Mastering In-Depth Interviews: Preparation, Execution, and Recording Tips (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So, how do we implement in-depth interviews well? How do you make sure that you get the most of the conversations that you have with people? The first thing you need to do is to prepare extensively. This seems sort of self-explanatory, but often what you need to do is to write your questions down, make sure that the timing of the questions and the order of the questions make sense, such that you get people to feel comfortable before you start getting to the meat of the questions that you want to ask. At the same time, you have to balance that with if you do too many questions about the weather and how their family is doing and how their health is, and very open-ended questions to make people feel comfortable, you might run out of time and not get the kinds of information that you really seek to get. So there's a balance between the order of the questions that you do and the timing and how quickly you get to the questions that matter the most for your research. If you're not doing research that's deeply personal, then you can go ahead and get to those things faster, right? So this would also depend on your research agenda. So you prepare and you practice. You prepare your questions according to timing and order, but you also think about preparing such that you don't have to be reading anything while you're doing an interview. The best interview you do is one that you can literally do off the top of your head. And in your mind at most, keeping one sheet of paper with a checklist to make sure that you've asked a series of questions that you need to ask in order to be thorough is sufficient. If you're thumbing through long lists of questions with bullet points and all of that, it becomes very distracting and it can detract from the conversation. So at the end of the day, the content of your conversation, which becomes the data for your analysis is just not as thorough as it could be. So you want to make sure that you make the most of those interviews. And this is particularly so for key informant interviews because often those people will give you one chance for 30 minutes. It takes a long time to get those interviews. Recording devices can be really useful because it enables you to just have a conversation without having to write anything down. And writing and reading while you're having a conversation becomes very distracting as you know. Increasingly, people want to use their smartphones in order to record conversations. But it's not that smartphones can't do the job. It's that smartphones often do a number of jobs at the same time. So if you're having a conversation with somebody and you get a text while you're recording, if you're having a conversation and doing an interview with somebody and you get a text at the same time, this can be distracting for the conversation. It could also potentially disrupt the recording. So what might happen is you look at your text and turn off the recording device. The same thing might happen with phone calls, timers, any number of things that you use your smartphone for. So people are using them, but sometimes to quite disastrous effects. And often it would be very awkward to have to either redo an interview in order to get that information or to ask somebody to repeat their answers for things. It comes across as sort of disrespectful. And also when people have to repeat what they're doing, they tend to be less thorough the second time because it becomes awkward and contrived. So use a recording device that you're very comfortable with. Try to use a recording device that is just a recording device so that if you are getting, if there are other distractions happening, it won't be with the instrument that's collecting and recording the most important information, which again becomes the substance of your research.