Interviewing & questioning

Today i had the opportunity to discuss and think about interviewing as a data collection method. The key things that sring to mind that i took away from this session during the honours school are:

Listenning to what participants say - in order to do 2 things. A) Clarify and check you have gained the perception of the participant, and B) keeping track of the key words or phrases they say so that you can prompt them to gain a better understanding or more depth. Not only is this important for gaining quality information, it is important for let the participant guide the disscussion. Allowing this will ultimetly gather information grounded in their perception of "what is going on in the area of interest".

The researchers perception/biases - during data collection.
When asking questions during data collection it is important to be aware of your own perception, in order to be avoid leading the participants to support your percpetion/bias or assumptions. How to manage this???? Well i thouht about it for a while...and decided that clearly identifying my answers to the questions would help me to become aware of "what not to ask" and making sure that i utilise the questions that i have prepared (as well as double checking that the questions i take with me to the interviews are not leading).

What to do if situations. Clearly if something out of the ordinary occurs e.g. i get questioned, interuptions emotional outburst, participants stray from the questions, etc) i need to have guidelines in place in order to get myself and the participants back on track. I plan to go through some scenarios and talk with my superviser about "what to do it scenarios"..

After talking about interviewing we had the chance to analyse an interview - and pick out questions that were leading, or unclear. Also during this we noticed some of the challenges and realities of interviewing. It was really interesting especially when you get a participant where you are consitently "digging" for answers. This made me wonder whether the question were simple enough or prehaps the content within them was hard for the participant to understand. I guess thats what we were talking about "matching the level of the questions to the ability and age of the participants"

Also during this session we observed our questions being used to interview someone else. It was so beneficial to here if the interviewee was struggling to understand what the question was asking...however this may be a challenge during a teleconference!!!!!! but i guess "silence or ummmmmmm" will be the main prompt to reword or clarify what is being asked....

Looking forward to my pilot focus group to test out my interview skills..and see if the questions are going to "work" in my favor to get some discussions going.

Well at least i have some resources to come back to in order to reflect on how it goes, and analyse my interview skills and questions.