interview

The next step in your research project is to conduct an interview with someone who uses the piece of tech that you’ve been researching — either in person, via phone, or with a video chat device like Zoom or FaceTime.

Instructions for completing the assignment

So, how will you conduct your interview? • First, you’ll write your interview questions. • Then, you’ll obtain a signed consent form from your interview subject. • Then you’ll conduct your interview and take notes. • Finally, you’ll (a) submit your interview notes to me via this post and (b) send me the signed consent form as an attachment to a Canvas message. Let’s break things down a bit: Interview questions are different from survey questions, though the two are often confused. So first let's talk about what you're not doing: you are not conducting a survey. A survey seeks merely to gather information from respondents (information like, say, the respondents’ age, gender, opinion on such-and-such an issue, etc.). The information requested is simple, which is why surveys themselves are typically simple: they usually involve checking some boxes, or providing one-word answers to questions, or maybe answers that are a sentence or two long. In other words, surveys seek surface-level information from large numbers of people. And that information is valuable: the responses the researcher gets may not be very deep at the individual level, but the patterns the researcher discovers between answers and between individual interview subjects can — if the sample size is correctly calculated — reveal fascinating things about broader trends. By contrast, interviews — which you are doing — are all about getting deep insights from individual people. Interviewers don’t want their subjects to check boxes; we want them to talk in detail and at length. We don’t want surface opinions; we want profound thoughts. We don’t want simple information from our interview subjects; we want them to provide rich and interesting stories and arguments. A good interviewer, then, is like a good conversationalist: she helps the person she’s interviewing to open up, to share his or her experiences and thoughts in copious detail, to dig down into them, explain them, make connections between, and reflect upon them — in short, she doesn’t seek information, but insight;  and she talks way less than she listens. Helping interview subjects to share insight is no easy task — not for you, and not for them. Most of us aren’t accustomed to sharing not only our thoughts but the reasoning behind those thoughts, nor are we accustomed to analyzing and interpreting those thoughts. As an interviewer, then, your biggest, most important job is to help your interview subject to open up, share freely, and think deeply on their feet. One way to help interview subjects to share is by composing a sequence of questions that encourages them to dig deeper as the interview proceeds. I want to emphasize the word sequence  here: what I’m trying to share with you isn’t a magic formula for coming up with individual questions; rather, it’s a way of thinking about how to order  your questions such that your interview subject is encouraged to slowly but surely open up and think harder. I describe that sequence in the slideshow below, and then illustrate it in the two-part video interview that follows. The slideshow describes the interview protocol that you are to use when you create your own sequence of interview questions. As you’ll see, the protocol moves through a series of different kinds of questions: (1) descriptive questions,  which ask the subject simply to describe her experience in her own terms; (2) structural questions, which ask the subject to break that experience down; and (3) comparison/contrast  questions, which ask the subject to compare their experience to other, similar experiences. It also mentions what may be the most important kind of questions: (4) the follow-up questions  that you create in the moment as you react to the interesting things that your interview subject says. In the video that follows the slideshow, you’ll see me interviewing my colleague Richard Colby about gaming. (Richard has done significant research on gaming and is an avid gamer himself.) The interview is part of a research project that I’ve been informally conducting for our class. My overarching research question is: How and to what ends does online learning differ from face-to-face classroom learning? My questions to Richard are all on this topic (and specifically about the video game World of Warcraft.) And, as you’ll see, they follow the interview protocol I describe in the slideshow. OK, so here we go: please read the slideshow and then watch the videos. If you listened carefully, you may have noticed a few things that will help you when you conduct your own interview:

1. We talked for a good long time (about 35 minutes), and I made sure that Richard did most of the talking (indeed, about 95% of it).  That’s what you want to aim for, too: an interview of about 30-40 minutes, the vast majority of which is spent (by you) listening. Some people are more talkative than others, but it's up to you to get the most from your subject. It's not enough to say, "Well, I tried to get them to talk, but they weren't really into it." If you can't get in the vicinity of a half-hour of deep thought from your subject, then you need either to get a different subject, or to write a stronger sequence of interview questions, or to ask better follow-up questions, or all three.

