do I have for these assertions? Read on.

Evidentiary Ruminating

By definition, ruminations express opinions. A particularly strong opinion may become a rant. People who rant often display overconfidence about their overgeneralizations. The irony that I may be displaying my own illusory superiority is not lost on me. So, given that this is a research text, let me at least report the basis for my assertions and make this an evidentiary rumination—or rant. You decide which label is most appropriate.

In the 1970s, I directed the Minnesota Center for Social Research at the University of Minnesota. That’s when I began training staff and graduate students in qualitative methods, especially interviewing. I noticed from the beginning that some displayed an affinity for interviewing and were receptive to training, while others thought they were naturally gifted as interviewers and were inattentive during training. I also became convinced, as the title of this rumination asserts, that interviewing is an unnatural act. That’s why training is necessary. Normal interpersonal and social interactions don’t involve one person systematically asking questions, the other answering, and the first person listening, probing, taking the responses deeper, but not sharing his or her own experiences. Interviewing is an unnaturally unbalanced interaction.

Every interview is also an observation, so the skills required include appropriate questioning, focused listening, astute observation, and sensitive responding, all while taking notes (even when the interview is being recorded). There’s a lot to learn and then practice, for it’s not enough to grasp the basic concepts. Putting them into practice, actually becoming a skilled interviewer, requires practicing, listening to, and studying transcripts of your own interviews and getting feedback about how well you’re doing—the usual things that accompany professional development and learning.

Having developed training processes for my own research and evaluation staff, I began offering qualitative workshops to others, first through the University of Minnesota and then

through a variety of organizations that provide training. For many years, I have taught qualitative methods workshops for the American Evaluation Association, the Evaluators’ Institute, and the International Program in Development Evaluation Training. I also take on special commissions from other organizations to train their staff or prepare people for fieldwork projects. All in all, I do at least 30 days of qualitative methods training a year with a heavy emphasis on interviewing skills as well as the other skills and topics covered in this book.

Finally, as a full-time independent organizational development and evaluation consultant, I engage in a lot of interviewing. When I undertake a new assignment, I routinely begin by interviewing key people. Part of what I ask is how they get information. I find out from junior staff how they experience the communication and interviewing skills of their managers and senior personnel in the organization. I also have opportunities to review a lot of research and evaluation projects, read interview transcripts, and enquire into the skills of colleagues and others engaged in qualitative fieldwork. Many are accomplished, highly skilled, and exemplary interviewers. Many others manifest remarkable patterns of illusory superiority, proclaiming their skill even as they demonstrate fundamental incompetence. Here are some types to watch out for.

A Typology of Clueless Incompetent Interviewers

Myopic Managers

I was once involved in helping a major international organization set up an institutional learning system that featured interviewing as a core element to extract lessons in real time as projects unfolded. Junior staff interviewed senior staff as projects began to be implemented. Midway through projects, midlevel staff interviewed other midlevel staff in specialized program areas where they didn’t ordinarily have contact with one another. Senior staff interviewed midlevel staff as projects came to an end. To implement this organization-wide learning system, interview protocols were developed, and everyone committed to interview training. Well, almost everyone. Senior managers were quite happy to commit their underlings to interview training, but they were insistent that they didn’t need such basic training themselves. Having this reported to me by the senior vice president in charge of the learning system, I wrote the following memo, which he agreed to send to all senior staff:

I understand that you are cooperating with the institutional learning process by committing your staff to participate in interview training but that you, yourselves, have opted out of training. I would ask you to reconsider. First, even if you are already a skilled interviewer, the project would benefit from each of you serving as a role model demonstrating support for this effort, not just by sending your staff but by committing your own time and leadership to this organization-wide initiative.

Second, and more importantly, I doubt that most of you are skilled interviewers for this kind of open-ended, in-depth qualitative inquiry interviewing. Most managerial interviewing is directed at solving problems. Someone comes into your office, and you ask just enough questions to tell them what to do to solve the problem and get them out of your office. You may be good at that kind of problem-solving interviewing, but that’s not in-depth, get-the-full-story, lessons-focused interviewing. Indeed, without naming names, I know from interviewing your staff about your interviewing skills that most of you ask bad questions, listen poorly, interrupt as the person is trying to explain what’s going on, and give off all kinds of signals that you aren’t paying attention, are annoyed that you’re having to deal with the problem before you, and that you’re not interested in understanding the situation in depth and detail.

Let me be blunt. In my many years of experience, I’ve found managers in a wide variety of organizations to be at the top of the class in deceiving themselves about their competence as interviewers, even for problem solving. To do a good job and make your own contribution to this important initiative, I invite you to participate in the customized senior manager interview training we’ve designed for you. I believe it will not only increase your skills for this learning initiative, but you’ll pick up techniques that will enhance your day-to-day problem solving and strategic interviews with your staff. If you come and don’t find it worthwhile, I’ll apologize for wasting your time and return my training fee.

And one last thing: I’ve heard that the junior staff is betting that there’s nothing I can say to convince you that you need training because you regularly and consistently avoid any professional development training. I invite you to prove them wrong in this case.

The senior managers did decide to participate in interview training though only for a half- day instead of the full day I proposed. The feedback was generally positive. No one asked for an apology or return of my fee. They affirmed that they learned some things that they could apply to their work generally. Their feedback also affirmed a finding from the research on illusory superiority: Those who begin a learning experience by overestimating their baseline competence do improve when they are given focused training and feedback. The trick is to get them into training and provide meaningful feedback.

