Speaker 1: So in this video I'll explain how to develop a good interview guide, as this is something that I often discuss with my students during private lessons. My private lessons. The private lessons that I sell. Link in the description. You can also buy this and this. That's enough of selling things for today. I'm just not really good at it. It's not something that's in my nature. But anyway, as I was saying, developing a good interview guide is a very challenging, a very difficult thing to do, especially if you're new to research. So I understand why you're often concerned with this at this stage of your study. So basically the worry, the concern is usually that because it's such a responsible moment that really defines your study, defines the kind of data that you will collect and later analyze, the feeling is that if something goes wrong, if I do something wrong, the whole study is going to be worthless. So I understand how you feel and why you may, why this whole thing may feel overwhelming. But whilst it does feel overwhelming and you have every right to be stressed, I also want to stress something that's, I say these things very often, it may sound obvious, but I want to stress that you have to remember that the goal of the study is simply for you to answer your research questions. So there is hardly any right or wrong when it comes to developing an interview guide, apart from this simple question. Are your research, are your interview questions, is your interview guide something that helps you answer your research questions? And you are the person who's responsible for that study and you are the person who's in the best position to make that judgment and to decide whether your interview guide is a good one or a bad one. I also often stress that this kind of a flexibility of qualitative research is one of the reasons why I like it so much, but at the same time, I also understand why this very same flexibility is also one of the reasons why if you're new to research, you may feel overwhelmed. And of course, because it's so flexible and because every research situation is different, every interview is different, every interview participant is different, then it's very hard to develop some kind of universal guidelines for how to conduct a good interview guide. However, in this video, I will share with you some tips for how I usually do this, how I approach this process of developing interview questions. And while doing so, I want to stress and highlight the importance of one single most important skill when developing an interview guide, which is creativity. So why creativity, you may ask? Well, people tend to forget things. They may have lots of things on their minds and simply forget things, forget what happened yesterday. If you ask me what I did yesterday, I would also have to spend some time actually trying to remember, not to mention if I was to answer your specific questions. So if you were interested in, let's say, at what point yesterday I felt happy, because I didn't really focus on that, it may be very hard for me now to remember at which point yesterday I felt happy. So it's not that your participants are trying to withhold information from you or they're trying to lie to you, but quite often they simply don't remember the things you're asking them about, especially if these things happened sometime, at some point in the past. So your responsibility as the researcher, as the interviewer, is simply to help them remember. So to help them remember, there are three main things that I do. I'll list these things now and later I'll give you specific examples for each of these points. So number one is to use the knowledge of how the brain works in general, how to facilitate that cognitive effort that will help the participants remember. And interestingly, that knowledge, these theories of how the brain works, have been adopted in police interrogations. So that's why they tend to be effective in general, I suppose. So one of these things is to start with the broad and then gradually narrow things down. So gradually go towards the specific. So don't start with very focused questions, start with broader questions, such as describe everything you remember about that day, and then start narrowing things down. And another related thing is to ask the participants to reflect, to remember things that are not necessarily related, such as smells and sounds during that day, or generally any other aspects of that experience. And again, whilst this may sound weird and funny and almost ridiculous, this does often help remember, because we start to think about all these different aspects and elements of that experience, and then we start to remember the specific things that the interviewer wants us to remember. And the second technique is to generally dig around the topic by asking many similar questions, questions that are asking about the same thing, but from a slightly different perspective in a slightly different way. So again, in a second, I'll explain what exactly I mean. And the third technique is to simply ask a lot of hypothetical questions. So what would you do or how do you imagine a perfect day or whatever, depending on, again, the subject, the focus of your study? The reason, there are many reasons why this is effective, including that asking this kind of question simply helps the participants detach from that experience, helps take some of that pressure off their shoulders. And sometimes they may not be willing to share certain opinions or experiences, but if you ask about these imaginary or hypothetical