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210 CHAPTER 8 Interviews and focus groups

with younger children (Read and MacFarlane, 2006). In more complex cases, work-
ing with children or other groups with different backgrounds may require spending
some time to understand the context before you design an interview—see Chapter 9
for background on ethnographic observations.
When your interview is less than fully structured, you may be generating ques-
tions on the spot, in response to specific interviewee comments. On-the-fly phrasing
of questions that are clear, simple, and free from jargon and bias is an art requiring
practice and experience. This may be another reason to stick with more structure
until you gain some experience, but all is not lost: the informal give-and-take of
semistructured and unstructured interviews gives you some room for rephrasing and
revisiting questions as needed.
Human nature being what it is, interviewee responses may be inconsistent. This is
to be expected. Including questions that are slightly redundant may help you assess
the degree of consistency in responses, but you should probably decide in advance
how you will handle any inconsistency. Possibilities include reporting inconsisten-
cies and discounting responses from interviewees who appear to be particularly in-
consistent. The Finding and Reminding sidebar in Section 8.3.1 discusses Thomas
Malone's study of how people organize information in their offices—an example of
a semistructured interview that generated some influential results.

8.8 CONDUCTING AN INTERVIEW
8.8.1 PREPARATION
With all of the details that must be addressed, appropriate planning and preparation
is obviously important. Pilot-testing your interview—both with research colleagues
and participants—is always a good idea. In addition to helping you find questions
that are hard to understand, pilot testing can give you some idea of the potential
length of an interview. If your pilot test runs past the two-hour mark, you may want
to ask yourself if there is anything that you might trim. Although pilot testing may
be harder for a focus group, it is not impossible. One approach might be to use
your colleagues as pilot focus group participants. Other possibilities include asking
experts familiar with focus groups to review your questions and other materials.
You might also consider your first group to be the pilot: if it goes well, great. If not,
you can revise it and remove the results from further consideration in your analysis
(Krueger, 1994).
A clear and concise interview guide can help you remember which steps to take
and when. Guides are particularly helpful for focus groups (Brown, 1999) and for any
situation where more than one researcher is acting as an interviewer or moderator.
Proper preparation includes appropriate backups. Assume that your computer
will crash, your recorder won't work, and the power will fail. Can you conduct your
interview in the dark on paper? That might be a bit extreme, but extra batteries,
paper, and perhaps even a backup recording device will prepare you for almost any
contingency.