How To Not Control Your Interview
Some dos and don’ts of conducting research through interviews.
It’s been a year and a half since I conducted my last interview. The last interviews that I conducted were for an introductory American Studies class that focused broadly on “What is an American?” For our final project, we needed to conduct interviews from people talking about the topic that we chose. We were to create a list of questions for each interviewee to answer however they chose. In my mind, the goal of an interview is to ideally create a structured conversation between the interviewer and the interviewee, obviously focusing on the latter. But writing the questions for an interview and where the interview actually goes in reality, can be very different. It’s dangerous for many reasons to imagine how your questions will be answering and not allowing for the idea of free-flowing and evolving conversation.
One of the issues that I had with previous interviews that I conducted was that I would write my questions with possible answers in mind. I would assume that my subjects were going to answer in certain ways or say certain things. Then, when they did not go according to the idea that I had of how the interview would go or deviated in another way, I got flustered. I either had to think on my feet or just give up on the interview. I learned that not every interview will turn out to be a good interview and not every interviewee is necessarily a good interviewee. It’s how you handle the situation and move on with future projects and interactions that really allows you to evolve as a researcher.
Preparing to do my first interview for my capstone was nerve-racking. I find that I get even more nervous interviewing people that I know rather than strangers on the street or people that I reached out to through a mutual contact or connection. As I said, it’s been around 18 months since the last time that I had to do this. The interview approach that I believe is the most successful is the unstructured type. While it can lead to tangents and side conversations, it opens up for the interviewee to interpret the question. The issue that I had in the past where I would unintentionally anticipate how people would answer and interpret my questions does not allow for those side conversations that can lead to greater depths of research. This time around I am working with a question bank. This way, I have questions that relate to my topic no matter what, that can also keep the conversation on track. However, if the conversation flows into other things that are still constructive, it keeps the dialogue open. Below is an example of my question bank for this research I am conducting.
Question Bank:
- How old are you?
- Do you consider yourself as part of a certain “generation”, if so, which?
- When was the first time you voted?
- What motivated you to vote?
- Have any recent campaigns caught your attention? Why?
- How long have you been following politics?
- Are you vocal about your political opinions in real life? What about on social media?
- How do you interact with politics on social media?
- How do you feel about seeing politics on social media?
