Designing interview
questions
Resources
• Purdue OWL, Creating Good Interview
and Survey Questions
– http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/55
9/06/
• Turner, D.W. Qualitative Interview Design:
A Practical Guide for Novice Investigators
– http://www.engin.umich.edu/teaching/crltengin
/engineering-education-researchresources/turner-qualitative-interviewdesign.pdf
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Tips from OWL
• Avoid biased questions
• Avoid double-barreled (multipart)
questions
• Avoid ambiguous questions
• Avoid wordy questions
• Avoid questions that are not related to
your goals
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Tips from Shaun
• What are you trying to find out?
– Write backwards. Start with the results, figure
out what to ask
– Give participants an opportunity to share the
details of your life
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Debugging questions
• Avoid questions that are…
– Overly generic
– False dichotomies (“do you prefer cheap items or
high quality items?” … “it depends”)
– Multipart questions (double-barreled)
– Wordy
– Unnecessary
– Just because someone has done something
doesn’t mean they remember it
• How many times have you looked at your phone today?
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Pilot pilot pilot
• On your team members, family, friends…
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Activity
• Work on G2 interview questions
• Share your question list with another team
– Other team identifies questions that are
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•
•
•
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Ambiguous
Difficult to answer
Double-barreled
Unnecessary
Confusing
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• (10 minutes) Pair up with another group
and test your questions
– 1 person: ask questions
– Others: take notes; what was difficult to
answer? Ambiguous? etc
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