Interview Guide

Interview Guide

Students embarking on research often begin with a problem of wide import, only to discover that their initial list of inquiries will not actually address it, forcing them to narrow their focus. When preparing to gather qualitative data, a student may learn that questions whose meaning seems perfectly obvious to them are not clearly understood by their participants. Or it may become clear that inquiries considered entirely objective in content appear highly biased to listeners. This is why developing a thoughtfully constructed interview guide is critical before beginning any study; formulating good questions is a much subtler and more frustrating task than is generally believed by those who have not actually attempted it.

Turning to the actual problem of constructing a questionnaire or similar research tool requires some brief comments and definitions. In general, the word questionnaire refers to a device for securing answers to questions by using a form that the respondent fills in themselves. Thus, anyone who has filled in a job application has had the experience of answering a questionnaire.

A schedule is the term usually used for a set of questions asked and filled in by an interviewer in a face-to-face situation with another person. The two forms obviously have much in common, particularly that the wording of the questions is the same for all respondents.

An interview guide, on the other hand, is a list of points or topics that an interviewer must cover during the interview. In this case, considerable flexibility may be allowed as to the manner, order, and language in which the interviewer asks the questions.

Each of these three research tools contains a set of related items, that is, a set of questions all logically related to a central problem or problems. Not all items, obviously, have the same form, but in general they can be classed by the degree to which they are structured. By this, it is meant that some ways of asking a question leave only a few possible answers, while others allow a wide variety of responses. The questionnaire and schedule employ mainly structured items, while the interview guide uses a greater proportion of unstructured, or “open- ended,” questions.

Some types of questions are automatically structured because of the precision of the categories that can answer the questions. An example of such a structured question is “How old were you on your last birthday?” Another frequently asked example is referring to marital status. This is best handled in a highly structured manner. Thus the item might be formulated as follows: “Are you at present: Single _____ ? Married _____ ? Divorced _____ ? Separated _____ ? Widowed _____ ?” To ask an open-ended question such as “What is your marital status?” might produce interesting but confusing answers, such as “Fine,” “As good as could be expected,” or “I’ll have to ask my wife.”

Many questions, however, cannot be structured so easily. This is particularly true when the responses to the item cannot be anticipated in detail. Thus, in the National Opinion Research Center Survey No. 1044, respondents were asked to list the main characteristics of a job that they believed made it a high-prestige position. Another similar question in the same survey asked which factors a young man should consider before accepting a job.

 

References

Goode, W. J., & Hatt, P. K. (2018). Methods in Social Research. Asia Law House.