Learning How To Conduct Research Interviews

I have realized two important things about my 2017 interview process.

1. First, I asked too many closed-ended questions. The results are too many short Yes or No responses. These types of responses require me to analyze my questions, more than the interviewees’ responses. In a sense, I created a closed-ended data set that depends on my questions, and on how I posed the questions. This limits the depth and richness of the respondents’ answers. 

• For my dissertation interviews, I will need to capture the desired demographic and other closed-ended data at the start of the interview, and then more to an almost entirely open-ended interview process.

1. The other realization is that the nature of the responses, with many of them being very short, inhibits analysis of what the respondents were thinking and feeling. Also, the questions used key phrases, such as experiential learning, the use of this type of descriptive language prompted the respondents to use the same phrases and words. This complicates the effort to assess word frequencies and other aspects of meaning from the interviews. Too many responses include the words I used in the questions.

• For my dissertation interviews, I will need to carefully construct my questions to open the discussion by the respondent in a way that he or she will use his or her own words. This will be a difficult task, but the analysis of these 2017 pilot interview data will help me to design the interviews for the dissertation research.

The image below is the setting for all of the student and instructor interviews I conducted this spring in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam. This is in the Nikko Saigon Hotel. The setting provided a comfortable environment. Although there was background noise, such as music and the voices of other patrons in the lobby, the background served as white noise, giving my interviewees and me privacy.