empirical-methods
Homepage for 17-803 "Empirical Methods" at Carnegie Mellon University
Project maintained by bvasiles Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
L5: Conducting Interviews (pdf, video)
Interviews are probably the most common method of data gathering in qualitative research. There are a variety of forms of qualitative research interviews, among which semi-structured interviews are the most typically used in computer science. Interviews are a great way to validate data and wonderful tools for exploratory investigation. The can often drive the formation of theories and hypotheses, and they are very common in mixed-methods designs. In this lecture we go over all the steps to rigorously conduct interviews. We discuss in detail how to create the interview guide (or “protocol”), how to recruit participants, and how to carry out the actual interviews (including practical guidance for motivating participants, asking, listening, understanding, probing, maintaining control, reinforcing, and recording).
Lecture Readings
King, N. (2004). Using interviews in qualitative research. In C. Cassell & G. Symon (Eds.), Essential Guide to Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research (pp. 11-22). London: Sage.
This chapter describes the main practical issues involved in conducting qualitative research interviews. It covers four steps in the process of constructing and using qualitative research interviews: defining the research question; creating the interview guide; recruiting participants; and carrying out the interviews. General advantages and disadvantages of the method are also discussed.
Seidman, I. (2012). Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide for researchers in education and the social sciences: Teachers college press. (Ch 4, Ch 6).
Ch4: Establishing access to, making contact, and selecting participants. The perils of easy access (e.g., interviewing people whom you supervise, your students, acquaintances, friends). Access through formal (unavoidable) and informal (useful if buy in) gatekeepers. Purposeful sampling to select participants (instead of random sampling as typical in experimental and quasi-experimental studies, since it is not feasible). Criteria for deciding how many participants are enough (sufficiency, saturation of information).
Ch6: Techniques and skills of interviewing. Listen more, talk less. Follow up on what the participant says (ask questions when you do not understand; ask to hear more about a subject; explore rather than “probe”). Avoid leading questions. Ask open-ended questions. Follow up, but don’t interrupt. Ask participants to reconstruct, not to remember. Keep participants focused and ask for concrete details. Follow your hunches. Use the interview guide (‘protocol’) cautiously (prefer questions that follow from what the participant has said, even if out of order).
Example Papers
Barwulor, C., McDonald, A., Hargittai, E., & Redmiles, E. M. (2021). “Disadvantaged in the American-dominated internet”: Sex, Work, and Technology. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) (pp. 931-936).
Wash, R. (2010). Folk models of home computer security. In Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) (pp. 1-16).
Grinter, R. E., & Palen, L. (2002). Instant messaging in teen life. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (pp. 21-30).
Dabbish, L., Stuart, C., Tsay, J., & Herbsleb, J. (2012). Social coding in GitHub: transparency and collaboration in an open software repository. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (pp. 1277-1286).
Manotas, I., Bird, C., Zhang, R., Shepherd, D., Jaspan, C., Sadowski, C., … & Clause, J. (2016). An empirical study of practitioners’ perspectives on green software engineering. In 2016 IEEE/ACM 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (pp. 237-248). IEEE.