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Interviews

What is it?

An interview is a one-to-one or one-to-many conversation where the interviewer will ask questions in order to understand a topic or gather more information from the person or people being interviewed.

There are a number of different types of interview:

  • Informal, conversational interview – no pre-prepared questions are asked so as to maintain an open and fluid conversation. The interview direction will depend on the answers as the interviewer and interviewee ‘goes with the flow’.
  • General interview guide approach – pre-set areas for discussion are agreed to ensure that the same general areas are discussed for every interview. This offers more structure than the informal approach, which also allows the interview to adapt if necessary.
  • Standardised open-ended interview – the same pre-set open-ended questions are asked to everyone being interviewed. For example, job interviews tend to follow this approach so that every candidate is asked the same questions. This is fairer, faster and makes comparison and analysis easier.
  • Closed, fixed-response interview – the same questions are asked to everyone being interviewed and each person must respond to the question from the same set of alternative answers.

Why does it matter?

Interviews matter because they allow for the collection of much richer data regarding a topic. Interviews tend to be much more intimate and so people can tell you more than they might expect to tell you or want to tell you.

The benefits of using interviews to gather data is the ability to dig behind the initial answers to really get to the nuggets of information or useful insights. Interviewing someone allows you to paint a much more vivid picture of what happened in a specific event or situation and allows you to hear the different individual perspectives on that event. Because the interview is usually in person in an intimate setting it is also possible for the interviewer to pick up on social cues such as voice tonality and body language which can help direct the discussion. This intimacy and verbal, and non-verbal, data download can help shed light on otherwise hidden connections between people, emotions, thoughts, events, behaviour and situations, which few other forms of data collection allows.

How can I use it in practice?

Interviews can be used in practice when you want to understand the meaning of central themes or to understand what the person being interviewed really thinks about certain topics.

Questionnaires can be quite impersonal and formulated, whereas if you get people talking they can often reveal far more about what is driving their behaviour or their actions. It is this meaning data that can be particularly useful.

In order for them to yield value, however, you need to know what it is you want to know and why. Make sure you are very clear about why you are conducting the interviews.

How do I get started?

Being able to interview others effectively requires skill. Being able to listen is crucial as is tact and sensitivity. If you don’t naturally have those skills then either consider training or seek to outsource the interviews to someone who is skilled in this area.

The effectiveness of this data collection approach will also depend on who is interviewed. Take some time to consider what types of people you want to interview and why.

If you are a novice interviewer, and even if you are not, it is always wise to record the interviews so that you can go over them after the event and perhaps pick up additional insights. You can choose to record your interview using audio or video, although audio can be more discrete and tends not to intimidate the interviewee as much as video.

Possible data sources

Possible data sources include written notes from the interviewer. That said, the interviewer’s primary role is to direct and manage the interview, so it’s always preferable to record the interview to ensure all data is captured.

The recordings, either video or audio, can then be partially or completely transcribed for further analysis including text analytics (Chapter 8), voice analytics (Chapter 12) and sentiment analysis (Chapter 9).

How difficult or costly is it to collect?

Interviews are not difficult to organise but depending on how many interviews you plan to conduct they can be quite expensive. In order to ensure you gather all the information you can you will need to record them and potentially transcribe the recordings, which can soon mount up.

Practical example

Interviews are often used as the data collection methods when people leave an organisation. Known as ‘exit interviews’ these are designed to discover what caused the individual to leave to assess whether it’s a one-off or something that the company could change to reduce staff turnover.

Obviously if a person is leaving a business then they can be quite hostile but an impartial interviewer can often extract reasons for the departure that may not be known without the exit interview.

Exit interviews allow for a thorough download of what went right and what went wrong with the role so that changes can be made to improve the experience for employees and potentially reduce costly absenteeism and turnover.

Tips and traps

As always, it is important to be really clear on the information you are seeking to identify and work out ahead of time what questions you are trying to answer.

Ultimately the quality of the data will depend on the skill of the interviewer and the quality of those being interviewed. Don’t simply assume that anyone can run the interviews. Plus, it is important to account for interviewer bias. Everyone goes into an interview situation with their own unique set of behaviours, beliefs and values which can inadvertently skew the results.

Further reading and references

To understand more about conducting interviews see for example:

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