Interview styles and question choice for 5-minute interviews
When conducting an interview there are three styles that can be employed: structured, unstructured and mixed (semi-structured).
Question
Style of questions to ask university students when conducting 5-minute interviews on the following topic: ‘Proposed ban on use of Facebook on University campus’
Answer
When conducting an interview there are three styles that can be employed: structured, unstructured and mixed (semi-structured).
Unstructured approaches are based around eliciting a broad response from the subject being interviewed, this is done through open-ended questions and through use of minimal set questions. Instead more questions are asked based around the responses of the subject and these are typically captured using comprehensive methods such as note taking or full transcripts.
This enables a greater amount of data to be collected from a single interview, but at the expense of taking longer to collect and analyse.
Question design for this style is normally broad, such as:
“What do you think about the proposed ban of Facebook on campus?”
It is important that the interviewer is suitably skilled to get a good response from the subject, to record their response accurately and to avoid introducing bias in the questions.
A structured approach seeks to formalised and uniform in the interview process. It will follow a set structure of questions and not deviate from this. Responses are normally brief (using closed questions), such as yes/no or using Likert scaling determined by the interviewer based on responses, though full, long responses may also be recorded, if sought.
Structured interviews are better suited to larger sample sizes than unstructured; larger samples offer more reliable and generalisable findings. It is also less demanding on the skills of the interviewer.
A mixed approach can incorporate both open and closed ended questions.
In the case presented a structured interview seems more appropriate. It could use question design such as:
“Do you support the proposed ban of Facebook on campus? – (Yes/No)” or,
“I support the proposed ban of Facebook on campus – (Likert scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree)”