- 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.
- 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.