scenarios, they are just more willing to share their opinions. And another reason is that people simply like to fantasize and theorize. So if you think about children and how they like to draw a dream house, for example, as adults, we are still the same. So basically, we like to imagine perfect, ideal scenarios and this kind of thing. So now to further help you develop your interview guide, I already told you what kind of questions, what kind of techniques I'm using, but I just want to help you, to walk you through the whole process of how I even develop an interview guide, how I start and how I finish and how I make sure that I ask these questions that I mentioned. So for this, let's assume that we are working on our hypothetical, remember, I told you we like to have hypothetical scenarios. So here is another one. So we're working on a hypothetical study. And in this study, we want to know about stress that nurses experience. We want to know the sources of that stress, and we want to understand how they cope with that stress. So these are our research questions in our hypothetical study. What sources of stress are there for nurses? And what kind of coping strategies do they employ? Or maybe, do they employ any kind of coping strategies? So generally, the first thing I always do, because again, I realize that it's so overwhelming to just sit down and come up with all these questions, I usually start with having a blank Word document, and I just put these two questions in that document. So I just, I will type both of these questions. What are the sources of stress? And what are the coping strategies? This is how I start. And then I make some space between them. And generally, the first thing I do, I start to put every single question that just comes to my mind and relates to one of these questions underneath. So every single question, it's a real brainstorming. And I just try to come up with anything at all that's relevant, bearing in mind what I already said, what I said to you previously. So bearing in mind that I want to use lots of different questions to explore this from lots of different perspectives, to give them opportunity to theorize and fantasize, and to later arrange this so that I start with the general and then move towards the specific. So to start with general and move towards specific in this case, under our first question, so what kind of, what sources of stress they experience, I may just start with some question to generally describe their day at work. So it doesn't have to be straight away about stress. I want to know about their day. I want them to, I want to break the ice. That's one thing. I want them to get into that mode of talking, of sharing their story. I want them to remember to really think and focus about on their day-to-day life as a nurse. And also, I simply don't want them to straight away think about stress. I want them to relax and talk to me and then to open up gradually. So I may start by asking some very general questions. Like I said, just tell me about your work or even do you like it, do you generally like it? Then I may, for example, start moving towards asking questions. Is there anything you don't like or is there anything that causes stress? Then I may gradually move towards more specific questions. So I may, for example, ask them to remember a particular day, a particular day when they did experience stress. Again, I want them, I want to keep this quite open-ended. I want them just to tell me everything about that. What happened and when and why. So everything. I'm also thinking about data analysis. If you're not experienced, and obviously you have every right not to be if you're a student experienced in data analysis, you're not thinking about these things straight away. But after all the data that I have analyzed in my work, I usually think straight into the future and think about the analysis. And if you know how the analysis, data analysis works, you know that the more the better generally. It's always better to have more data or even too much data than not enough data. So you do want them to just talk and you won't have to analyze or code every single thing. But there is a chance that when they do talk just about anything related to their day, they will share things that will eventually be important to you. So I want to know about that stressful incident. What happened and why was it stressful? Then perhaps I want to start, you know, theorizing and hypothesize, hypothesizing, is that how you say it? I want to, I want them to hypothesize and theorize. So what would have had to be different, for example, for that not to happen? What would have had to be different? So how would that situation need to be different? That's one of the things I can ask them. To help them understand that, I may, for example, ask, think about a day that was not stressful or just give me, just reflect on a day that you remember as one of your best days in this work or one of the happiest or, you know, the least stressful days in your work. And as they reflect, as they tell me about this day, I will be probing. So I'll be asking more questions. So if they, you know, describe this whole day and again, I want them to be broad and just to, you know, talk about anything that you can remember, then I gradually may start adding questions. So why do you think it was not stressful? Why was this day not stressful? Or how, what is the difference between this day and the stressful day that you mentioned or that you can think of? So what's the difference? So again, you don't have to always ask