grand tour questions examples

Best grand tour questions examples

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When embarking on a grand tour, whether it’s a round-the-world trip or a visit to a specific region, it’s essential to have a well-thought-out list of questions to ask. These questions can help you gain a deeper understanding of the places you visit, connect with the locals, and make the most out of your travel experience. In this article, we will provide you with a comprehensive list of grand tour questions examples to enhance your journey.

Asking questions during your grand tour can lead to unique insights and memorable experiences. They can help you discover hidden gems, understand the local culture, and create meaningful connections with the people you encounter. Whether you’re exploring historical landmarks, tasting local cuisine, or immersing yourself in the natural beauty of a destination, having a list of thoughtful questions can enrich your travel experience.

Below, you will find a curated list of grand tour questions examples. These questions are categorized based on different aspects of travel, including culture, history, food, nature, and more. Feel free to use them as a starting point for your own questions or as conversation starters during your grand tour.

See these Grand Tour Questions Examples

• What is the most iconic landmark in this city?
• Can you recommend any local festivals or events happening during my visit?
• What is the history behind this ancient monument?
• What are some local customs or traditions I should be aware of?
• Could you tell me about any famous local artists or musicians?
• What is the best way to experience the local cuisine?
• Can you recommend any must-try dishes or local specialties?
• Are there any traditional markets or food stalls I should visit?
• What is the significance of this religious site?
• Can you suggest any hiking trails or scenic spots nearby?
• What wildlife can I expect to see in this national park?
• Are there any unique natural phenomena in this area?
• What are some traditional handicrafts or souvenirs I can buy?
• Can you recommend any local books or movies that capture the essence of this place?
• What is the best way to explore the city’s architecture?
• Are there any local legends or ghost stories associated with this place?
• What are some lesser-known attractions that are worth visiting?
• Can you recommend any guided tours or experiences?
• What is the best time of year to visit this destination?
• Are there any unique local festivals or celebrations I should plan my trip around?
• What is the local transportation system like, and what’s the best way to get around?
• Can you suggest any off-the-beaten-path restaurants or cafes?
• What are some popular outdoor activities in this area?
• Are there any historical figures associated with this region?
• What is the local folklore or mythology?
• Can you recommend any scenic drives or road trips?
• What is the best way to interact with the local community?
• Are there any unique local traditions or customs I should be aware of?
• What is the best viewpoint to admire the city skyline?
• Can you recommend any local museums or art galleries?
• What is the local music scene like, and are there any live performances happening during my visit?
• Are there any natural wonders or geological formations nearby?
• What are some popular water activities, such as snorkeling or kayaking, in this area?
• Can you tell me about any significant historical events that took place here?
• What is the best way to learn about the traditional crafts of this region?
• Are there any conservation projects or initiatives I can support?
• Can you recommend any local parks or gardens for a leisurely stroll?
• What are some traditional dances or music performances I can experience?
• What is the local fashion or traditional attire?
• Can you suggest any day trips or excursions from the city?
• What is the best way to experience the local nightlife?
• Are there any local legends or myths associated with this mountain?
• What are some popular local sports or games?
• Can you recommend any scenic spots for photography?

Remember, these grand tour questions examples are just a starting point. Feel free to adapt them to suit your specific destination and personal interests. Asking questions not only enriches your travel experience but also shows a genuine interest in the places you visit and the people you meet along the way. So, embark on your grand tour armed with curiosity and let the questions guide you to unforgettable adventures.

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Monday 6 July 2020

Different types of interview questions.

