Monday 29 October 2012

Reflections on being an Interviewee


Last weekend I had an interesting encounter on the street. I was heading through the Philosopher's Walk, on my way to meet a friend, when a total stranger stopped me on the path and asked if he could ask me a few questions about "student life." Normally I would have said no to this - I don't like talking to people I don't know, and I don't like being put on the spot to answer questions, and I find that kind of stopping-strangers-on-the-street method of gathering information a little bit invasive. But I said yes, because I got the impression he was a student and I thought it might be a good opportunity to observe a research method in action.

It was a really strange experience, as an interviewee, to begin answering questions with no real sense of what the questions were going to be about, and with no idea what it was the interviewer was trying to find out. All I knew before we began was that he wanted to know about "student life" -  but what he actually ended up asking me about was how I, as a student, celebrated birthdays. I was distracted, when answering his questions, by trying to anticipate what he wanted to know or what he was actually trying to find out. I don't know if it was a halo-effect kind of thing - I didn't really care about telling him what he wanted to hear, but I was trying to figure out what he was actually doing. Would it have been that hard for him to preface his request with, "I'm interested in finding out about how university students celebrate birthdays?" I feel like just that tiny bit of extra context would have made it easier for me to answer his questions.

It turned out that he wanted to find out whether or not I would find a particular product (some sort of content aggregation thingy for finding birthday gifts based on things like age & gender, from the looks of it?) useful. In the end I wasn't sure what his motives were and felt a little weird about the fact that I let myself get roped into an interview I didn't really know the whole context of. I realize this is probably not going to be how most of us conduct interviews in our research careers, but it was interesting all the same and made me wonder about how or if to prepare a respondent for an interview you're conducting.

In another class I am taking, we had an in-class workshop on conducting semi-structured interviews. When we prepared our interview questions, some of us made a point of giving our questions a little bit of context, and others did not. Is there a reason to choose in one direction or the other? Or, I guess, what is the benefit of giving your respondant no/limited context?  I feel like it would be to everyone's benefit to give a little bit of explanation - by at least letting the person your interviewing know what it is, in a general way, you are trying to explore - but maybe I'm wrong.




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