For this week’s activity I interviewed three people about how they prepare to shop for a new vehicle. At the beginning of the activity I felt I would try to probe the different activities in which people engage while shopping for a new car. However, I quickly realized that the questions for the semi-structured and critical incident interviews were too similar to elicit different answers. The similar answers could also be a result of the notion that most people in the United States take similar approaches to purchasing a vehicle, from initial research, to test driving, to negotiating, etc.
The semi-structured and critical incident interviews were too restrictive to me. I did not feel as though I could probe for more in-depth information to responses that I found intriguing. I felt as though I had to return to the interview protocol immediately and could not ask more questions that I had not already written down. I know the purpose of these types of interviews is to attempt to answer certain questions and keep the interview moving in a specific direction, but the formats do seem restrictive when it comes to probing for more information. This could also be a result of the extremely limited time in which we had to complete the activity. There would undoubtedly be more time in the field to probe for more information.
The unstructured interview, however, allowed for more probing on my part without feeling guilty about abandoning my interview protocol, mainly because there was only one question on my interview protocol for this type of interview. This interview did not feel as awkward to me and seemed more conversational. Despite its relative freedoms, I can easily see the danger to this type of interview. The interviewer could easily become lost in the details of a specific line of inquiry and no longer see the forest for the trees. Not having at lease a semi-defined protocol could lead to the interviewer wasting his or her time as well as the participant’s, and come home empty-handed with no valuable data. As long as the interviewer is capable of keeping the interview on track, however, I think this interview allows for greater ability to probe interesting responses for more information.