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Complete the following questions to help you plan whom you will interview and what questions to ask.
1 Ask people to be specific and elicit more detail by asking them to tell a story or give an example.
2 Be sure to tell people how you plan to use the information they share with you.
3 Get consent to record. It’s the law in most states.
4 Throughout the process, endeavor to summarize and unify your observations.
5 Create an interview guide with your questions and activities in one place.
6 Prepare a description of your project ahead of time to introduce interviewees to your work.
7 Use a combination of short and long answer formats. For example, consider yes/no questions followed by open-ended questions about why people have that view.
8 Evaluate each question, asking yourself, “What am I hoping to learn by asking this?”
9 Make sure to test your questions with a few people to help you improve the questions.
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Articulate project goals. What do you need to know to inform your problem definition?
Research and sampling design. Whom do you want to study? How many will be enough so that you are no longer surprised by what you learn?
Recruit participants. Who can help you talk to the people you identify in exercise 2?
Write down a series of questions and activities for your interviewees to last about half an hour. But create extra questions to last an hour in case you end up having longer.
Create activities: Some of these might involve direct questions but you can also ask people to undertake an activity, such as testing a website, and narrate their observations.
Collect and document. How will you document your interviews?
Draw insights and analysis. What have you learned?
Hit save once you have completed filling out the worksheet. If you set a password, you can come back and edit it anytime!
If you like to receive your responses via email, please enter your email address below too.
Having trouble with this exercise? Get in touch with us: hello@solvingpublicproblems.org