In qualitative research, I think it is quite common for interview questions to develop and evolve during the research process. For that process to be most effective, you need to alternate between data collection and analysis. So, if you have not been analyzing the interviews you've done so far, I would suggest taking a break from data collection to examine what you already have, and then reflect on what new data would add the most to your understanding.

One thing that might come out of that reflection is a clearer sense of your research goals and the interview questions that it would take to address those goals. Another possibility is that you develop a better sense of who would be your best sources for future interviews. In particular, one reason why you might have to "jump around" in the content of your interviews is because you are talking to people with a very wide range of experiences. Narrowing in on the kinds of experiences that interest you most could also help you develop interview questions that are targeted to those experiences.

The advice of supervisors will be valuable.  My supervisor used to remind me to ask for more rather than less, because I have just one opportunity to interview.  I think this is a useful link.

"Write your own rationale, in terms of statements like, ‘I need to know whether or not senior members of staff are more likely to support the moves to introduce appraisal and what reasons they have for the positions they express.   I need to find out why some junior staff seem opposed, ie are they misinformed about the nature of the proposals or do they find them threatening in the context of performance related pay? "

http://www.edu.plymouth.ac.uk/resined/interviews/inthome.htm

Dear Sara,

I think using semi structured interviews is a good start. Perhaps the questions you are using as your prompts in the interviews along with the way they have worked might form the basis for your questionnaire questions. You should also look at the literature and identify key themes.

Another approach would be to pilot a questionnaire. We recommend this guide: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/media/wwwlboroacuk/content/library/downloads/advicesheets/questionnaire.pdf.

 Dear Ms. Alshareef,

I'm far from being an expert in research methods, but I remember reading somewhere that the "right" interview question should be the one that generates enough information for you to answer the research question.  

I came across the following interview type that may additionally be of use in your collecting data from diverse interviewees. It 's from the link that follows.

"In the exploratory interview, the question areas are pre-determined but the respondents are allowed some latitude to answer in their own way and the interviewer may probe for more information in promising areas." 

http://www.informat.org/researchmethods/researchmethods-2-00.html

Best regards,

Cameen

In qualitative research, I think it is quite common for interview questions to develop and evolve during the research process. For that process to be most effective, you need to alternate between data collection and analysis. So, if you have not been analyzing the interviews you've done so far, I would suggest taking a break from data collection to examine what you already have, and then reflect on what new data would add the most to your understanding.

One thing that might come out of that reflection is a clearer sense of your research goals and the interview questions that it would take to address those goals. Another possibility is that you develop a better sense of who would be your best sources for future interviews. In particular, one reason why you might have to "jump around" in the content of your interviews is because you are talking to people with a very wide range of experiences. Narrowing in on the kinds of experiences that interest you most could also help you develop interview questions that are targeted to those experiences.

Dear Sara,

I hate to burst the buble, but there is probably never a guarantee that you are asking the "rgiht" questions, or even that you are seeking "the right answer". If there are such things as "right" questions and answers.

Notwithstanding, there are better ways to seek answers to research questions. You are probably interested in forming open questions which may generate rich answers. This is a general advise for qualitative researchers. 

I recommend two books that may assist you in moving from "big research questions" to the more specific "small interview questions.

1. Kvale, S., & Brinkmann, S. (2009). Interviews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. Sage.

And more so:

2. Josselson, R. (2013). Interviewing for qualitative inquiry: A relational approach. Guilford Press.

Good luck.

I agree with David Morgan's response, but would add a point from Robert Weiss's Learning From Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interviewing, the book on interviewing that I use in my qualitative methods course:

"What is essential in interviewing is to maintain a working partnership. You can get away with phrasing questions awkwardly and with a variety of other errors that will make you wince when you listen to the tape later. What you can't get away with is failure to work with the respondent as a partner in the production of useful materia.l" (p. 119). 

For more on this, see the discussion of research relationships in my book Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach, and the sources cited there.

I agree with many of the comments above.  I especially like David Morgan's comment about stepping back from data collection and checking out if your questions are answering what is needed and how do they need to be reconsidered.  

Dear Sarah,

This is the most difficult part of the interview method--making sure that your questions measure your variables, (and I am using "measure" loosely here), and keeping questions consistent across subjects. I always have a set of core questions that do not vary across subjects. Don't allow variables such as business type and age take your eye off of the ball. Focus on the larger questions. What questions are you asking about spatial mobility and women entrepreneurship? Are you wondering if the degree of spatial mobility affects the ability of women to start businesses? What do think the relationship is between spatial mobility and women as business owners?  Everyone here has given you excellent advice. The questions do change as your research evolves. If you want to be sure that your questions measure what you think they are measuring, then ask someone in the field to look over your survey instrument. Even the most seasoned researcher needs feedback from colleagues. Best wishes, Andrea.

Dear Sarah,

Excellent advice from experts in the field! The only other thing I would add is have a clear research question in mind when constructing your instrument. What is the gap in the research that this study should fill? If this is a  domain with very little research, you may be in an exploratory phase of your study and the questions you ask now may inform a more formal instrument (semi-structured interview guide) later. But having a clear idea of what you are investigating (as per Dr. Simpson) will really help guide your instrument creation-- good luck!