DSM-Enthralled Therapists

A second group especially susceptible to illusory superiority in interviewing is therapists, especially those who are well trained in and focused on making a diagnosis based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or any other diagnostic framework. Therapists engage in in-depth interviewing, but it is for the purpose of diagnosing a problem and prescribing a treatment or intervention. That is a crucial medical task, but it is not open-ended qualitative interviewing. I’ve had a lot of therapists in my classes and workshops over the years. They pose special challenges in reorienting them to qualitative inquiry interviewing because they have developed deeply ingrained habits of diagnostic interviewing. They have as much to unlearn as they have to learn, and I find that they are generally surprised, and initially discouraged, by the degree of difficulty in making the transition. Those who prevail, however, find that the world opens up to them in quite a different way when they are in discovery and leaning mode rather than mired in a diagnostic mind-set and set of protocols.

Endemic Academics

Illusory superiority might well be considered endemic to academia. Somehow having attained a doctorate in whatever field makes high-achieving scholars suddenly and miraculously qualified to teach, administer, advise, evaluate—the list goes on and on and includes interviewing. I review all kinds of projects, site visits, evaluations, and fieldwork that require interviewing as a primary or at least major form of data collection. When I am asked to review such qualitative studies, I enquire into the training and experience of the people doing the data collection. Too often I find that the scholars, researchers, and evaluators conducting these studies have never had any interview training. They describe themselves, when challenged, as being self-trained, which I treat as a euphemism for “untrained but don’t know it.” I know of prestigious researchers and evaluators who undertake a great deal of fieldwork and think they’re great interviewers—and tell their colleagues, students, and friends as much. They’re very smart, have impressive disciplinary knowledge, are held in high esteem for their peer-reviewed publications, but are lousy interviewers. Lousy how? They ask leading

questions, interrupt respondents’ responses, talk as much or more than they listen, make instantaneous judgments, and commit the whole series of novice errors warned against in this chapter. Worst of all, they are oblivious to doing so and feel insulted and defensive when their competence is challenged.

Illusory Superiority: The Good News

The three illusorily superior types I’ve been ruminating about—(1) myopic mangers, (2) DSM-enthralled therapists, and (3) endemic academics—do not exhaust the possibilities. Not even close. Exhibit 7.1 (pp. 423–424) identifies 10 types of interviewing done for purposes other than research and evaluation. Those well schooled in these other interviewing approaches and purposes will find it difficult to become skilled qualitative interviewers. The skill set and mind-set are different.

There is, however, some good news in this otherwise bleak rumination. As I noted earlier, those who begin a learning experience by overestimating their baseline competence do improve when they are given focused training and feedback. The trick is to get them training and feedback. Reading this book can be a starting point. But you must find ways of practicing, getting feedback, and continuing to learn. Interviewing is a skill. Acquire it. Then, like many other skills, once acquired, use it or lose it.

SOURCE: © Chris Lysy—freshspectrum.com

MODULE

58 Distinguishing Interview Approaches and Types ofInterviews

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.

—Nobel Prize–winning physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (1916)

Different inquiry traditions emphasize different questions and fieldwork methods. Interviewing varies in important ways, then, within different traditions and inquiry approaches. Traditional social science interviewing emphasizes standardized questions and consistency across interviewers and interviewees, while social constructionist interviewing places priority on individualized interactions and adapting the interview as appropriate to the emergent relationship that is formed between the interviewer and the interviewee in the course of an interview. Ethnographic interviewing involves conversational interactions that are part of long-term, in-depth fieldwork to support and deepen direct observations in the field about cultural patterns. Phenomenological interviewing, in contrast, aims to elicit a personal description of a lived experience so as to describe a phenomenon as much as possible in concrete and lived-through terms. Exhibit 7.3 contrasts the focus and methods of interviewing across 12 different qualitative inquiry traditions. These distinctions and comparisons build on the discussion in Chapter 3 of the variety of philosophical, theoretical, and methodological frameworks for undertaking qualitative inquiry. Exhibit 7.3 highlights the following interviewing approaches:

1. The ethnographic interview

2. The traditional social science research interview

3. The phenomenological interview

4. Social constructionist interviewing

5. The hermeneutic interview

6. Narrative inquiry interviewing

7. The life story interview

8. Interpretive interactionism

9. Oral history interviewing

10. Postmodern interviewing

11. Investigative interviewing

12. Pragmatic interviews

EXHIBIT 7.3 Twelve Contrasting Interview Approaches Grounded in Different Qualitative Inquiry Traditions and Frameworks

Variations in Qualitative Interview Question Formats: Alternative Protocols and Instruments

On her deathbed, the writer Gertrude Stein asked her beloved companion, Alice B. Toklas, “What is the answer?”

When Alice, unable to speak, remained silent, Gertrude asked, “In that case, what is the question?”

The question in this section is how to format questions. There are three basic approaches to collecting qualitative data through open-ended interviews. They involve different types of preparation, conceptualization, and instrumentation. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and each serves a different purpose. The three alternatives are as follows:

1. The informal conversational interview

2. The interview guide

3. The standardized open-ended interview

These three approaches to the design of the interview differ in the extent to which interview questions are determined and standardized before the interview occurs. Exhibit 7.4 presents an overview of variations in interview instrumentation. Let’s look at each approach in greater depth for each serves a different purpose and poses quite varying interviewer challenges.