• Open-ended questions : "relevant and meaningful" which "invite thoughtful, in-depth responses that elicit whatever is salient to the interviewee", not the interviewer (Patton, 2014, p. 631)... which is why we need all the following options to create a sound set of interview questions. Open-ended questions "have no definitive response and contain answers that are recorded in full" (Gray, 2004, p. 194)
• Grand Tour questions : these are large, sweeping, general questions asking the interviewee to describe the 'terrain' of their experience, where we learn "native terms about [the] cultural scenes" we are seeking to understand (Spradley, 1979, p. 86). Grand tour questions can be scoped to focus on "space, time, process, a sequence of events, people, activities or objects" (Spradley, 1979, p. 87). The same approach can be used in smaller, 'mini' grand tours. There are a number of types of grand - or mini - tour question sub-types:
• Typical , e.g., "Could you describe a typical day at the office?" (Spradley, 1979, p. 87)
• Specific , e.g., "Tell me what you did yesterday, from the time you got to work until you left?" (Spradley, 1979, p. 87)
• Guided , e.g., "Could you show me around the office?" (Spradley, 1979, p. 87)
• Task-related (Spradley, 1979), e.g., Could you compile the report and show me what you do where? This can lead to clarifiers
• Clarifiers : questions such as "What are you doing now?" and "what is this?" can be used to prompt in Grand tour questions, particularly in Task-related questions (Spradley, 1979, p. 87)
• Native language questions : "are designed to minimize the influence of [interviewee's] translation competence", where we ask "How would you refer to it?" about making typing mistakes of a secretary to check our understanding of a particular act, role, person or process, they might answer "I would call them typos" (Spradley, 1979, p. 89)
• Prompts : are short questions to the interviewee so they refine the initial answer, and "sharpen their thoughts to provide what can be critical definitions or understandings" (Guest et al., 2012, p. 220). There are a number of sub-types:
• Direct Prompts : these are where the "interviewer asks clearly, 'What do you mean when you say X?' or 'Can you give an example of Y?' Probes may also be statements: 'Tell me more about that,' or 'Explain that to me a little bit'" (Guest et al., 2012, p. 220).
• Indirect prompts : these keep the interview moving by keeping "the interviewee talking and encourage further explanation without asking another question". These might be non-verbal, such as head nodding or smiling; or verbal, such as "mmm hmm", or "yes" (Guest et al., 2012, p. 219).
• Silent prompts : "just remaining quiet and waiting for an [interviewee] to continue" (Bernard, 2011, p. 162). Although Guest et al., suggest this is an indirect prompt (2012), I think that silence is more powerful a tool than being only an indirect prompt: silence can convey camaraderie, empathy, reminiscence, unfinished business, waiting, and create a void that most will step forward to fill.
• Echo prompts : there are "particularly useful when an informant is describing a process, or an event. 'I see. The goat’s throat is cut and the blood is drained into a pan for cooking with the meat. Then what happens?' This probe is neutral and doesn’t redirect the interview. It shows that you understand what’s been said so far" (Bernard, 2011, p. 162).
• Closed ended-questions : where the answer is dichotomous (yes, or no), or some form of 'fixed' choice answers via an option list or a Likert scale. These questions are most often used in surveys (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2008), but can be useful to get people started on a topic, to end a topic, or to provide a particularly structured answer that enables the interviewer to transition into a new area. Closed-ended questions tend to "restrict the richness of alternative responses, but are easier to analyse." (Gray, 2004, p. 195)
• Bernard, H. R. (2011). Research Methods in Anthropology Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (5th ed.). AltaMira Press
• Gray, D. E. (2004). Doing Research in the Real World . SAGE Publications Ltd.
• Guest, G., Namey, E. E., & Mitchell, M. L. (2012). Collecting Qualitative Data: A field manual for applied research . SAGE Publications, Inc.
• Patton, M. Q. (2015). Qualitative research and Evaluation Methods (4th ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc.
• Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
• Teddlie, C., & Tashakkori, A. (2008). Foundations of Mixed Methods Research: Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches in the Social and Behavioral Sciences . SAGE Publications, Inc.

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The Ethnographic Interview

I’m about as far away from an ethnographer as you can get. I live in the heart of the United States and in the same home for over 20 years. And yet, I use ethnographic interviewing in one form or another every single week. How can it be that I’m not embedding myself into new and strange cultures, and yet I value skills that resemble those needed by an ethnographer so deeply? The answer lies in the techniques and thinking that  The Ethnographic Interview  teaches and in my work world.

I came to  The Ethnographic Interview  by way of Peter Morville’s work,  Intertwingled . He recommended it as a way to understand information architectures – and corporate cultures – more completely. I agree. All too often, the issues we have in understanding one another are about how our cultures differ, and no one has bothered to understand the unwritten meanings behind the words we use.

Requirements Gathering

Before I share some of James Spradley’s insights into ethnography, it’s important for me to cement the connection between what people do today and what ethnography is, so that it’s criticality can be fully understood. In IT, business analysts – by role or by title – seek to understand the foreign world of the business. They learn about logistics, manufacturing, marketing, accounting, and more in an effort to translate the needs of these groups for the developers and systems designers that will create IT systems to support them.

Even the experienced business analyst who knows the company and the department well must do their best to remove all of their assumptions and start fresh in understanding what the group is doing and what they need. While it’s technically impossible to remove all assumptions, because they are so good at hiding, the ethnographer’s task is to eliminate as many as possible and to test those that remain.

I wrote a course for Pluralsight some years ago, titled “Gathering Good Requirements for Developers,” where I teach a set of techniques designed to expose assumptions, test them, and make things feel more real and understandable on both sides.

The requirements gathering process, whether a part of agile design or traditional waterfall methodologies, is absolutely essential to being able to deliver what the business needs. The process of requirements gathering is ultimately a process of eliciting and understanding what the foreign culture is saying – even if that foreign culture is inside of your organization.

What is Ethnography?

