The interviewer

The role of the interviewer is to help motivate participants to share their thoughts and feelings on the topic you are studying. He or she needs to be able to listen carefully, to know when to seek clarifying information, and to pay attention to non-verbal as well as verbal responses.

Be interested: It is crucial that the interviewer is genuinely interested in both the subject matter and in the participants. Participants can easily detect an interviewer who appears “phony.”

Be polite: Don’t forget to greet the participants, and don’t forget to thank the participants for their time and help.

Explain what you are doing: Tell participants what will happen during the interview and how the information will be used. Make sure the participants understand that any information collected will be kept confidential.

Take notes: It can be very helpful to ask the interviewer to rate the participant and the responses in some way that is meaningful to you. This may include putting a star in the margin next to questions about which the participant seems to feel particularly strongly. It may also include developing some kind of rating system to be completed at the end of the interview. Items may include issues such as whether the participant appeared comfortable or anxious, truthful or dishonest, sober or under the influence of drugs, etc. This will help you make decisions later during the analysis phase about the validity of a given interview, and can be invaluable especially if the data do not “make sense” upon careful reading.

The questions

The bottom line is that you want rich, in-depth information, so it is important that the questions are developed to encourage this. For this reason, in-depth interview questions are usually open-ended, while quantitative survey interview questions are typically closed-ended. Below is an example of each type:

Closed-ended: “How helpful did you find the group facilitator?

   4=Very helpful;
    3=somewhat helpful;
    2=somewhat unhelpful,
    1=very unhelpful”

Open-ended: “What did you find most helpful about the facilitator?” “What did you find least helpful?”

Good Questions, Better Answers --  � 1998 California Department of Health Services and Northern California Grantmakers AIDS Task Force  -- http://www.goodquestions.com