Pre-Interview Process

Pre-Interview Education

Sophia Pascente

The second week of our project was dedicated towards educating ourselves on the pre-interview process. This process consisted of crafting an interview guide, pre-interview checklist, and evaluation rubric. However, we also focused on the verbal characteristics of a good interview. Personally, this is my first time conducting a series of qualitative interviews, so the educational materials on the characteristics of a good interview were incredibly pertinent to me. Some of these characteristics, such as the ones listed below, were then integrated into our evaluation materials for conducting the interview itself.

Examples of Characteristics of Good Interviewers:

• Knowledgeable about the topic

• Semi-structured outline

• Clear, gentle, sensitive, and open in dialogue

• Steering the conversation in a subtle manner

• Remembers answer to what the interviewee has already discussed

• Stops occasionally throughout the interview to summarize and interpret what the interviewee has said

• Balanced between different research questions

• Ethically sensitive as an interviewer

The above framework for interviewer conduct will drive us throughout the actual interviews themselves. That being said, other videos that we watched discussing the format of semi-structured interviews provided insight into the purpose of that structure for this project. For example, semi-structured interviews are valuable in that they provide familiarity and flexibility as you repreat the interview process. While they acknowledged that this structure can be complex for the interviewer, having a comprehensive interview guide should go a long way in bridging that gap. The education further instructed that the question guide should be based extensively off the research questions, should have around 20 questions prepared, and should be memorized to allow for a natural flow of conversation that builds from easy to difficult.

One of the most core takeaways from this education, however, is the importance of obtaining consent. This involves being as informative to your interviewee as possible and subsequently asking them for permission to record the interview, while ensuring that any identifying information would be redacted. Further, it highlighted the measures that should be taken immediately after the interview. Once the interview is completed, you should stay behind for 5-10 minutes and reflect upon the interview, write a thank you note to the person you are interviewing, continuously send project updates to make the work feel more realized, back up the audio recording, and transcribe the interview to reference back to later.

Each of the aforementioned parts of the interview process is critical in understanding how to conduct a qualitative interview, and was indispensable knowledge to use when crafting the interview guide, and evaluation materials.

Crafting an Interview Guide

Sophia Pascente

One of the first things we needed to develop before reaching out to individuals for interviewing was to develop a checklist to hold ourselves accountable. This includes ensuring that we give the interviewees time to contextualize, are transparent in our intentions, making our conversation anecdotal, and are including both pathos and logos-based questions. It further provides a mechanism for the evaluation of our questions in the interview guide itself, in order to ensure that it is structured as effectively as possible.

In addition to the checklist, we had to create an evaluation rubric to evaluate the way that we connducted each interview. This focuses extensively on the flow of the interview process as well as its format. We are looking into the depth of the information being provided, as well as the formatting, ability to ask follow up questions, and the ability to effectively community the goal of the project. This is the data that we hope to use to tweak our interview structure throughout the process, and ensure that the interviews themselves are achieving the end goal.

Finally, we worked on the development of the most important part of the pre-interview process, the interview guide. This guide is going to be the specific framework for the questions we plan to ask throughout the interview, and its flow. Currently, it is broken up into four main sections: Introductions, Getting to know the interviewee, discussion on the administrative burdens, and the wrap up/ conclusion. The core of the interview lies in that third section where we are evaluating administrative burdens. Here, we plan to incorporate the six hypotheses that our research question is founded upon. This includes discussion surrounding

• Locationality

• Education

• Advocacy Groups

• Stigma/ Psychological Impacts

• Administrative Practices

• Application Practices and Paperwork

Our interview guide as of March 4th, 2022 is comprehensive and will be the predominant mechanism we use to guide each of these individual interviews. You can find this guide linked here.