Learning to Conduct Interviews

Earlier this spring, I finished my first year as a graduate student studying engineering education. This year has been a year of countless new experiences, and many new learning opportunities. Before coming to OSU, I had spent five years working in industry, and helped develop unique systems for clients, so I felt as if I was coming into graduate school with a good research foundation. While this may be true in a broad sense, my turn from Mechanical Engineering to Engineering Education meant that I needed to learn how to be an effective qualitative researcher as well. Fortunately, I was able to get involved with the Pathwaysproject, which has introduced me to one aspect of qualitative research, interviewing.

Understanding Engineering Pathways and their Impact on Community and Identity, or Pathways  is exploring how the choices made in first-year engineering (FYE) programs impact the community and identity development of students who have taken different pathways (for example, transfer students, regional campus students, etc) to and through their engineering degree. We’re working in conjunction with Mississippi State University.  This year, I helped both with the Baseline phase, which is a survey of students currently enrolled in FYE programs, and Phase 1, which is interviews of students who are one year removed from their FYE courses. Over the course of 3 weeks, we ended up interviewing 17 students about their first-year experiences.

When we started the interviewing process, I was nervous. I felt so new and inexperienced, and I, along with an undergraduate researcher, was being turned loose to interview students about their first-year experiences, when the only interviews I’d ever been involved with were when I was applying for jobs. The first interview we completed went fairly well, but I’ve learned a lot since then. Here are some of the things I learned from conducting interviews this year that may be helpful to new interviewers:

  • Pause before you ask the next question. Sometimes, given a moment of silence, the participant will start talking again and provide you with more details that you may or may not have gotten had you moved on to your next question. This also gives you a moment to collect your thoughts and phrase your question coherently.
  • Think about your research question throughout the interview. Sometimes, when I forgot to do this, I found myself veering down paths that, while interesting, weren’t obviously applicable to the research question we were trying to answer. While you may end up somewhere useful eventually, you may have gotten there more quickly if you’d kept your research question in mind throughout the interview.
  • Be careful of how you phrase your questions. As a fan of podcasts such as Serial, Truth and Justice, and Undisclosed, I have listened to a lot of police interviews where people were lead to “knowing” information that “only the killer knew” because of the way that the interviewer framed their questions. I always thought that it was crazy that these professional interviewers would mess up like that! Until I was the one doing the interviews-then I saw how easy it was to slip into leading question. I have a little more sympathy for those police officers now! To avoid this, try to keep your questions as open as possible. While you want to get certain information from your participants in order to answer your research question, try not to suggest the “right” answer to your participant. For example, instead of “did that experience make you feel frustrated?” try “how did that make you feel?”

I learned a lot this year about interviewing and certainly have more to learn, but I will feel more confident when we follow up with these students over the next two years!

-Abby Clark