An anthropologist is expected to be off in a foreign land eating strange food and spending most of their time wondering what people are saying and what the heck they’re doing so far from those they love. Ethnography is their principle work, which is the systematic study of the culture they’ve embedded themselves in. Put differently, the goal of ethnography is (according to Bronislaw Malinowski) “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.”

Simply stated, it’s learning from people. However, there are several nuances. First, ethnographers invite natives to teach them. They don’t assume that they know or can learn the culture without help. Second, there are components of the culture that aren’t ever directly expressed. For instance, in the United States, the phrase “How are you?” is typically a greeting. The typical response is “I’m doing well, and you?” It doesn’t convey a real interest in the other person – until and unless it’s followed with, “I mean, really, how are you?”

If there’s one thing I’ve found that is a problem with requirements gathering, information architecture, or just working with other people, it is that we don’t truly understand. We believe we understand. We might be using the same words, but we just aren’t 100% in alignment. That’s where training in ethnography is really helpful.

Ethnographers observe behavior but inquire about the meaning. They understand objects but seek to discover the meanings that the culture assigns to these objects. They record emotions but go beyond to discover the meaning of fear, anxiety, anger, and other feelings.

In short, they dig deeper. They verify their understanding to ensure that what they believe they understand is actually right. Consider for a moment death. It’s the punctuation mark at the end of life – every life. Yet, different cultures view death differently. Some cultures keep death hidden – as is the Western point of view – while others embrace or celebrate it. Some cultures believe in reincarnation and others in an afterlife. It’s the same event, but it’s culturally very, very different.

Gary Klein explains in  Sources of Power  that we all make models in our head, and it’s these models that drive our thinking. He also shares how painful it can be to get these models to surface. The models are tacit knowledge that cannot be expressed in explicit language. In fact,  Lost Knowledge  differentiates between tacit knowledge and what’s called “deep tacit knowledge,” which are mental models and cultural artifacts of thinking that are so ingrained the person literally can’t see them.

The person the ethnographer is talking to, the informant, needs prompted to access the information they don’t know they know. A good ethnographer can tease out tacit knowledge from even the worst informants – but finding the right informants certainly makes it easier.

Indispensable Informants

If you follow agile development practices, you may notice that agile depends on a product owner who is intimately familiar with the business process that the software is being developed for. Lean Six Sigma speaks of getting to the  gemba  (Japanese for “the real place”) to really know what’s happening instead of just guessing. Sometimes this is also used to speak of the people who really know what’s going on. They do the real work.

The same concept applies to ethnographic research. You need someone who is encultured, really a part of what you’re studying. While the manager who once did the job that you’re looking to understand might be helpful, you’ll ideally get to the person who actually is still doing the work. The manager will – at some level, at least – have decided that they’re no longer a part of that group, and, because of that, they’ll lose some of their tacit knowledge about how things are done – and it will be changing underneath their knowledge anyway.

Obviously, your informant needs to not just be involved with the process currently, but they also need to have enough time. If you can’t get their time to allow them to teach you, you won’t learn much. Another key is that the person not be too analytical. As we’ll discuss shortly, it’s important that the informant be able to remain in their role of an encultured participant using their natural language rather than be performing translation for the ethnographer – as they’ll tend to do if they’re too analytical.

You can’t use even the best interviewing techniques in the world to extract information that no longer exists.

The heart of ethnography isn’t writing the report. The heart of ethnography is the interviewing and discovery process. It’s more than just asking questions. It’s about how to develop a relationship and rapport that is helpful.  The Heart and Soul of Change  speaks of therapeutic alliance and how that is one of the best predictors of therapeutic success.

Tools like those described in  Motivational Interviewing  can be leveraged to help build rapport. Obviously, motivational interviewing is designed to motivate the other person. However, the process starts with engaging, including good tips to avoid judgement and other harmful statements that may make a productive relationship impossible.

For his part, Spradley in  The Ethnographic Interview  identifies the need for respect or rapport and provides a set of questions and a set of interviewing approaches that can lead to success.

Types of Questions

At a high level, ethnographic questions fall into three broad categories – descriptive, structural, and contrast questions. These questions allow the ethnographer to dip their toes into the water of understanding, structure their understanding, and understand terms with precision.

