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8.8 Conducting an interview 211

8.8.2 RECORDING THE RESPONSES
Having chosen the format of your interview, identified your participants, and writ-
ten your questions, you are ready to plan the details of conducting the interview.
Written notes and audio or video recordings all have advantages and disadvantages.
You'll probably always want to have a notebook on hand. If you have an interviewing
partner, she might take notes with the computer while you write your thoughts on
paper, but it's probably too distracting for the primary interviewer to be typing on the
computer during the course of the interview session. In any case, you should have a
paper notebook available as a backup.
Written notes can be useful for recording interviewee responses and interviewer
comments. Even if you are using audio or video recording devices for your main
records of participant comments, you should use written notes to document nonver-
bal cues or concerns (Brown, 1999). Do your interviewees seem bored, anxious, or
tired? This can be particularly important for focus groups: you'll want to note if you
see body language cues indicating disagreement with the current speaker, general
frustration, or lack of interest.
Simply writing down interviewee responses is likely to be most effective for
simple, closed questions. Answers to open-ended questions and comments made
in free-flowing unstructured interviews may be hard to capture adequately in writ-
ing. Transcribing spoken text in real time is a cognitive challenge. If you are busy
trying to write down what your interviewee said a few seconds ago, you might
miss an interesting comment. Participants may find it distracting as well, particu-
larly if you are so focused on writing that you appear not to be paying attention
to them.
You should strongly consider summarizing and possibly rewriting your notes as
soon as possible after each interview. This will give you a chance to clarify any com-
ments, add details that will help you remember the context, and clarify in other ways
that increase the likelihood of extracting useful data from the record, even after a gap
of months or years.
Audio and video recordings capture every word of an interview, at the potential
cost of difficulty of transcription and interpretation. Turning a single hour of recorded
discussion into text may take several hours (Robson, 2002) and substantially sized
projects can generate massive amounts of content (see the Green Living Interviews
sidebar in Section 8.3.1). Digital recorders make recording inexpensive and easy
enough that you might decide to record interviews before committing to transcribing
them, but such recordings may go unheard.
If you are going to record, the choice between audio and video can be important.
Video recording is logistically harder, usually requiring a tripod and some maneu-
vering that might be challenging if you are in a tight space. Some interviewees may
initially be uncomfortable with the video camera, but most forget about it within a
few minutes. In many cases, the additional details captured by a video recording can
be quite informative. Interviews with professionals aimed at understanding work in
context would benefit from video recordings of workspaces and offices. You might
even use a video camera to capture the use of a current software tool, but you should