Michelle

Hello Sarah,

I'm working on the same kind of topic (mobility and citizenship). I interview young mobile high-qualified workers in Brussels and I think that important questions will gradually arise as long as you have your research question clear in mind, as Michelle said.  As your question will evolve with time, pay attention to your interviewees' reaction and what seems relevant for them. For example, for me a really big part of my question was to know if there is a correlation between their transgenerational history of mobility and their own mobility. As a matter of fact, there is a strong connection.  But I realized that this question was not the most interesting part of the interview, and so other questions emerged from the interviewees themselves (for example, the question of their status and how to call them (migrant, expat, mobile?) generated great interest and a lot of discussions with them). I would say that after +/- 12 interviews, I knew what were the important questions to ask, because at that point, I knew on what I wanted to focus and how I wanted to approach my subject of research. Good luck!

Cécile

Cecile,, you're making an important point, but I think it's critical to distinguish between your research question(s) and your interview questions, which your response doesn't clearly do. Your research question formulates what you want to know or understand; your interview questions are what you ask your participants in order to gain that understanding. There isn't a strict logically deductive relationship between these; developing good interview questions requires consideration of the participant's experience and context, including what it is appropriate to ask in that situation and how the participant is likely to understand and respond to the question.  Particularly when interviewing participants from other cultures, you need to be aware of the ways in which interviewing incorporates unconscious cultural notms that your participants may not share (see Charles Briggs, Learning How to Ask). Creating a good interview guide requires a lot of careful planning and revision, evenif your research question is already clear (and as you note, even your research questions may require revision based on what you're learning). See Robert Weiss, Learning From Strangers, for good advice on interviewing.

Dear Joseph,

Of course you're right, I haven't been clear. My point was that the research question may evolve with time based on what emerged during the interviews.  Questions to ask in order to gain an understanding of your topic have to be prepared carefully. But I noticed that "what are the important questions to ask" will be more evident when the most relevant approach angle to deal with the research question will appear.  And paying attention to what seems the most important and interesting for the interviewees may be a good starting point.  

Cécile

Hi Sara,

Your problem is at the core of some of the most important methodological and epistemological problems of many qualitative research strategies.

I faced this problem a lot of times, because I am Italian and I do research both in Italian, French and English (I work in France). So I have to face also some language problems. That’s why I tried to develop some strategies to face this problem:

-          first of all, when I build my tools (interviews or focus groups, for example) I do some “interviews in the interviews”, that means that I do some meta-research asking for example some master students what is the signification that they give to the questions I’m supposed to use in my research. This strategies helped me and my teams to avoid some misunderstandings and some aspects that I took for granted concerning the questions that I use etc. For example I understood that the signification that I gave to the word “health” was very different compared to the different socio-cultural profiles of the people I was interviewing.

-          then I test my own interviews on myself: I ask my colleagues to interview me.

-          finally, of course I do some pre-test

That’s a bit confusing, but it’s my own strategy to face these kind of problems.

Ciao

Sandro

Using semi-structured interviews could be good start...

Also, You can have a look on a usefull book concerning this topic, that I had to this answer.

Finally, the advice that Alessandro POrrovecchio seems to me really useful.

Good luck !!!

Chris

Joseph makes some very good points and I second his suggestion that you read Briggs, its a fascinating book. It raises some serious questions about our understanding of what is going on when we ask questions. 

I also suggest having a look at Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow.   He suggests that people do not answer the questions we ask but that a question stimulates a range of implicit responses, one of which eventually emerges in our awareness.  The answer 'fits' the question but is usually not the result of conscious thinking about the question. We need to understand the dynamics of cognition in order to improve our interviewing processes. I argue that the context of a research interview creates an interpretative framework for the participant that drives implicit responses, which in many cases bear little relationship to the interpretive frameworks active in the situation being investigated. This is a complex topic and I can't go into it here.  I hope to publish an extended discussion on this topic soon but you could have a look at the attached document for an outline.

What does that mean for your question? I will start by saying that your choice of technique should depend on your research question and your analysis. If you are looking for qualitative information from a smallish sample of interviewees and you know what questions you want to ask, then structured or semi-structured interviews give you a framework for analysis.  The responses to your questions are already sorted by the interview structure.  If you want to explore ideas and find out the nature of the issues then you may be better off having a conversation and responding to the issues as they are raised by the participants.  If you are interested in this approach, Patton in Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods has a useful notion of  'sensitizing concepts' - a set of categories that you want to explore.  If you want to be able to generalise across a population, then there may be an argument for more structured questions.

However, there is now good evidence that even in surveys, data quality is improved by exploring the topic with interviewees rather than relying on a standard list of questions (Krosnick, JA 1999, 'Survey Research', Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 50, pp. 537-67.) 

I  tend to use either unstructured interviews with sensitizing concepts or to structure my interviews using elicitation techniques to stimulate interpretative schema.  See attached

Conference Paper Understanding the subjective: eliciting hidden meaning

Charles Briggs's Learning How to Ask makes some fundamental and important points about interviewing, but it's not an easy read; it uses some heavy sociolinguistic theory that may be hard to follow for those not familiar with this field. There are lots of good, more basic books on interviewing; my favorite is Robert Weiss's Learning From Strangers. (iI's also not expensive.)

I like Rubin & Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data, as a more detailed introduction (and somewhat more expensive).

I like "Talking to Humans", Giff Constable. Which might be quite suitable for the target you mentioned.

Cheers,

Anna