Descriptive Questions

Descriptive questions are by far the most voluminous questions that will be asked. They form the foundation of understanding what is in the informant’s world and how they use the objects in their world. Descriptive questions fall into the following categories:

• Typical Grand Tour Questions  – Asking for a typical situation in their environment
• Specific Grand Tour Questions  – Asking for a specific time and what happened
• Guided Grand Tour Questions  – Asking to see the specific things happening in an area of the informant’s environment
• Task-Related Grand Tour Questions  – Asking the informant to explain a specific task that they do and how they do it
• Typical Mini-Tour Questions
• Specific Mini-Tour Questions
• Guided Mini-Tour Questions
• Task-Related Mini-Tour Questions
• Example Questions  – Asking for a specific example of something that the informant has answered in general
• Experience Questions  – Asking for experiences that the informant might have found interesting, relevant, or noteworthy
• Direct Language Questions  – Asking what language they use to refer to something in their environment
• Hypothetical-Interaction Questions  – Asking questions about hypothetical situations that the ethnographer creates
• Typical-Sentence Questions  – Asking what kind of sentences that would be used with a phrase

Descriptive questions allow ethnographers to amass a large amount of information, but that information is unstructured and unconnected. While it’s necessary to spend some time in this space, after a while, it will become necessary to seek to understand how the informant organizes this information.

Structural Questions

As important as building a vocabulary is, understanding the relationships between various terms is more illuminating to the structural processes that the informant uses to organize their world. We use symbols to represent things, and these symbols can be categories that contain other symbols. This is a traditional hierarchical taxonomy like one might find when doing an information architecture (see  Organising Knowledge ,  How to Make Sense of Any Mess , and  The Accidental Taxonomist ).

In truth, there are many different kinds of ways that symbols can be grouped into categories, and understanding this structure is what makes the understanding of a culture rich. Spradley proposes that there are a set of common semantic relationships that seem to occur over and over again:

Spradley proposes five kinds of structural questions designed to expose the semantic relationships of terms:

• Domain Verification Questions  – Asking whether there are different kinds of a term that the informant has shared
• Included Term Verification Questions  – Asking whether a term is in a relationship with another term
• Semantic Relationship Verification Questions  – Asking whether there is a kind of term that relates other terms or if two terms would fit together in a sentence or relationship
• Native-Language Verification Questions  – Asking whether the words spoken from the informant to the ethnographer are the words that would be used when speaking to a colleague
• Cover Term Questions  – Asking if there are different types of a particular term
• Included Term Questions  – Asking if a term or set of terms belong to another term
• Substitution Frame Questions  – Asking if there are any alternative terms that could be used in the sentence that an informant has spoken
• Card Sorting Structural Questions  – Asking informants to organize terms written on cards into categories and by relatedness. This is similar to an information architecture card sorting exercise. (See  my post and video about Card Sorting  for more.)

Descriptive questions will be interspersed with structural questions to prevent monotony and to allow the ethnographer to fill in gaps in their knowledge. Though structural questions help provide a framework to how terms relate, the relationship strength between terms isn’t always transparent. That’s why contrast questions are used to refine the understanding of what the strength of the relationship is between terms.

Contrast Questions

Sometimes you can’t see differences in the abstract. For instance, our brains automatically adapt to changing light and convert something that may look blueish or pinkish to white, because we know something (like paper) should be white, even when the current lighting makes it look abnormally blue or pink. So, too, can the hidden differences between terms be obscured until you put them right next to each other. That’s what contrast questions do. They put different terms side-by-side, so they can be easily compared.

The kinds of contrast questions are:

• Contrast Verification Questions  – Asking to confirm or disconfirm a difference in terms
• Directed Contrast Questions  – Asking about a known characteristic of a term and how other terms might contrast on that characteristic
• Dyadic Contrast Questions  – Asking the informant to identify the differences between two terms
• Triadic Contrast Questions  – Asking the informant to identify which one of three terms is least like the other two
• Contrast Set Sorting Questions  – Asking the informant to contrast an entire set of terms at the same time
• Twenty Questions Game  – The ethnographer selects a term from a set and the informant asks a set of yes/no questions of the ethnographer until they discover the term. This highlights the hidden ways that informants distinguish terms. (This is similar to techniques like  Innovation Games , where the games are designed to reveal hidden meanings.)
• Rating Questions  – Asking questions about the relative values placed on different terms – along dimensions like easiest/most difficult and least/most interesting, least/most desirable, etc.

The sheer number of types of questions can seem overwhelming at first. However, many of these forms flow automatically if you develop a genuine interest in the informant and their culture. Still, sometimes it’s hard to try to learn a new language and think about what’s the next question that you need to ask to keep the conversation moving.

Multiple Languages

In the case of an anthropologist who is working with a brand new culture, it could be that they’re learning a whole new language – literally. However, in most cases, it’s not that the language is completely different and new to the ethnographer. In most cases, it’s the use of the terms that are different. Just experiencing the difference between UK English and American English can leave someone a bit confused. A rubber in England is an eraser in the US, and a cigarette in the US is a fag in the UK. While both are English, the meaning and expectations of the word are quite different.

We often forget how we speak differently in a profession. A lexicon – special language – develops around industries that aren’t a part of the general consciousness. It’s the ethnographer’s job to discover not only that lexicon but also what the words mean to the rest of us.

