ABSTRACT
Before conducting the interview, you must prepare what is called an ‘interview guide’ or ‘interview schedule’. This interview guide is a list of all the questions, topics and issues that you want to cover during the interview. It may include open questions (which informants can answer with their own words) and closed questions (where answers are limited to a fixed set of responses, usually a ‘yes’ or ‘no’), as well as possible probes and prompts to encourage informants to provide more information or talk more about certain topics. Bearing in mind that open questions aim to encourage informants to define and describe a situation or event, they should start with a ‘how’, ‘why’ or ‘what’ – for example, ‘Why did the organization introduce this specific marketing strategy?’ or ‘How has your corporate strategy changed over the past five years?’ A probe is an extra question that encourages informants to elaborate on their responses when you feel that they have more to give (see Box 6.1). It can be used to explore responses that are of particular significance to the research topic. A probe may be worded like an open question, but request a particular focus or direction.
