The interview studio
Introduction to Social Research Methodology
Aim
Interviewing is a craft, and crafts are learned by doing. In this exercise you will draft a semi-structured interview guide from real research questions, then use it — under observation — in a live role-play. By the end you should know, from the inside, how hard it is to ask a genuinely open question, how tempting it is to lead, and how many probing opportunities slip past an interviewer who is thinking about the next question instead of listening to the current answer.
The brief from Meridian
The board of Meridian — the mid-sized Polish retail-and-services company you have been advising all semester — has approved a qualitative phase of the turnover study. Recruitment of participants has already been handled (that was session 10’s problem); your job today is the instrument and the technique. The two research questions this interview study must serve are:
RQ1. Why do Meridian employees who resign decide to leave, and how do those decisions develop over time?
RQ2. How do current employees experience day-to-day management and support in their stores, and what role does this play in their intentions to stay or leave?
Task 1: draft the interview guide (15 minutes, pairs)
With your partner, draft a semi-structured interview guide for a 45-minute interview with a current Meridian store employee, serving the two research questions above. Your guide must contain exactly:
- One opening question — easy, factual, unthreatening; something that builds rapport and gets the participant talking.
- Three key questions — open questions that carry the research, ordered from general to specific and from comfortable to sensitive. Under each key question, write one planned probe you will use if the answer stays on the surface.
- One closing question — one that hands control back to the participant before the interview winds down.
Remember the cardinal rule from today’s session: do not read the research questions out loud to the participant. Translate them into the participant’s world — concrete experiences, specific events, everyday language.
Quality checklist
Before you declare the guide finished, test every question against this checklist. Fix anything that fails.
Keep the guide legible — you are about to use it.
Task 2: the interview studio (25 minutes, trios)
Form groups of three by joining another pair and splitting (one pair member joins a different trio). Each trio runs three rounds of 7 minutes, rotating through three roles so that everyone plays each role once. Use one of the two guides your trio has brought; swap guides between rounds if you wish.
- Interviewer — conducts a real semi-structured interview using the guide. In seven minutes you will manage the opening question, one or two key questions, and probes. Do not rush to cover everything: depth beats coverage.
- Respondent — plays the Meridian employee described in the persona card below. Stay in character, improvise freely from the backstory, and behave like a real participant: answer what you are asked, volunteer nothing you are not asked for, and open up only when the interviewer earns it.
- Observer — says nothing during the interview. Completes the structured feedback sheet below, then delivers two minutes of feedback at the end of the round: one thing done well, one leading question quoted verbatim, one missed probe opportunity.
After each round, rotate roles and reset the timer.
Persona card: the respondent
You are Ola Nowak, 26, a senior sales assistant at Meridian’s store in a mid-sized shopping centre. You have worked there for four years — longer than almost anyone on the shop floor.
Your situation, for you to improvise from:
- You mostly like the work itself and you are good at it: regular customers ask for you by name. You trained three of the newer staff.
- Your store has had three managers in two years. The first was excellent and left for a competitor. The current one, in post five months, changes the rota at short notice and communicates mainly by pointing at the printout in the back room. Weekend shifts land on you disproportionately, you suspect, because you don’t have children.
- Two of your closest colleagues resigned in the past six months. One went to a rival chain for slightly more money; the other left retail entirely, saying she was “tired of being invisible”. You talk to both of them regularly and know exactly why they left.
- You have quietly updated your CV, but you have not applied anywhere yet. You would stay for surprisingly little: predictable rotas, a manager who says good morning, and some sign that four years of experience counts for something.
- You are polite but initially guarded — the interview was described as confidential, but you are not sure you believe it. You will not mention the CV, your colleagues’ real reasons for leaving, or your feelings about the current manager unless the interviewer asks open questions, probes, and earns your trust. If asked a leading question, agree blandly with it and say nothing more — exactly as a wary employee would.
Observer’s feedback sheet
Copy this table onto paper (or use a device) and tally during the interview:
| What to watch | Tally / notes |
|---|---|
| Leading questions — count each one; write down the worst offender verbatim | |
| Closed questions where an open one was needed — count | |
| Missed probe opportunities — moments where the respondent hinted at something (“it’s been a strange year…”) and the interviewer moved on; note the best example | |
| Probes used well — silence held, echo, elaboration, example, clarification — count and name them | |
| Talk-time balance — estimate the interviewer’s share of talking time (target: about 20%) | |
| Opening and closing — did the interview open with rapport and close by handing control to the respondent? |
Task 3: plenary (remaining time)
We reconvene as a class and pool what the observers saw.
- The missed-probe league table. Each observer reports the most common type of missed probe opportunity they recorded. What do the misses have in common — and what does that tell you about where an interviewer’s attention goes under pressure?
- How did it feel to be interviewed? Respondents: what did the interviewer do that made you open up — or shut down? When you were asked a leading question, what did you do?
- From studio to fieldwork. If a role-played interview with a classmate produces this much guardedness and this many missed cues, what does that imply for real interviews at Meridian — where the respondent has a job to protect and the interviewer may be from HR? What structural safeguards from today’s session would you now insist on before fieldwork begins?
Before you leave
Hand in (or photograph and submit) your pair’s interview guide with the completed quality checklist. Keep your observer’s sheet: in session 14, when we analyse interview transcripts, you will see how every leading question and missed probe from today would have surfaced as a hole in the data.