Lecture 4

Question 1

Structured interviews

Answer 1

• Focus: Researcher’s concerns
• Fixed questions
• Little flexibility
• High(er) reliability (another researcher will ask the same questions)
• Comparable information

Question 2

Semi-structured interviews

Answer 2

• Focus: Interviewee’s point of view
• Items instead of questions
• Flexibility
• Lower reliability (but see techniques to address this)
• Rich information

Question 3

Open interviews

Answer 3

• Focus: Interviewee’s point of view
• Prompts
• Flexibility
• Lower reliability (but see techniques to address this)
• Rich information

Question 4

Preparing for the semi-structured interview:
The interview guide (=item list=topic list=topic guide)

Answer 4

• List of topics (not questions!) that you want to address
• Logically arranged, but allow for flexibility
• Running from ‘easy to answer’ to ‘difficult to answer’
• Formulated in a way that helps answering the research question
• Not too general, not too specific
• Introduction and conclusion
• Background info/contextual information (personal data etc).

Question 5

Topics

Answer 5

• Management responsibilities
• Management decisions
• Decision-making process

Question 6

Questions

Answer 6

• What is your main responsibility as a manager?
• What kind of decisions do you make?
• Do you experience any decisions to be more challenging than others?
• What is challenging about…?
• Can you describe what information you use when deciding about…?
• How do you get the information you need?

Question 7

Order

Answer 7

• General and descriptive
• Personal experiences
• Going into detail

Question 8

Before the interview

Answer 8

• Addressing expectations
• Providing information and instructions
• Build rapport

Question 9

During the interview: the interviewer’s double role

Answer 9

• Engaging in the conversation (asking questions and listening to answers)
• Managing the interview (keeping your agenda in mind)
• Rapport & sensitivity in dealing with emotional responses.

Question 10

Mapping questions

Answer 10

Suppose you do research on people’s motivations to engage in sports, one of your topics is about the benefits people derive from sports.

Question 11

Question types: Probes

Answer 11

• Tell -me-more probe
• Silence…
• Uh-huh…
• Specifying questions, such as asking for examples

Question 12

Question types: Prompts

Answer 12

Ask people to react to something: an idea, a common opinion, what other interviewees have said…

Question 13

Body language

Answer 13

• Active listening
• Interview as an occasion for observation
  
  • Proxemic communication: spatial arrangements
  • Chronemic communication: pacing of speech, length of pauses
  • Kinesic communication: movement of body posture
  • Paralinguistic communication: tone, pitch, quality of voice
• The interviewee observes you, too! (Dress etc.)

Question 14

Proxemic communication

Answer 14

spatial arrangements

Question 15

Chronemic communication

Answer 15

pacing of speech, length of pauses

Question 16

Kinesic communication

Answer 16

movement of body posture

Question 17

Paralinguistic communication

Answer 17

tone, pitch, quality of voice

Question 18

Listening is evaluating answers

Answer 18

• Clear (room for interpretation?)
• Complete (does it cover everything?)
• Relevant (for your research)

If not: probing!

Question 19

To be avoided

Answer 19

• Closed questions
• Leading questions
• Unclear questions: Long questions, Too general questions, Double-barrelled
  questions
• Avoid jargon and technical terms
  
  • Do you sometimes feel alienated from work?
  • Is tourism a kind of escapism to you?

Question 20

Projective techniques

Answer 20

• To uncover feelings, beliefs, attitudes and motivation which many people find difficult to articulate
• Discover the person’s characteristic modes of perceiving his or her world and how to behave in it
• Enter the private worlds of subjects to uncover their inner perspectives in a way they feel comfortable with
• Common in market research (consumer motivations), origins in psychology

Question 21

Vignettes

Answer 21

short stories about hypothetical characters in specified circumstances, to whose situation the interviewee is invited to respond

Question 22

Three main purposes vignettes

Answer 22

• interpretation of actions in context
• clarification of individual judgements, often in relation to moral dilemmas;
• discussion of sensitive experiences: commenting on a story is less personal than talking about direct experience; participants can determine if and when they introduce their own experiences to illuminate their abstract responses

Used in surveys (often multiple vignettes), interviews and focus groups

Question 23

Photo elicitation

Answer 23

People react on photographs:

• Taken by themselves outside research contexts
• Taken by themselves on request of researcher
• Taken by the researcher
• Existing images

Purposes:

• Retrieve memory
• Evoke reactions (when studying opinions for example)
• Provide people with opportunity to show what is
  important to them (=photo voice)