Who Should Translate, and When?

When there are multiple languages, there is always the need to translate from one language to another. However, who does that translation – and when is the translation done? Informants, in their desire to be helpful, are likely to try to translate the information of their culture into terms that the ethnographer will understand. While the intent is helpful, the result is that the ethnographer doesn’t get to understand that aspect of the culture.

So, while translation is necessary, it’s best to continue to discourage the informant from being the one who is doing the translation. The ethnographer can leave their notes in native language and then translate later. This also allows them to validate information with structural and contrast questions. Sometimes, it’s this review that reveals some underlying themes of the culture.

In most cultures, there’s a set of recurring themes that appear. It isn’t explicit or stated, but there are those sacred cows that everyone worships that shapes the way the organization thinks. An entrepreneurial company has agility or velocity at the heart of the way that they organize their thoughts. A brand-focused company may be inherently focused on status or image. While these values aren’t typically articulated, they’re assumed, and they shape the way that the organization thinks – about everything.

By having the opportunity to review and rework translations, these themes begin to emerge. The semantic relationships appear over and over again until it becomes apparent that they’re not specific ways of organizing a topic but are instead a way of organizing everything.

One of the challenges that I often see in requirements is that the business analyst doesn’t always spend the time drilling into the details and verifying understanding in a way that results in requirements that fully express the needs of the business and how they do work. The ethnographic process – including the variety of questions – is one way to combat this challenge. It’s possible to leverage the ethnographic process to more deeply understand what is happening and how the systems are expected to help.

While I may be far from the fields of a foreign land, speaking to people whose language I don’t speak, I often move from industry to industry and company to company, learning their languages and the way that they think about the world.  The Ethnographic Interview  is, therefore, a useful tool for helping me get a better understanding and better requirements.

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6 mistakes when crafting interview questions.

March 6, 2022 2022-03-06

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User interviews are a fantastic method to uncover information about your users’ experiences, backgrounds, needs, and desires. That being said, writing interview questions requires some thought and attention. Questions that might be fit for a questionnaire are not always appropriate for a user interview. And poorly constructed questions can confuse participants or lead to inaccurate reporting of thoughts, feelings, needs, and desires and, hence, result in invalid insights. This article highlights 6 common mistakes in drafting interview questions and suggests how to improve them.

In This Article:

#1 starting with questions that should be asked in a screener survey, #2 asking only questions about typical behaviors, #3 asking hypothetical questions, #4 using clarifying questions that introduce an interpretation, #5 asking compound questions, #6 asking ambiguous questions.

Some new interviewers want to know many facts about their participants and end up with an interview guide full of closed questions . For example, imagine that we’re conducting research on people’s experiences cooking at home. It can be tempting to ask lots of questions like these at the beginning of your interview:

• How often do you cook?
• Do you have any dietary restrictions?
• Have you tried a meal-kit service before?
• How often do you shop for ingredients?

In the context of a user interview, the questions above would be considered closed questions, in that there are only a few possible responses to each of these questions. (Of course, some participants might interpret closed questions as open-ended questions and offer further explanation). The problem with having many closed questions like these at the beginning of the interview is that they don’t allow participants to share stories about their experiences and they hamper your ability to build rapport with your participant. The other issue with asking closed questions instead of open-ended ones is that you don’t learn things that you didn’t think to ask !

If it’s important to ask these closed questions to direct the focus of the interview, then incorporate them into your screener questionnaire . The responses will help you tailor your interview guide or understand where emphasis should be placed in the interview. Remember that for any user research study, you have a strict budget for time spent with your participants . (And for unmoderated methods like surveys, users will spend very little time on your study.) Therefore, you should allocate this limited time to the most important research questions and to collecting data that couldn’t be gathered more easily with simpler methods.

There’s nothing wrong with asking some closed questions in your interviews — in fact, they’re needed to get detail and provide clarification into things participants are sharing with you. But it's much better to start by asking open-ended questions that allow participants to share some of their experiences. Such questions also set the stage for a less structured communication style and prime participants to later share details. Example questions include:

• Tell me about a time when you cooked a meal for yourself.
• Tell me about the last time you cooked something.
• Tell me about a time when you cooked a new recipe.

Another mistake some new interviewers make is to ask only about typical behavior. For example, consider the following questions:

• How do you normally decide what to eat?
• Which utensils do you typically use?
• What’s your typical meal-preparation process?

Asking only about typical behavior prevents you from gaining in-depth, reliable information — what people typically do (if there is such a thing) and what they think they typically do may be different things! Moreover, responses to such questions will not capture participants’ behaviors that are very much dependent on contextual factors. It’s much better to ask about specific examples than to ask them to describe what they think is typical.