The Informal Conversational Interview

The informal conversational interview is the most open-ended approach to interviewing. It relies entirely on the spontaneous generation of questions in the natural flow of an interaction, often as part of ongoing participant observation fieldwork. Thus, the conversational interview is sometimes referred to as “ethnographic interviewing.” It is also called “unstructured interviewing” (Fontana & Frey, 2000, p. 652). The conversational interview offers maximum flexibility to pursue information in whichever direction appears to be appropriate, depending on what emerges from observing a particular setting or from talking to one or more individuals in that setting. Most of the questions will flow from the immediate context. No predetermined set of questions would be appropriate under many emergent field circumstances where the fieldworker doesn’t know beforehand what is going to happen, who will be present, or what will be important to ask during an event, incident, or experience.

Data gathered from informal conversational interviews will be different for each person interviewed. The same person may be interviewed on different occasions with questions specific to the interaction or event at hand. Previous responses can be revisited and deepened. This approach works particularly well where the researcher can stay in the setting for some period of time so as not to be dependent on a single interview opportunity. Interview questions will change over time, and each new interview builds on those already done, expanding information that was picked up previously, moving in new directions, and seeking elucidations and elaborations from various participants.

Being unstructured doesn’t mean that conversational interviews are unfocused. Sensitizing concepts and the overall purpose of the inquiry inform the interviewing. But within that overall guiding purpose, the interviewer is free to go where the data and respondents lead.

The conversational interviewer must “go with the flow.” Depending on how the interviewer’s role has been defined, the people being interviewed may not know during any particular conversation that “data” are being collected. In many cases, participant-observers do not take notes during such conversational interviews, instead writing down what they learned later. In other cases, it can be both appropriate and comfortable to take notes or even use a tape recorder.

The strength of the informal conversational method resides in the opportunities it offers for flexibility, spontaneity, and responsiveness to individual differences and situational changes. Questions can be personalized to deepen communication with the person being interviewed and to make use of the immediate surroundings and situation to increase the concreteness and immediacy of the interview questions.

A weakness of the informal conversational interview is that it may require a greater amount of time to collect systematic information because it may take several conversations with different people before a similar set of questions has been posed to each participant in the setting. Because this approach depends on the conversational skills of the interviewer to a greater extent than do more formal, standardized formats, this go-with-the-flow style of interviewing may be susceptible to interviewer effects, leading questions, and biases, especially with novices. The conversational interviewer must be able to interact easily with people in a variety of settings, generate rapid insights, formulate questions quickly and smoothly, and guard against asking questions that impose interpretations on the situation by the structure of the questions.

Data obtained from informal conversational interviews can be difficult to pull together and analyze. Because different questions will generate different responses, the researcher has to spend a great deal of time sifting through responses to find patterns that have emerged at different points in different interviews with different people. By contrast, interviews that are more systematized and standardized facilitate analysis but provide less flexibility and are less sensitive to individual and situational differences.

EXHIBIT 7.4 Variations in Interview Instrumentation

The Interview Guide

An interview guide lists the questions or issues that are to be explored in the course of an interview. An interview guide is prepared to ensure that the same basic lines of inquiry are pursued with each person interviewed. The guide provides topics or subject areas within which the interviewer is free to explore, probe, and ask questions that will elucidate and illuminate that particular subject. Thus, the interviewer remains free to build a conversation within a particular subject area, to word questions spontaneously, and to establish a conversational style but with the focus on a particular subject that has been predetermined. The guide serves as a checklist during the interview to make sure that all relevant topics are covered.

The advantage of an interview guide is that it makes sure that the interviewer/evaluator has carefully decided how best to use the limited time available in an interview situation. The guide helps make interviewing a number of different people more systematic and comprehensive by delimiting in advance the issues to be explored. A guide is essential in conducting focus group interviews for it keeps the interactions focused while allowing individual perspectives and experiences to emerge. With an interview guide in hand,

the investigator has a rough travel itinerary with which to negotiate the interview. It does not specify precisely what will happen at every stage of the journey, how long each lay-over will last, or where the investigator will be at any given moment, but it does establish a clear sense of the direction of the journey and the ground it will eventually cover. (McCracken, 1988, p. 37)

Interview guides can be developed in more or less detail, depending on the extent to which the interviewer is able to specify important issues in advance and the extent to which it is important to ask questions in the same order to all respondents. Exhibit 7.5 provides an example of an interview guide used with participants in an employment training program. This guide provides a framework within which the interviewer could develop questions, sequence those questions, and make decisions about which information to pursue in greater depth. Usually, the interviewer would not be expected to go into totally new subjects that are not covered within the framework of the guide. The interviewer does not ask questions, for example, about previous employment or education, how the person got into the program, how this program compares with other programs the trainee has experienced, or the trainee’s health. Other topics might still emerge during the interview—topics of importance to the respondent that are not listed explicitly on the guide and therefore would not normally be explored with each person interviewed. For example, trainees might comment on family support (or lack thereof) or personal crises. Comments on such concerns might emerge when, in accordance with the interview guide, the trainee is asked for reactions to program strengths, weaknesses, and so on, but if family is not mentioned by the respondent, the interviewer would not raise the issue.

The Standardized Open-Ended Interview

This approach requires carefully and fully wording each question before the interview. For example, the interview guide for the employment training program above simply lists “work experiences” as a topic for inquiry. In a fully structured interview instrument, the question would be completely specified:

You’ve told me about the courses you’ve taken in the program. Now I’d like to ask you about any work experiences you’ve had. Let’s go back to when you first entered the program and go through each work experience up to the present. Okay? So what was your first work experience?

