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214 CHAPTER 8 Interviews and focus groups

tension or anxiety. After your questions are complete, be sure to thank interviewees
for their time (Robson, 2002).
During the interview, you must be on your best behavior. The first and most im-
portant rule is to remember that as the interviewer, your job is to listen. You are meet-
ing with your interviewees to learn from them and you can't do that if you're doing
all of the talking. After you introduce the interview and go over any administrative
details, you should let the interviewee do most of the talking. You can certainly ask
the questions, provide clarification if needed, and encourage further details, but that's
about it—the interviewee should do the bulk of the talking. You'll have to give them
time to speak—don't rush—and provide multiple opportunities to continue: “is there
anything else you wanted to tell me?” or “take your time” are good ways to give
your participants room to gather their thoughts without feeling pressured. Don't rush
to move on to a new question until you are absolutely sure that the interviewee has
finished answering the current question. Careful listening also involves paying atten-
tion to nonverbal cues: if the interviewee seems anxious or agitated, you may have
interrupted her. If this happens, back up and give her a chance to continue.
Being adaptable and flexible is particularly important for semistructured or un-
structured interviews. If you want to get the full benefits of ceding some control to
your participants, you will have to be willing to go where they will lead you. This
may mean reordering or eliminating certain questions and letting the conversation
take some unexpected twists and turns. In some cases, you may be able to come back
to those questions later, while other interviews may leave their original script and
never return. As long as your interviewees don't go completely off-topic, you should
try to follow them. If they digress into totally unrelated areas, you might want to gen-
tly nudge them back on track. Careful and early attention to conversational style can
help you avoid irrelevant digressions. If you notice early on that you are talking with
someone who is prone to wander off into unrelated topics, you can prepare yourself
to repeatedly—but politely—interrupt and guide the conversation back on track.
Interviewees and focus group participants have their own need for clarity and
continuity. You should take care to explain why you are asking each question, and
how it relates both to the overall topic of the interview and to questions that you
have previously asked. If participants aren't sure why you are asking a question,
they might misunderstand it and provide an answer to what is, in effect, a different
question.
Terminology, also introduces possibilities for misunderstanding. Provide defini-
tions of any terms that might involve technical jargon or otherwise be unclear or
ambiguous. If a participant introduces a term that may be problematic, ask for a
clarification: “What exactly do you mean when you say…?” If the definition is not
the one that you would tend to use, it's probably best to make a note of this difference
and then to stick with it.
As the interview or focus group session progresses, you should try to distinguish
between answers that the participants give because they are trying to please you
and answers that genuinely reflect their opinions. The tendency of research partici-
pants to try to please researchers, particularly by providing information that would