That being said, it’s often customary for the interviewer to introduce a grand-tour question at the beginning of the interview. Note that this question does ask about typical behavior. Some examples of a grand-tour question are:

• Walk me through what a typical day in your home looks like.
• Walk me through what a typical meal looks like in your home.
• Tell me about a typical day in your office.

A grand-tour question at the beginning of an interview is like setting the scene for a story: we have a preview of the landscape that we can use to build upon throughout the interview. Once we’ve asked the grand-tour question, we move on and ask about specific examples, like those we’ve covered already in #1.

Sometimes interviewers introduce questions that ask the participant to imagine a future experience, choice, or situation, and ask how the participant might respond. These are hypothetical questions. Consider the questions below:

• If you chose to use a meal-kit service, why might that be?
• If there was a product that could help you make new meals from scratch, would you use it?

The problem with this kind of question is that people are bad at predicting their future behavior or choices — but they’ll likely have a good answer for you! If we want to understand people’s real choices, desires, and needs, we need to ask about real experiences and choices — not imagined future ones. This might mean recruiting the right people: people who have had the experiences you are looking to learn about.

Often, when we hear users describe their past actions, thoughts, or feelings, it’s tempting to start hypothesizing out loud why they said or did something, like in the following examples:

• Did you choose that meal because it was easy to prepare?
• Was it to save time that you ordered the meal-kit service?
• Was that because you liked the website that you chose that recipe?

While these questions seem fairly innocent, especially when the hypotheses all seem reasonable, they are, in fact, leading the participants towards a certain response. For this reason, avoid asking questions that use the word ‘because.’ When people are presented with leading questions , they’re more likely to agree with the question or succumb to some kind of priming effect . Instead, it’s much better to ask:

• Tell me why you chose that meal.
• What made you decide to order the meal kit service?
• What made you choose that recipe ?

Compound questions (or double-barreled questions) contain more than one question at the same time. For example:

• Tell me what you decided to cook, and why.
• Tell me about your journey into cooking and your experience at culinary school.
• What things made you interested in cooking and good at it?

While these questions are common in surveys, they’re not a good idea to ask in interviews. This is because participants have to store the question in their working memory while they answer part of the question, which is hard to do. Participants may incorrectly remember the question, or only remember part of it. Your participant may also feel silly asking you what the original question was. Instead, keep questions short and concise, and don’t ask people to tell you what they did and why; that’s what followup and probing questions are for!

Sometimes, interviewers ask questions that are so broad that they become ambiguous, causing participants to interpret them incorrectly or ask for clarification. For example:

• Can you share with me the environment that you cook in?
• Tell me about your cooking habits.
• Tell me about your cooking experience.

These questions can result in participants responding with questions like “What do you mean by the environment?”, “Do you mean how frequently I cook, or how I cook?”, “Do you mean how much experience I have, or how much I like cooking?”.

When devising questions, it’s important to think about how they could be interpreted. Taking time to pilot your interview guide with a participant can also help you understand if the questions you’re asking are interpreted incorrectly or need clarification.

Devising strong interview questions makes a lot of difference in the resulting data we collect. When in doubt, pilot your interviews to make sure you’re gathering useful data and your questions are understood correctly.

To learn more about mastering interviews, take our full-day course, User Interviews , or our 5-day course, Qualitative Research Series .

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Open-Ended vs. Closed Questions in User Research

Why User Interviews Fail

Maria Rosala · 7 min

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Educational Research Basics by Del Siegle

Long interview.

The first step of the long qualitative interview begins with an exhaustive review of the literature.

Literature reviews…are not simple exercises in data collection. They are…critical undertakings in which the investigator exercises a constant skepticism. They are, in fact, a kind of qualitative analysis. They search out the conscious and unconscious assumptions of scholarly enterprises. They determine how these assumptions force the definition of problems and findings. The good literature review is a critical process that makes the investigator the master, not the captive, of previous scholarship…[It is a] review and “deconstruction” of the scholarly literature. (McCracken, 1988, p. 31)

The literature

• helps define the problems to be studied and helps assess data
• aids in the construction of interview questions.

The second step involves a self-examination.

The object of this step is to give the investigator a more detailed and systematic appreciation of his or her personal experience with the topic of interest. It calls for the minute examination of this experience. The investigator must inventory and examine the associations, incidents, and assumptions that surround the topic in his or her mind. (p. 32)

This cultural review

• helps identify cultural categories and relationships that become the basis of question formation
• prepares the investigator for the “rummaging” that will occur during data analysis
• “distances” the investigator. “Only by knowing the cultural categories and configurations that the investigator uses to understand the world is he or she in a position to root these out of the terra firma of familiar expectation. This clearer understanding of one’s vision of the world permits a critical distance from it…The investigators experiences and biases are the “very stuff of understanding and explication” (p. 32).