Possible probes

Who did you work for?

What did you do?

What do you feel you learned doing that?

What did you especially like about the experience, if anything?

What did you dislike, if anything?

Transition Okay, tell me about your next work experience.

Why so much detail? To be sure that each interviewee gets asked the same questions—the same stimuli—in the same way and in the same order, including standard probes. The standardized open- ended interview consists of a set of questions carefully worded and arranged with the intention of taking each respondent through the same sequence and asking each respondent the same questions with essentially the same words. Flexibility in probing is more or less limited, depending on the nature of the interview and the skills of interviewers.

EXHIBIT 7.5 Evaluation Interview Guide for Participants in an Employment Training Program

The standardized open-ended interview is used when it is important to minimize variation in the questions posed to interviewees. A doctoral committee may want to see the full interview protocol before approving a dissertation proposal. The institutional review board for protection of human subjects may insist on approving a structured interview, especially if the topic is controversial or intrusive. In evaluations, funders and other key stakeholders may want to be sure that they know what program participants will be asked. In team research, standardized interviews ensure consistency across interviewers. In multisite studies, structured interviews provide comparability across sites.

In participatory or collaborative studies, inexperienced and nonresearcher interviewers may be involved in the process so that the standardized questions can compensate for variability in skills. Some evaluations rely on volunteers to do the interviewing; at other times, program staff may be involved in doing some interviewing; and in still other instances, interviewers may be novices, students, or others who are not social scientists or professional evaluators. When a number of different interviewers are used, variations in data created by differences among interviewers will become particularly apparent if an informal conversational approach to data gathering is used or even if each interviewer uses a basic guide. The best way to guard against variations among interviewers is to carefully word questions in advance and train the interviewers not to deviate from the prescribed forms. The data collected are still open ended, in the sense that the respondent supplies his or her own words, thoughts, and insights in answering the questions, but the precise wording of the questions is determined ahead of time.

When doing action research or conducting a program evaluation, it may only be possible to interview participants once for a short, fixed time, like a half-hour, so highly focused questions serve to establish priorities for the interview. At other times, it is possible and desirable to interview participants before they enter the program, when they leave the program, and again after some period of time (e.g., six months) after they have left the program. For example, a chemical dependency program would ask participants about sobriety issues before, during, at the end of, and after the program. To compare answers across these time periods, the same questions need to be asked in the same way each time. Such interview questions are written out in advance exactly the way in which they are to be asked during the interview. Careful consideration is given to the wording of each question before the interview. Any clarifications or elaborations that are to be used are written into the interview itself. Probes are placed in the interview at appropriate places to minimize interviewer effects by asking the same question of each respondent, thereby reducing the need for interviewer judgment during the interview. The standardized open-ended interview also makes data analysis easier because it is possible to locate each respondent’s answer to the same question rather quickly and to organize questions and answers that are similar.

Exhibit 7.19 (pp. 508–511) at the end of this chapter, provides an example of a standardized open-ended evaluation interview sequence for participants in an Outward Bound wilderness program for disabled persons. The first interview was conducted at the beginning of the program, the second interview was used at the end of the 10-day experience, and the third interview took place six months after the program. Questions are specified for able-bodied and disabled participants.

In summary, the four major reasons for using standardized open-ended interviews are as follows:

1. The exact instrument used in the study is available for inspection by those who will use the findings of the study.

2. Variation among interviewers can be minimized where a number of different interviewers must be used.

3. The interview is highly focused so that interviewee time is used efficiently.

4. Analysis is facilitated by making responses easy to find and compare.

In program evaluations, potential problems of legitimacy and credibility for qualitative data can make it politically wise to produce an exact interview form that the evaluator can show to primary decision makers and evaluation users. Moreover, when generating a standardized form, evaluation users can participate more completely in writing the interview instrument. They will not only know

precisely what is going to be asked, but, no less important, they will also understand what is not going to be asked. This reduces the likelihood of the data being attacked later because certain questions were missed or asked in the wrong way. By making it clear, in advance of data collection, exactly what questions will be asked, the limitations of the data can be known and discussed before evaluation data are gathered.

While the conversational and interview guide approaches permit greater flexibility and individualization, these approaches also open up the possibility, indeed, the likelihood, that more information will be collected from some program participants than from others. Those using the findings may worry about how conclusions have been influenced by qualitative differences in the depth and breadth of information received from different people.

In contrast, in fieldwork done for basic and applied research, the researcher will be attempting to understand the holistic worldview of a group of people. Collecting the same information from each person poses no credibility problem when each person is understood as a unique informant with a unique perspective. The political credibility of consistent interview findings across respondents is less an issue under basic research conditions.

The weakness of the standardized approach is that it does not permit the interviewer to pursue topics or issues that were not anticipated when the interview was written. Moreover, a structured interview reduces the extent to which individual differences and circumstances can be queried.

Combining Approaches

These contrasting interview strategies are by no means mutually exclusive.

A conversational strategy can be used within an interview guide approach, or you can combine a guide approach with a standardized format by specifying certain key questions exactly as they must be asked while leaving other items as topics to be explored at the interviewer’s discretion. This combined strategy offers the interviewer flexibility in probing and in determining when it is appropriate to explore certain subjects in greater depth, or even to pose questions about new areas of inquiry that were not originally anticipated in the interview instrument’s development. A common combination strategy involves using a standardized interview format in the early part of an interview and then leaving the interviewer free to pursue any subjects of interest during the latter parts of the interview. Another combination would include using the informal conversational interview early in an evaluation project, followed midway through by an interview guide, and then closing the program evaluation with a standardized open-ended interview to get systematic information from a sample of participants at the end of the program or when conducting follow-up studies of participants.