2. My specific questions were about gaming, but the general sequence followed the pattern of our interview protocol: descriptive questions — structural questions — comparison/contrast questions, with follow-up questions  interlaced throughout. That’s what you should be aiming for with your interview script: You want to come to the interview equipped with a script that carefully adheres to the protocol sequence with a series of smart, well formed, successively more challenging questions, as well as a mindset (yours) that's prepared to supplement the scripted questions with spur-of-the moment follow-up questions that really help your subject to think more widely and deeply. 

3. I asked a lot of these follow-up questions, in order to help Richard to elaborate on thoughts that I believed would be most valuable for my research. You should do the same with your interview subject. Again, it's not the subject's job to spontaneously generate a lot of great material for your TED Talk; it's your job to ask questions that encourage, inspire, and help the subject to do that.

Because I did these three things, I got an interview that would really be helpful to me if I were, say, creating a homegrown TED Talk of my own: it’s full of good stories, interesting arguments, and quotes that I can and analyze. Now, what you can’t see me doing in the interview is taking notes. But here’s a   link  (Links to an external site.)  to a helpful set of tips that you can use to help you take good notes on your interview — whether you take them in the moment or when listening to audio/video you made of the conversation. OK, to wrap up, then, here’s what you need to do to complete this assignment, due by noon on Friday, July 8:

(1) Watch the slideshow and the video interview, and (2) write your interview questions. You should write 9–12 interview questions — three or four each for each of the three categories in the sequence: descriptive, structural, and comparison/contrast. Word them carefully, so that your subjects will be able to understand and respond to them easily. And make sure that all of them are relevant to your overarching research question. You’ll be using the insights that you glean from this interview as part of your TED Talk, so you want to make sure that your interview will be helpful to that end.

(2) Note that interviews, like ethnographies, fall under the University's IRB’s purview, which means

· You cannot interview anyone under 18.

· You cannot ask about the subject's sexual behavior or about criminal activity.

(Links to an external site. Before you write your questions,  review the University's IRB rules  to insure that your questions are in compliance.

(3) Obtain a signed consent form from your interview subject via email, and then forward that email and the signed consent form to me at [email protected].  There's a blank consent form  here    Download here. Download it and send it to your subject to be signed. Again, interviews must comply with  IRB (Links to an external site.) . So you must have your interview subject sign  the consent form    Download the consent form, and you must email it to me ( [email protected] ).

(4) Conduct your interview and take notes.Your interview should be at least 30 minutes long. Longer is OK (though not too much longer, or you’ll have more interview material than you’ll know what to do with). But it definitely shouldn’t shorter.          You can conduct the interview in person or via Zoom, FaceTime, or another video chat app. But do not conduct the interview via email or text message. Writing back and forth is very different from conversing orally. Interview subjects tend to give short, purely informational responses to email or text interviews, rather than the fully elaborated, deeply insightful stories and arguments that you want. And it’s much harder to ask follow up questions. (Once again, here’s a   link  (Links to an external site.)  to some good tips for talking interview notes.)

(5) Clean up your notes and flesh them out. In the end, your interview notes should be as close to an edited transcript as possible. I’m not asking you to actually transcribe your interviews because that’s a LOT of work. (A 40-minute interview would result in something like 80 double-spaced pages of transcript.) But you need to turn those notes into a clear, detailed, and coherent report on the conversation that you had — one that includes quotations when your interview subject said something especially on-point, memorable, or otherwise noteworthy. This will help you when working with the interview later for your TED Talk.

(Again, quotations. What's that I said? Quotations. Did you not hear me the first time? Quotations, quotations, quotations!) (6) Submit your notes to me here and email me  the consent form    Download the consent form . The doc should be named as follows: Last name, first name – WRIT 1133 - Interview notes.

Note taking tip

https://www.theopennotebook.com/2011/12/06/taking-good-notes/

IRB regulations

https://www.scribd.com/document/269922872/IRB-Information-for-Students

Slide show