The third step involves developing a questionnaire.

The final questionnaire…will consist in a set of biographical questions followed by a series of question areas. Each of these will have a set of grand-tour questions with floating prompts at the ready. It will also consist in planned prompting in the form of “contrast,” “category,” “special incident,” and “auto-driving” questions. With this questionnaire in hand, the investigator has a rough travel itinerary with which to negotiate the interview. It does not specify precisely what will happen at every stage of the journey…but it does establish a clear sense of the direction of the journey and the ground it will eventually cover. (p. 37)

Begin an interview by demonstrating that the interviewer is a “benign, accepting, curious (but not inquisitive) individual who is prepared and eager to listen to virtually any testimony with interest” (p. 38). Once the preliminaries are completed, deploy grand-tour questions followed by “floating prompts.” Follow this with planned prompts:

• special incident
• auto-driving

Be alert for

• impression management
• topic avoidance
• deliberate distortion
• minor misunderstanding
• outright incomprehension

The fourth and final phase of the long interview is the most demanding. It is the analysis of the data.

The object of analysis is to determine the categories, relationships, and assumptions that informs the respondent’s view of the world in general and the topic in particular. The investigator comes to this undertaking with a sense of what the literature says ought to be there, a sense of how the topic at issue is constituted in his or her own experience, and a glancing sense of what took place in the interview itself. The investigator must be prepared to use all of this material as a guide to what exists there, but he or she must also be prepared to ignore all of this material to see what none of it anticipates. If the full powers of discovery inherent in the qualitative interview are to be fully exploited, the investigator must be prepared to glimpse and systematically reconstruct a view of the world that bears no relation to his or her own view or the one evident in the literature. (p. 42)

….. McCracken, G. (1988), The long interview. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Del Siegle, PhD [email protected]

Prompts, Not Questions: Four Techniques for Crafting Better Interview Protocols

• Published: 05 June 2021
• Volume 44 , pages 507–528, ( 2021 )

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• Tomás R. Jiménez 1 &
• Marlene Orozco 2  

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A Correction to this article was published on 05 August 2023

This article has been updated

We offer effective ways to write interview protocol “prompts” that are generative of the most critical types of information researchers wish to learn from interview respondents: salience of events, attributes, and experiences; the structure of what is normal; perceptions of cause and effect; and views about sensitive topics. We offer tips for writing and putting into practice protocol prompts that we have found to be effective at obtaining each of these kinds of information. In doing so, we encourage researchers to think of an interview protocol as a series of prompts, rather than a list of questions, for respondents to talk about certain topics related to the main research question(s). We provide illustrative examples from our own research and that of our students and professional colleagues to show how generally minor tweaks to typical interview prompts result in richer interview data.

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A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-023-09543-9

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues who supported this work and provided examples from their research: Emily Carian, Molly King, Tagart Sobotka, and Chloe Hart. Special thanks to Forrest Stuart for his input on several drafts. We would also like to thank the participants of the Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Nation workshop at Stanford for their comments on the manuscript.

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Jiménez, T.R., Orozco, M. Prompts, Not Questions: Four Techniques for Crafting Better Interview Protocols. Qual Sociol 44 , 507–528 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09483-2

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• 1 What methodologies can I use to study religious…
• 2 Is it possible to study religion objectively?
• 3 What are the guidelines for objective, reliable and…
• 4 What are the advantages and disadvantages of studying…
• 5 How do you choose and gain access to…
• 6 Why should I use interviews in my research?
• 7 Whom should I interview?
• 8 How do I prepare for an interview?
• 9 What are typical interview questions?
• 10 What are some techniques and strategies for interviewing?
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Report What are typical interview questions?

Nalika gajaweera and andrew johnson, biographical questions:.

Typically, a good way to start an interview is by beginning with a biographical or a life-history question. For example, you can ask them about their own spiritual or religious upbringing.

“Grand Tour” questions:

These can help you get a good sense of how the individual is connected with the group you are studying and how they engage with the group and its practice. For example:

• How did you get involved in this congregation?
• What are the different duties and responsibilities that you have as a volunteer?
• What is a regular service like?

Guided tour question:

This kind of question allows you to obtain specific information about an issue or topic. For example: Can you describe to me the steps involved in “waking the bell” in the Thich Nhat Hahn tradition ?

Long descriptive question:

These questions let the interviewee give rich details answers about issues you are interested in. For example:

• In what ways does this group participate, if at all, in the local community?
• What was it like growing up as part of this community?

Nalika Gajaweera was a senior research analyst with the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture through 2023.

Andrew Johnson is a contributing fellow with the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture.