A sensitizing concept can provide the bridge across different types of interviews. In doing follow-up interviews with recipients of MacArthur Foundation fellowships, the sensitizing concept “enabling,” a concept central to the Fellowship’s purpose, allowed us to focus interviews on any ways in which receiving the fellowship had enabled recipients. Enabling, or being enabled, broadly defined and open-ended, gave interviewees room to share a variety of experiences and outcomes while also letting us identify some carefully worded, standardized questions for all interviewees, some interview guide topics that might or might not be pursued, and a theme for staying centered during completely open-ended conversations at the end of the interviews.

Summary of Interviewing Formats

All three qualitative formats for interviewing share the commitment to ask genuinely open-ended questions that offer the persons being interviewed the opportunity to respond in their own words and to express their own personal perspectives. While the three strategies vary in the extent to which the wording and sequencing of questions are predetermined, no variation exists in the principle that the response format should be open-ended. The interviewer never supplies or predetermines the phrases or categories that must be used by respondents to express themselves, as is the case in fixed-response questionnaires. The purpose of qualitative interviewing is to capture how those being interviewed view their world, to learn their terminology and judgments, and to capture the complexities of their individual perceptions and experiences. This openness distinguishes qualitative interviewing from the closed questionnaire or test used in quantitative studies. Such closed instruments force respondents to fit their knowledge, experiences, and feelings into the researcher’s categories. The fundamental principle of qualitative interviewing is to provide a framework within which respondents can express their own understandings in their own terms.

SIDEBAR

CULTURE AS A SENSITIZING CONCEPT

“Culture” is certainly one of the more contentious and complex words in our lexicon. Like the term “force” to a physicist or “life” to a biologist, or even “god” to a theologian, “culture” to the ethnographer is multivocal, highly ambiguous, shape-shifting, and difficult if not impossible to pin down. When put into use, contradictions abound. Culture is taken by some of its most distinguished students as cause and consequence, as material and immaterial, as coherent and fragmented, as grand and humble, as visible (to some) and invisible (to many). . . .

One of the charming but endlessly frustrating things about culture is that everybody uses the term, albeit in vastly different ways. The notion of culture as used by ethnographers today is more a loose, sensitizing concept than a strict, theoretical one. It signals a conviction that agency and action (be it word or deed) rest on social meanings that range from the rather bounded and particularistic to more or less institutionalized and broad. . . . Certainly the view of culture as an integrated, shared system of interlocking ideas, routines, signs, and values passed on more or less seamlessly from generation to generation has withered away (thankfully). . . .

But as long as meanings are taken to be central to accounts of human activity and meanings are seen as coming forth—somehow, someway—from human interaction, it is most unclear what conceptual framework might step up to replace culture as a way to imagine and think about such matters as “how things work.” . . . Culture and the meaning making and remaking processes associated with the concept, however trimmed down and inevitably flawed, still seem to me indispensable.

—John Van Maanen (2011, p. 154)

Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography

Anticipating Analysis and Reporting in Developing an Interview

Look to the end at the beginning to increase the likelihood of ending up where you want to be at the end.

—Halcolm

The overarching purpose of an inquiry frames analysis, and anticipating analysis can inform the kind of interview protocol and instrumentation developed. For example, a program evaluation might interview 20 participants, about an hour each, covering a set of discrete topics, like the following:

1. What influenced your decision to participate in the program?

(Program recruitment)

2. Describe the program activities in which you participated.

(Program processes)

3. What did you get out of participating in the program?

(Program outcomes)

The evaluation report will analyze and present the responses from the 20 participants question by question, or section by section, what is called cross-sectional analysis. Organizing and sequencing the interview in anticipation of this format for the final report will greatly facilitate analysis.

A different kind of analysis and reporting involves constructing case studies. A case study integrates all the responses in an interview into a coherent story of that person or place (the case). If 20 participants are interviewed for individual case studies, the analysis and report will be presented as holistic cases and patterns across cases rather than question by question.

Yet a third kind of analysis is illumination of one or more sensitizing concepts. Responses across participants and across questions will be synthesized to present varying perspectives on and meanings of the sensitizing concept, for example, empowerment, or power (Sheehan, De Cieri, Cooper, & Brooks, 2014).

Thus, the interview protocol and format is part of the overall design of the study and flows from prior decisions. The overarching purpose of the study and the primary inquiry questions lead to a purposeful sampling strategy. Those inquiry and design decisions anticipate the kind of analysis that will be needed to fulfill the purpose of the study, whether research or evaluation. The interview format (degree of standardization vs. degree of flexibility) flows from this combination of design considerations, the background and experience of the interviewer(s), and the expectations of the audience for the study (What approach will be most credible?). Exhibit 7.6 summarizes these analysis alternatives and their implications for formatting and constructing qualitative interviews.

EXHIBIT 7.6 Anticipating Analysis and Reporting to Organize, Sequence, and Format Interviews

Three examples of how anticipating the analysis and report can influence the qualitative interview format.

