Feb 3, 2020
In this six blog post series, we cover the best practices in interviewing, from preparation, to analysis. The following is the third blog post, asking the best interview questions.
Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash
The most essential preparation for the interviews is finding the right questions to ask.
In a nutshell, the best questions are;
To be more specific, we will dig deeper into the different types of questions;
If a question can only have one single answer, then it is a closed question.
Examples are;
Closed questions are helpful if you are targeting an accurate and brief answer. They can be used together with open-ended questions. However, using closed ended questions frequently in an interview may hinder getting more detailed answers.
This is the most common type of question in the interviews as they generate detailed and out-of-box answers.
Asking "How do you feel about working here" rather than saying "Do you like working here?" is likely to generate more diverse and longer responses.
Leading questions are the ones that lead your participant to one specific answer. These type of questions are the ones a good interviewer should avoid.
These questions apart from directing a question, express an opinion of their own, that mathematics are difficult and teachers should do a better job in grading. As a result they lead the interviewee to agree with those opinions.
As part of a good preparation practice, one should notice the leading questions and rephrase them in neutral ways:
These are neutrally worded versions of the exact same questions, however they are more likely to generate unbiased and free opinion of the participants.
Single questions are the ones that include only one question.
It is a common mistakes by researchers to gather more than one question and ask at once.
"What do you think about the current government and why do you think that?" is an example of two questions merged into one and asked back to back.
If you detect double questions in your questionnaire, you should split them into two and ask one by one; "What do you think about the current government?" and "Why do you think that?"
After getting the necessary preparations done, next step is to conduct the interview. For a comprehensive guide on interview techniques and recording interviews, check out our next blog post: Interview Techniques and How to Record Interviews.