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As a rule, interviews of an hour or so are acceptable to most respondents: Beyond an hour or so, many respondents can become less cooperative, more guarded, and be less likely to provide full, honest, and accurate responses. As this happens, the quality and value of your data will steadily decline. If your interview runs longer than an hour or if you see signs of resistance from respondents, review your items and see what you can cut. As part of your pretesting, time how long your interviews last - from the time you appear at a place to the time you make your exit. Getting the length of an average interview is important. This information will let you estimate how many interviews you can do in a day, a week, or a month. With this information, you can determine if you will be able to interview all the members of your sample in the time you have available. In addition, pretest interviews allow you to check how well you can conduct interviews. As we point out in greater detail in the following chapter, interviewing is a social process and involves certain social skills. Interviewing also requires skill in asking questions and in recording responses. Some people are better at this than others, but we all can learn how to improve our interviewing skills. Pretesting gives you an opportunity to test your interviewing skills, discover areas in which you feel uncomfortable or do not perform well, and to learn how to improve your interviewing skills. Pretest interviews also provide an opportunity to test ways of introducing yourself and the survey to respondents. By the end of your pretest, you should be confidant that respondents receive your introduction positively and that you are comfortable using your questionnaire in interviewing. Don't feel badly if your first draft questionnaire is not perfect. It is very hard to anticipate all the ways persons will respond to questions. Experienced researchers expect difficulties with questionnaires. They prepare for this by conducting a thorough pretest of a preliminary version, revise this, and, if necessary, conduct additional pretests before preparing the final questionnaire. You should plan to do the same. If you have to make many revisions in the first or even second drafts of your questionnaire, another pretest is in order. Your goal should be to create a questionnaire that you know contains items respondents are able and willing to answer honestly and one you are comfortable in using. Preparing the final questionnaire At some point you will decide that no further improvements can be made in your questionnaire. At this time you will be ready to put the questionnaire in its final form. Our final advice is that you make the questionnaire as neat as possible; allow plenty of space between items; show all response categories in a clear and consistent manner; and allow enough space for writing responses to open-ended items. It is a good idea to make about 10% more copies of the final questionnaire than you think you will need for interviewing. You will want some extra copies to use for tabulating results and to include in an appendix of your report. Qualitative surveys Most surveys are based on a quantitative approach, with use of a questionnaire and structured interviewing. Surveys also can be based on a qualitative method, using unstructured interviewing. With unstructured interviewing, the interviewer uses a conversational style to obtain information from respondents. This approach allows an investigator to explore all possible thoughts or views of the respondent and to get these in the respondent's own words with all their emotional content. Unstructured interviewing often produces ideas that would never have been found using a questionnaire. An investigator using unstructured interviewing starts with a general idea of what he or she wants to know and draws up a set of broad questions for getting relevant information. The investigator starts an interview with a few initial questions, and lets the respondent take the lead to a large extent. Respondents are encouraged to talk at length. The investigator selects portions of responses that are particularly revealing and follows up with additional questions. When the conversation wanders too far off the topic, the investigator brings it back to the topic with a question or two. New questions can be introduced at any time as well, but there is no predetermined order or specific working set in advance for questions. |