MODULE

59 Question Options and Skilled Question Formulation

Know What You Want to Find Out, and Listen Attentively to Whether Your Question Was Answered

If you ask me, I’m gonna tell you. —Comedienne Roseanne Barr

Six kinds of questions can be asked of people. On any given topic, it is possible to ask any of these questions. Distinguishing types of questions forces you, the interviewer, to be clear about what is being asked and helps the interviewee respond appropriately.

Experience and Behavior Questions

Questions about what a person does or has done aim to elicit behaviors, experiences, actions, and activities that would have been observable had the observer been present: “If I followed you through a typical day, what would I see you doing? What experiences would I observe you having?” “If I had been in the program with you, what would I have seen you doing?”

Opinion and Values Questions

Questions aimed at understanding the cognitive and interpretive processes of people ask about opinions, judgments and values—”head stuff” as opposed to actions and behaviors: Answers to these questions tell us what people think about some experience or issue. They tell us about people’s goals, intentions, desires, and expectations. “What do you believe?” “What do you think about ______?” “What would you like to see happen?” “What is your opinion of_________?”

Feeling Questions

Emotional centers in the brain can be distinguished from cognitive areas. Feeling questions aim at eliciting emotions—feeling responses of people to their experiences and thoughts. Feelings tap the affective dimension of human life. In asking feeling questions—for example, “How do you feel about that?”—the interviewer is looking for adjective responses: anxious, happy, afraid, intimidated, confident, and so on.

Opinions and feelings are often confused. It is critical that interviewers understand the distinction between the two in order to know when they have the kind of answer they want to the question they

are asking. Suppose an interviewer asks, “How do you feel about that?” If the response is “I think it’s probably the best that we can do under the circumstances,” the question about feelings has not really been answered. Analytical, interpretive, and opinion statements are not answers to questions about feelings.

This confusion sometimes occurs because interviewers give the wrong cues when asking questions—for example, by asking opinion questions using the format “How do you feel about that?” instead of “What is your opinion about that?” or “What do you think about it?” When you want to understand the respondents’ emotional reactions, you have to ask about and listen for feeling-level responses. When you want to understand what someone thinks about something, the question should explicitly tell the interviewee that you’re searching for opinions, beliefs, and considered judgments—not feelings.

Knowledge Questions

Knowledge questions inquire about the respondent’s factual information—what the respondent knows. Certain things are facts, like whether it is against the law to drive while drunk and how the law defines drunkenness. These things are not opinions or feelings. Knowledge about a program may include knowing what services are available, who is eligible, what the rules and regulations of the program are, how one enrolls in the program, and so on.

Sensory Questions

Sensory questions ask about what is seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled. Responses to these questions allow the interviewer to enter into the sensory experience of the respondent. “When you walk through the doors of the program, what do you see? Tell me what I would see if I walked through the doors with you.” Or again, “What does the counselor ask you when you meet with him? What does he actually say?” Sensory questions attempt to have interviewees describe the stimuli that they experience. Technically, sensory data are a type of behavioral or experiential data—they capture the experience of the senses. However, the types of questions asked to gather sensory data are sufficiently distinct to merit a separate category.

Background/Demographic Questions

Age, education, occupation, and the like are standard background questions that identify characteristics of the person being interviewed. Answers to these questions help the interviewer locate the respondent in relation to other people. Asking these questions in an open-ended rather than closed manner elicits the respondent’s own categorical worldview. Asked about age, a person aged 55 might respond “I’m 55” or “I’m middle-aged” or “I’m at the cusp of old age” or “I’m still young at heart” or “I’m in my mid-50s” or “I’m 10 years from retirement” or “I’m between 40 and 60 (smiling broadly),” and so forth. Responses to open-ended, qualitative background inquiries tell us about how people categorize themselves in today’s endlessly categorizing world. Perhaps nowhere is such openness more important and illuminative than in asking about race and ethnicity. For example, professional golf star Tiger Woods has African, Thai, Chinese, American Indian, and European ancestry—and resists being “assigned” to any single ethnic category. He came up with the name “Cablinasian” to describe his mixed heritage. In an increasingly diverse world with

people of mixed ethnicity and ever-evolving labels (e.g., Negro, colored, black, African American, person of African descent), qualitative inquiry is a particularly appropriate way of finding out how people perceive and talk about their backgrounds.

Distinguishing Question Types

Behaviors, opinions, feelings, knowledge, sensory data, and background demographics—these are the universe of kinds of questions it is possible to ask in an interview. Any kind of question one might want to ask can be subsumed in one of these categories. Keeping these distinctions in mind can be particularly helpful in planning an interview, designing the inquiry strategy, focusing on priorities for inquiry, and ordering the questions in some sequence. Before considering the sequence of questions, however, let’s look at how the dimension of time intersects with the different kinds of questions.

The Time Frame of the Questions

Questions can be asked in the present, past, or future tense. For example, you can ask people what they’re doing now, what they have done in the past, and what they plan to do in the future. Likewise, you can inquire about present attitudes, past attitudes, or future attitudes. By combining the time frame of questions with the different type of questions, we can construct a matrix that generates 18 different types of questions. Exhibit 7.7 shows that matrix.

EXHIBIT 7.7 A Matrix of Questions Options

Asking all 18 questions about any particular situation, event, or programmatic activity may become somewhat tedious, especially if the sequence is repeated over and over throughout the interview. The matrix constitutes a set of options to help you think about what information is most important to obtain.

Sequencing Questions

No recipe for sequencing questions can or should exist, but the matrix of questions suggests some possibilities. The challenges of sequencing vary, of course, for different strategies of interviewing. Informal conversational interviewing is flexible and responsive so that a predetermined sequence is seldom possible or desirable. In contrast, standardized open-ended interviews must establish a fixed sequence of questions to fit the structured format. I offer, then, some suggestions about sequencing.