specifically about the stressful day to find out about the sources of stress. You can ask about a day that was not stressful and then ask them to reflect. Why do you think it was not stressful? So of course, remember, you want to know about sources of stress. So this will also contribute to our understanding and to us answering this research question. So again, and this is about, like I said, digging around the topic, asking similar questions, also asking them to theorize. So I could ask them, describe maybe an ideal day. So it doesn't even have to be a real day or a real good day that they had, but maybe describe an ideal day at this job, in this work, and just let them be creative again. So let them be creative. Maybe they will say an ideal day is when there is no management and I'm happy to do whatever I want and I can drink coffee all day. So if they do that, I'll start asking them again. So would you say your management is a problem? Would you say that you don't have enough breaks to have your coffee or this kind of thing? So as you can see from hypothesizing, from theorizing, you can smoothly move towards actual beliefs and actual sources of stress in this case. So the second research question was about coping strategies. So I will write down all questions about coping strategies again. So how did you deal with stress on that day? Or if you didn't, what do you think you should have done? So anything that has to do with any coping strategies. So I can ask them, what do you wish you had done? Even if you didn't do anything, what you should have done or what would others do? Anything, anything that's relevant. I may also remind them of the different sources of stress that we have already discussed and maybe go one by one and say, look, you mentioned this or you mentioned that you're not happy when you're not allowed to have your coffee break. What do you do or what did you do? Is there anything you can do to make it less stressful? So that's obviously asking about these coping strategies. Just a quick thing. There is an online self-study course that I have and it's all about interviews. There is also a lesson about developing an interview guide, but there is also so much more. So generally what it takes to be a good interviewer, what are different types of interviews, what are different types of interview questions, how to conduct the interview, how to prepare it, how to act during the interview, how to break the ice and form a good relationship. So all kinds of things. And also how to interview different difficult, unconventional groups. So how to talk, interview children, how to talk to elite members. So all kinds of knowledge about interviewing. So if you're interested, just check the link in the description. Okay. So I'm done with advertising for today. So what do I do next with my interview guide? So just to summarize what I said so far, I start with, of course, writing down the research questions. Then I write all kinds of questions underneath. So I have now at this point, I have plenty of questions that can be useful. So the final thing that I do after adding all these probing questions, and I kind of covered it already in this video as well. So why or why not, all these little questions that probe for more information. When I'm done with all of this, the final step is to arrange these questions, of course. So just because I arranged, I initially typed these interview, these research questions, and then all these related interview questions underneath doesn't necessarily mean that this is the final order, or this is the order in which I will keep these questions. So usually what I try to do, sometimes it will remain in that order. So there is nothing wrong if it makes sense, this kind of organization, it will remain in this order. But sometimes I may decide to reorder them and just kind of make sure that everything is fluent and makes sense, and it just resembles as much as possible a real conversation. So I will be reordering, mostly paying attention to what I said before about the broad to specific arrangement. And then I'm done. And of course, I'll add some initial questions and some questions at the end, do you have anything to add, this kind of thing. So that's the final step. However, and this is an additional, an extra insight that's not really related to planning your interview guide, but rather to how you conduct interviews. Remember that during the interview, you also need to be extremely flexible and responsive to what's happening. So even despite having this order of questions, despite having this carefully planned interview guide, the most important skill during the interview is to be responsive, to be natural in your conversation. So if the participants start with talking about something that you planned, talking about in your question number eight, for example, do not interrupt them and tell them that we'll come back to it later, but rather just let them talk about this. Because as I explained in my other videos, the most important thing is to make sure that the participant feels at ease and feels relaxed and wants to share knowledge with you. So this is how I prepare a good interview guide. This is my process and also what kind of questions I try to include. I hope that all of this helped you. I hope that you learned something new. If you did, please like the video to help others find it online. And finally, again, just to remind you, I do offer a private session. So if you want me to help you plan your interview guide, I'm more than happy. Just reach out using the details under the video.