Doing semi-structured interviews

Given this week's readings I thought I'd share a bit about my past experience in conducting semi-structured interviews. For my last masters (Comp. Sci/HCI) I wound up doing a study on how photos and other mementos are stored and displayed in the home that involved going to a number of participant homes and getting "the tour". It was a really great experience despite the fact that I'm terribly shy under the best of circumstances, and was generally scared out of my wits to begin with.

A couple of aspects of this methodology seemed really useful for the research. First, doing the interviews in context seemed to really illustrate and help with the disparity between what people talk or think about in the moment, and what they actually do. Being able to see and ask about various artifacts revealed how these things disappear into everyday life - participants often had stories to tell about things they wouldn't have thought of off the top of their head.

As well, I was able to conduct the interviews with the help of another researcher - this helped in managing all the note-taking and documentation, and helped avoid the pitfalls of missing aspects in the moment, as we could both be listening and asking questions. As well, working in a pair helped manage the insider-outsider disparity - in this case I was more of the outsider (w.r.t. photography), seeing things with relatively fresh eyes, and my co-investigator was more of the insider, with the expertise to ask and discuss things I might have been less equipped to.