I prefer to begin an interview with questions about noncontroversial present behaviors, activities, and experiences like “What are you currently working on in school?” Such questions ask for relatively straightforward descriptions; they require minimal recall and interpretation. Such questions are hopefully fairly easy to answer. They encourage the respondent to talk descriptively. Probes should focus on eliciting greater detail—filling out the descriptive picture.

Once some experience or activity has been described, then opinions and feelings can be solicited, building on and probing for interpretations of the experience. Opinions and feelings are likely to be more grounded and meaningful once the respondent has verbally “relived” the experience. Knowledge and skill questions also need a context. Such questions can be quite threatening if asked too abruptly. The interviewer doesn’t want to come across as a TV game show host quizzing a contestant. So, for example, in evaluation interviewing, it can be helpful to ask knowledge questions (What are the eligibility requirements for this program?) as follow-up questions about program activities and experiences that have a bearing on knowledge and skills (How did you become part of the program?). Finding out from people what they know works best once some rapport and trust have been established in the interview.

Questions about the present tend to be easier for respondents than questions about the past. Future-oriented questions involve considerable speculation, and responses to questions about future actions or attitudes are typically less reliable than questions about the present or past. I generally prefer to begin by asking questions about the present; then, using the present as a baseline, I ask questions about the same activity or attitude in the past. Only then do I broach questions about the future.

Background and demographic questions are basically boring; they epitomize what people hate about interviews. They can also be somewhat uncomfortable for the respondent, depending on how personal they are. I keep such questions to a minimum and prefer to space them strategically and unobtrusively throughout the interview. I advise never beginning an interview with a long list of routine demographic questions. In qualitative interviewing, the interviewee needs to become actively involved in providing descriptive information as soon as possible instead of becoming conditioned to providing short-answer, routine responses to uninteresting categorical questions. Some background information may be necessary at the beginning to make sense out of the rest of the interview, but such questions should be tied to descriptive information about present life experience as much as possible. Otherwise, save the socio-demographic inquiries (age, socioeconomic status, birth order, etc.) for the end.

Practical Guidance on Wording Questions

An interview question is a stimulus aimed at eliciting a response from the person being interviewed. How a question is worded and asked affects how the interviewee responds. As Payne (1951) observed in his classic book on questioning, asking questions is an art. In qualitative inquiry, “good” questions should, at a minimum, be open-ended, neutral, singular, and clear. Let’s look at each of these criteria.

SIDEBAR

PRAGMATIC INTERVIEWING: SKILLFULLY WORDING QUESTIONS

How qualitative interview questions are worded depends on a number of factors, including but not limited to these: the theoretical tradition that informs the inquiry, the nature and focus of the study, the relationships and interactions between the interviewer and the interviewee, the length of the interview and setting where the interview talks place, the interviewer’s experience as an interviewer, and the interview format being used (conversational, interview guide, standardized questions). Thus, general guidance on how to word questions must be adapted to

purpose and context. What can be said with confidence is that skillful wording is a core competence that enhances the quality of responses. In the sections that follow, I offer some practical guidance about how to be strategic, intentional, thoughtful, and skillful in wording questions.

Ask Truly Open-Ended Questions

Qualitative inquiry—strategically, philosophically, and methodologically—aims to minimize the imposition of predetermined responses like fixed survey items (“strongly agree”). Rather, questions should be asked in a truly open-ended fashion so people can respond in their own words. Those open-ended responses are the heart of qualitative data, and they emerge from asking open-ended questions.

The standard fixed-response item in a questionnaire provides a limited and predetermined list of possibilities: “How satisfied are you with the program? (a) very satisfied, (b) somewhat satisfied, (c) not too satisfied, (d) not at all satisfied.” The closed and limiting nature of such a question is obvious to both questioner and respondent. Many researchers seem to think that the way to make a question open-ended is simply to leave out the structured response categories. But doing so does not make a question truly open-ended. It merely disguises what still amounts to a predetermined and implicit constraint on likely responses.

Consider the question “How satisfied are you with this program?” Asked without fixed-response choices, this can appear to be an open-ended question. On closer inspection, however, we see that the dimension along which the respondent can answer has already been identified—degree of satisfaction. The interviewee can use a variety of modifiers for the word satisfaction—“pretty satisfied,” “kind of satisfied,” “mostly satisfied,” and so on. But, in effect, the possible response set has been narrowly limited by the wording of the question. The typical range of answers will vary only slightly more than what would have been obtained had the categories been made explicit from the start while making the analysis more complicated.

A truly open-ended question does not presuppose which dimension of feeling or thought will be salient for the interviewee. The truly open-ended question allows the person being interviewed to select from among that person’s full repertoire of possible responses those that are most salient. Indeed, in qualitative inquiry, one of the things the inquiry is trying to determine is what dimensions, themes, and images/words people use among themselves to describe their feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Examples, then, of truly open-ended questions would take the following format:

What’s your reaction to ______?

How do you feel about ________?

What do you think of ________?

The truly open-ended question permits those being interviewed to take whatever direction and use whatever words they want to express what they have to say. Moreover, to be truly open-ended, a question cannot be phrased as a dichotomy.

