How to conduct better Psych Interviews

These are the things I gathered from experience and also through the help of one of my professors. Actually most of them were based on mistakes that I committed and were constructively criticized by my prof. I'm now ready to take that plunge into the recesses of more in-depth interviews.

Without particular sequence, here are the useful tips you could use in doing interviews for qualitative empirical studies:

1) Memorize the themes of your interview and ask questions as you naturally do. Don't read them. Reading the questions sound so fake. I can attest to this.

2) Listen like how you listen to a friend. It fosters open conversation.

3) Dead air is okay. This is not a television interview nor is it a radio interview. It's a personal one-on-one interview in Psychology. Pausing then is perfectly fine especially when you're reflecting on the answers that have been shared by your respondent and connecting these to the next question to be asked.

4) Follow the flow of thought of your respondents. Make him or her recall particular events by following his or her lead. But be able to discern if you're still tackling the themes of your study and knowing how to go back to the topic at hand.

5) Allow yourself some time to think, to pause, and to even shift from English to Tagalog and vice versa.

6) Be comfortable and your respondent will be comfortable.

7) Ask questions when you don't understand what your respondent is saying.

8) Learn to multi-task in a microlevel. Listen, analyze, compose questions, ask, and analyze again but do all these while listening constantly.

9) Write short notes if needed and return to particular topics that need more focus.

10) In order for interviews to be in-depth, you have to probe and prod but you can never ask leading questions. Leading questions are those pre-conceived questions that make respondents feel like they thought of particular ideas but they actually didn't because you just fed them these ideas. It's different from observations gathered during the interview with which you are encouraged to ask the respondents for confirmation.

10.5) Make sure your recorder works. And if it works, make sure that if it's digital, it completely "saves" your interview. No matter how good an interview has been, if it does not get documented verbatim, important data are lost. And all you're left with are the following: additional interview experience, a little hint of regret, an attempt to make a joke out of a dilemma, charging everything to experience, and scheduling another respondent to be interviewed in exchange for the lost data.

I hope you get to enjoy all your Psych interviews as much as I enjoy mine!

CHEERS :)