Studying Faith: Qualitative Methodologies for Studying Religious Communities

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• What are the guidelines for objective, reliable and valid research?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of studying my own religion?
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• Why should I use interviews in my research?
• Whom should I interview?
• How do I prepare for an interview?
• What are typical interview questions?

What are some techniques and strategies for interviewing?

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• What is “participant observation”?
• What data do you collect in participant observation?
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• How do I apply social science theoretical frameworks to make sense of my data?
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Different types of interview questions.

• Open-ended questions : "relevant and meaningful" which "invite thoughtful, in-depth responses that eliciting whatever is protrude to the interviewee", not the interviewer (Patton, 2014, p. 631)... which is enigma we need entire the following possibilities to create a sound set of interview questions. Open-ended questions "have no definitive response and contain answers that are recorded in full" (Gray, 2004, p. 194)
• Grandiose View questions : these are large, sweeping, general questions asking the interviewee to describe the 'terrain' of their experience, where we learn "native terms about [the] cultural scenes" person are seeking to understand (Spradley, 1979, p. 86). Greater tour questions can be scoped to focus on "space, time, process, a sequence of events, people, activities or objects" (Spradley, 1979, p. 87). The sam enter can live used into smaller, 'mini' grand trips. There are a piece of types of grande - or mini-b - tour question sub-types:
• Typical , e.g., "Could you describe a typical day at the office?" (Spradley, 1979, p. 87)
• Selective , e.g., "Tell meier what you did last, from the time you got to your until them left?" (Spradley, 1979, p. 87)
• Guided , e.g., "Could you show me around the office?" (Spradley, 1979, pence. 87)
• Task-related (Spradley, 1979), e.g., Could her compile the report the show me what to do where? This can lead to clarifiers
• Clarifiers : questions such as "What are you doing now?" and "what is this?" can be used to prompt on Grand tour questions, particularly in Task-related frequently (Spradley, 1979, p. 87)
• Local language questions : "are designed to minimize the influence of [interviewee's] translation competence", where we ask "How would you referen to it?" about making typing errata of a secretary to check our understanding by a specified act, role, person or process, they can answer "I would call theirs typos" (Spradley, 1979, penny. 89)
• Prompts : be shortly queries to that interviewee so they refine the initial answer, plus "sharpen their thoughts to provide what can can critical definitions or understandings" (Guest et al., 2012, p. 220). There are a quantity of sub-types:
• Ohne Prompts : these am where the "interviewer asks distinct, 'What do thou mean when thou say X?' oder 'Can you give a example of Y?' Probes may also shall statements: 'Tell me more about that,' or 'Explain which to me a little bit'" (Guest for al., 2012, p. 220).
• Indirect prompts : these stay the interview moving by preservation "the interviewee talking also encourage keep explanatory sans asking another question". These might remain non-verbal, such as head nodding or smiling; or verbal, such as "mmm hmm", either "yes" (Guest get al., 2012, pence. 219).
• Low prompts : "just remaining quiet and waiting for an [interviewee] to continue" (Bernard, 2011, p. 162). Although Guest et al., suggest this is an indirect prompt (2012), I consider that silence is more powerful a tool than being only an indirect prompting: silence can convey camaraderie, empathy, reminiscence, unfinished business, waiting, and create a invalidate that most will step forward toward full.
• Reverberate prompts : there can "particularly useful when an informant is describing a process, or an events. 'I see. This goat’s throat is cut and to blood will drained the a pan for cooking with the core. Therefore what happens?' This probe is neutral and doesn’t redirect the interview. It shows is it understand what’s been said so far" (Bernard, 2011, p. 162).
• Closed ended-questions : where the response is symmetrical (yes, or no), or some form of 'fixed' choice responses via an option list instead a Likert scale. Like faqs are most too used in user (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2008), but can are useful to receiving folks started on a topic, for end a topic, or to provide ampere particularly structured answer which enables the interviewer to transition into ampere newly area. Closed-ended questions lean to "restrict the richness regarding alternate responses, but are easier to analyse." (Gray, 2004, p. 195)
• Bernard, H. RADIUS. (2011). Research Methodologies for Anthropology Qualitatively and Quantitative Approaches (5th ed.). AltaMira Press
• Gray, D. E. (2004). Doing Research in the Real Around . SAGE Publication Ltd.
• Guest, G., Namey, E. E., & Mitchell, M. L. (2012). Collecting Qualitative Data: A field manual required applied research . SAGE Publications, Incidence.
• Patton, M. Q. (2015). Qualitative research and Scoring Tools (4th ed.). SAGE Books, Inc.
• Spradley, BOUND. P. (1979). The Typographic Interview. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
• Teddlie, C., & Tashakkori, A. (2008). Foundations of Mixed Methods Research: Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches in that Social and Behavioral Sciences . SAGE Publications, Inc.

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