The Horns of a Dichotomy

Dichotomous response questions provide the interviewee with a grammatical structure suggesting a “yes” or “no” answer. Are you satisfied with the program? Have you changed as a result of your participation in this program? Was this an important experience for you? Do you know the procedures for enrolling in the program? Have you interacted much with the staff in the program? By their grammatical form, all of these questions invite a yes/no reply.

In contrast, in-depth interviewing strives to get the person being interviewed to talk—to talk about experiences, feelings, opinions, and knowledge. Far from encouraging the respondent to talk, dichotomous response questions limit expression. They can even create a dilemma for respondents who may not be sure whether they are being asked a simple yes/no question or if, indeed, the interviewer expects a more elaborate response. Often, in teaching interviewers and reviewing their fieldwork, I’ve found that those who report having difficulty getting respondents to talk are posing a string of dichotomous questions that program the respondent to be largely reactive and binary.

Consider this classic exchange between a parent and teenager. (Teenager returns home from a date.)

“Do you know that you’re late?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you go to a movie?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it a good movie?”

“Yeah, it was okay.”

“So, it was worth seeing?”

“Yeah, it was worth seeing.”

“I’ve heard a lot about it. Do you think I would like it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Anything else happen?”

“No. That’s about it.”

Teenager then goes off to bed. One parent turns to the other and says, “Sure is hard to get him to talk to us. I guess he’s at the age where kids just don’t want to tell their parents anything.”

Dichotomous questions can turn an interview into an interrogation or quiz rather than an in-depth conversation. In everyday conversation, our interactions with each other are filled with dichotomous questions that we unconsciously ignore and treat as if they were open-ended. If a friend asks, “Did you have a good time?” you’re likely to offer more than a yes/no answer. In a more formal interview setting, however, the interviewee will be more conscious of the grammatical structure of questions and is less likely to elaborate beyond “yes” or “no” replies when hit with dichotomous queries. Indeed, the more intense the interview situation, the more likely the respondent will react to the “deep-structure” stimulus of questions—which includes their grammatical framing—and to take questions literally (Bandler & Grinder, 1975).

In training interviewers, I like to play a game where I only respond literally to the questions asked without volunteering any information that is not clearly demanded in the question. I do this before explaining the difficulties involved in asking dichotomous questions. I have played this game hundreds of times, and the interaction seldom varies. On getting dichotomous responses to general questions, the interviewer will begin to rely on more and more specific dichotomous response questions, thereby digging a deeper and deeper hole, which makes it difficult to pull the interview out of the dichotomous-response pattern. Exhibit 7.8 provides a transcription of an actual interview from a training workshop. In the left column, I have recorded the interview that took place; the right column records truly open-ended alternatives to the dichotomous questions that were asked.

EXHIBIT 7.8 Interview Training Demonstration: Closed Versus Open-Ended Questions

Instruction to workshop participants: Okay, now we’re going to play an interviewing game. I want you to ask me questions about an evaluation I just completed. The program evaluated was a leadership development initiative that involved taking higher education professionals into a wilderness setting for a week. That’s all I’m going to tell you at this point. I’ll answer your questions as precisely as I can, but I’ll only answer what you ask. I won’t volunteer any information that isn’t directly asked for by your questions.

In the left column below, I have recorded the interview questions actually asked and my answers; the right column records truly open-ended alternatives to the dichotomous questions that were asked and the answers I would have given to more open-ended questions.

The questions on the left in Exhibit 7.8 illustrate a fairly extreme example of posing dichotomous questions in an interview. Notice that the open-ended questions on the right side generate richer answers and quite different information than was elicited from the dichotomous questions. In addition, dichotomous questions can easily become leading questions. Once the interviewer begins to cope with what appears to be a reluctant or timid interviewee by asking ever more detailed

dichotomous questions, guessing at possible responses, the interviewer may actually impose those responses on the interviewee.

One sure sign that an interview is going poorly is when the interviewer is doing more talking than the person being interviewed. Consider the excerpt from an actual interview in Exhibit 7.9. The interviewee was a teenager who was participating in a chemical dependency program. The person conducting this interview said that she wanted to find out two things in this portion of the interview: (1) What experiences were most salient for John? (2) How personally involved was John becoming in his treatment? As you’ll see in the transcript, she learns that the “hot-seat” therapeutic experience was highly salient for John, but she really gets very little information about the reasons for that salience. With regard to the question of his personal involvement, the only data she has come from his acquiescence to leading questions. To see how few qualitative data are actually generated in her interview, I’ve listed below the actual data from the interview—his verbatim responses:

Okay.

Yeah, . . . the hot seat.

Right.

One person does it every day.

Yeah, it depends.

Okay, let’s see, hmmm . . . there was this guy yesterday who really got nailed. I mean he really caught a lot of crap from the group. It was really heavy.

No, it was them others.

Yeah, right, and it really got to him.

He started crying and got mad and one guy really came down on him and afterwards they were talking, and it seemed to be okay for him.

Yeah, it really was.

It was pretty heavy.

The lack of a coherent story line in these responses reveals how little we’ve actually learned about John’s perspective and experiences. Study the transcript, and you’ll find that the interviewer was talking more than the interviewee. The questions put the interviewee in a passive stance, able to confirm or deny the substance provided by the interviewer but not really given the opportunity to provide in-depth, descriptive detail in his own words.

©2002 Michael Quinn Patton and Michael Cochran

EXHIBIT 7.9 Interview Transcript With Commentary

The interview below took place with a teenager during his residency in a chemical dependency treatment program. The interview transcript is on the left. My commentary is in the column on the right.