Other Types of Source Material
Interviews
Although scholarly sources are extremely helpful and authoritative, they usually fall under the category of secondary sources. On the other hand, interviews almost always count as primary sources and can provide useful information on an individual’s perspective. Here are some tips to help you craft strong interview questions that can elicit useful information.
Do Your Homework: Before you interview a source, you should always research them, their experience, and their expertise. Start with a simple Google search of their name, and then continue researching organizations, topics, or events relevant to them based on the information you need for your story.
Ask Clear Questions: As you begin to write interview questions, ask yourself: Is this question easy to understand? Could I answer it?
Ask Open-ended Questions: Open-ended questions invite a source to elaborate on their response. For example, you might ask, “Why do you support the Minnesota Vikings?” Respondents usually feel the need to construct full sentences that establish and explain their perspectives. Thus, open-ended questions tend to generate more complete and thoughtful responses.
Order Your Questions: Although you might write your list of interview questions down in the order in which you think of them, take some time after brainstorming those questions to put them in the best order in which to ask them. It is generally helpful to start with some simple, introductory questions that help to ease your respondents into the interview and make them more comfortable. After that, group all questions that pertain to a specific topic or aspect of the story together and complete an entire topic before transitioning to the next set of questions. Structure your interview in a way that guarantees you will get all the information you need while, ideally, sticking to the time estimate you provided for the interview.
Be Flexible: Although you did your research and wrote a list of informed, clear, and well-organized questions, you may find that, during the interview, unanticipated questions start popping into your head. Do not panic! These follow-up questions are natural, and they often provide some of the best information and quotes. Good follow-up questions usually request additional context or explanation and begin with “why” or “how.” It is important to listen carefully so that you can catch and write down potential follow-up questions.
Ask for Clarity: If you find yourself confused or unsure about a key fact or piece of information during the course of your interview, always clarify that information. Ask for an explanation or a simplification. One good way to do this is by summarizing a key point and asking your source if you got the information correct. For example, you might ask: “So, you are saying that if I need to clarify information during an interview, I should take some time to do that with the source. Is that correct?”
Ask the Concluding Question: Once you have asked all the questions you brainstormed — and all the follow-up and clarifying questions that arose during the course of the interview — try to end with a final open-ended question that allows your respondents to share anything else they think they ought to know about the topic. This gives the source a chance to bring up something you or they may have forgotten or simply to contribute information that may be outside of the scope of your questions.
Surveys
Surveys are another way of obtaining primary source information. Although they typically give less depth than a good interview, surveys can be given to a lot more people to get a bigger variety of responses. When making a survey, there are two basic types of questions you can ask. Unstructured questions ask respondents to provide a response in their own words, while structured questions ask respondents to select an answer from a given set of choices. After your survey is complete, it will be useful to look over the collected responses to see the big picture.
Don’t just write your surveys on a whim: design your questions carefully to provide specific information that will be useful to your research. Here are some things to think about as you make your survey:
- Is the question clear and understandable? Survey questions should be clear and easy to understand and avoid using complicated jargon or advanced vocabulary.
- Is the question worded negatively? Negatively worded questions tend to confuse many responses and lead to inaccurate responses. For example, the question, “Do you believe the team should not hire more coaches?” can be misinterpreted by someone trying to finish your survey quickly.
- Is the question ambiguous? Survey questions should not use words or expressions that may be interpreted differently by different respondents (e.g., words like “any” or “just”). For instance, if you ask, “How long have you been in school?” some respondents may include grade school, while others just focus on university. Different interpretations by different respondents will lead to difficult-to-use results.
- Does the question have biased words? Bias refers to any property of a question that encourages subjects to answer in a certain way. For example, asking respondents, “Do you support healthcare reform?” may encourage more positive responses than “Do you think the government should spend more money on healthcare?”.
- Is the question double-barreled? Double-barreled questions can have multiple answers. For example, consider the question, “Are you satisfied with the hardware and software provided for your work?” In this example, how should a respondent answer if he/she is satisfied with the hardware but not with the software or vice versa?
- Is the question too general? Sometimes, questions that are too general may not accurately convey respondents’ perceptions. For example, asking respondents, “What do you think of this design?” may result in so many different answers that it won’t be useful data. Instead, ask more specific behavioral questions, such as “Would you recommend this book to others?”
Observations
Social scientists, natural scientists, engineers, computer scientists, educational researchers, and many others use observations as a primary research method. In this context, observations or personal observations refer to watching people, places, or events and making note of specific features that are relevant to your research.
Observations can be conducted on nearly any subject matter, and the kinds of observations you will do depend on your research question. For example, if you are writing a proposal on changing the way parking on campus works, you might observe traffic or parking patterns on campus to get a sense of what improvements could be made. If you choose to observe people, you will have several additional considerations, including the manner in which you will observe them and gain their consent.
If you are observing people, you can choose between two common ways to observe: participant observation and unobtrusive observation. Participant observation involves a researcher living with participants and becoming part of their community. For example, Margaret Mead, a famous anthropologist, spent extended periods of time living in communities that she studied. Conversely, in unobtrusive observation, you do not interact with participants but instead record their behavior in research notes or journals. Although in most circumstances, people must volunteer to be participants in research, in some cases, it is acceptable to not let participants know you are observing them. In places that people perceive as public, such as a campus food court or a shopping mall, people do not expect privacy, and so it is fine to observe without participant consent. Sometimes, the difficulty of getting consent may make unobtrusive observation the better option. If you are observing people in a busy airport, bus station, or campus food court, getting participants to sign forms giving consent may be next to impossible. In places that people perceive as private, which can include a church, home, classroom, or even a more formal restaurant, you need participant consent.
Eliminating Bias in Your Observation Notes
The ethical concern of being unbiased is important in recording your observations. You need to be aware of the difference between an observation (recording exactly what you see) and an interpretation (making assumptions and judgments about what you see). When you observe, you should focus first on only the events that are directly observable.
Example Observation Log Entries
- The student sitting in the dining hall enjoys his greasy, oil-soaked pizza. He is clearly oblivious to the calorie content and damage it may do to his body.
- The student sits in the dining hall. As he eats his piece of pizza, which drips oil, he says to a friend, “This pizza is good.”
The first entry is biased and demonstrates judgment about the event. First, the observer makes assumptions about the internal state of the student when they write “enjoys” and “clearly oblivious to the calorie content.” From an observer’s standpoint, there is no way of ascertaining what the student may or may not know about pizza’s nutritional value or how much the student enjoys the pizza. The second entry provides only the details and facts that are observable.
LICENSE AND ATTRIBUTION
“Other Types of Source Material” by Andrew Fields is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and adapted from:
- Charles Lowe’s and Pavel Zemliansky’s “10.6 Interviews” from Writing Spaces – Readings on Writing and used according to CC BY 4.0.
- Anol Bhattacherjee “Questionnaire Surveys” from ESA 420: Research and Design for Emergency Services and used according to CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
- Charles Lowe’s and Pavel Zemliansky’s “Observations” from Writing Spaces – Readings on Writing and used according to CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0.