Sustainability History Project

An Aid to Formulating Interview Questions

The information below builds upon lecture and discussions in class about how to think about, formulate, modify, and refine questions to achieve the goals of the oral history interview.

Jump to:

Goals of the Interview
Effective Interview Questions
Basic Question Format
Pattern of Questions in the Interview
Follow-up Questions
Avoiding Leading Questions

Goals of the Interview

We strive to document some of the people and organizations throughout the region engaged in one or another aspect of business and cultural practices that can be broadly identified as incorporating some aspect of “sustainability.” We are interested, primarily, in having interviewees share their passions, personal philosophies, challenges, goals, successes, and other important aspects of the work they do (link).

Our focus is on the qualitative information contained in our interviewee’s subjective, lived experience; the more quantitative aspects of our interviewee’s profession can usually be found more readily through research (using Internet resources, books, journal articles, government documents, etc.). Quantitative information is useful in helping us formulate interview questions that are tailored to our specific interviewee, but our use of this information should be to generate questions that will enable us to look beyond bare data and pursue our interviewee’s relationship to this data—their role in organizing the successful project, their frustrations with the regulatory framework, their proudest achievements working in the field, their understanding of what “sustainability” means, etc., etc., etc.

Oral history methods are particularly effective at documenting this subjective, lived experience because these methods enable the preservation of “an in-depth account of personal experience and reflections, with sufficient time allowed for the narrators to give their story the fullness they desire.” Oral history content is valuable also because it is “grounded in reflections on the past as opposed to commentary on purely contemporary events” (link).

Effective Interview Questions

To achieve the above goals in the interview, we first must generate effective interview questions. “Effective” questions are those that are:

1) Grounded in research

2) Tailored to the interviewee

3) Primarily focused on securing subjective (qualitative) information

4) Open-ended (see here for more information about open-ended questions)

Basic Question Format

One useful approach to formulating effective interview questions is to follow this two-part pattern:

1) Preface the question with your research or other contextualizing information.

2) Frame a clear and concise one-part question.

Examples:

“I see that you were interviewed in the Oregonian last year regarding the community outreach project that you were just beginning. Please tell me about how this project has gone since this news article.”

“In class, we’ve discussed the importance of considering equity issues as co-equal with environmental and economic concerns. In the work that your organization does, it seems that this organization also considers equity highly important. What are some specific projects or initiatives that you’ve been involved with in this area?”

Pattern of Questions in the Interview

Oral history interviews that are part of the Sustainability History Project generally fall into the following pattern:

I. Basic biographical questions: Questions common to every interview, establishes basic biographical information, provides “warm up” for both interviewer and interviewee, builds rapport, and makes it clear to the interviewee that the interviewer seeks subjective information about the person’s lived experience. Examples:
A) “How long have you lived in Portland?”
B) “What brought you to Portland [if you were not born here]?”
C) “What kinds of education did you pursue after high school?”
D) “How did you get involved in your work / advocacy?”

II. Main body of the interview: Two categories.

A) Unique questions tailored to the particular interviewee
B) Questions asked of every interviewee
i) On sustainability
a) “How do you define ‘sustainability?'”
b) “How do you assess or gauge progress toward sustainability?”

ii) On the interviewee’s workplace

a) “Please describe a typical day / week / event”
b) “Please describe an illustrative atypical day / week / event”

iii) On interviewee achievements

a) “What are some of your proudest achievements?”
b) “What are some of your persistent challenges?”

III. Concluding questions: Opportunity to ask interviewee to comment on what they might hope for in the future and then to wrap-up the interview

A) Questions about the future. Examples:
i) “What kinds of projects do you have planned for the future?”
ii) “What kinds of changes are you planning to implement?”

B) Final interview question:

i) “Thanks for meeting with me for this interview. I’ve asked all the questions that I had prepared for, but, before I go, I’d like to open it up to you by asking if there are any topics you’d like to comment on that I neglected to bring up, or if you’d like to expand upon anything you said earlier?”
ii) This question generally leads to another 5-15 minutes of the interview during which opportunities to ask additional follow-up questions arise

Follow-up Questions

Some follow-up questions can be prepared in advance of the interview, but, most often, they arise in the interviewers’ mind in the midst of the interview itself.

An example of a type of follow-up question that can be prepared in advance would be something like the following:

Initial question: “Please tell me when you moved to the Portland area.”

Follow-up question: “Why did you make this move?”

Since, by definition, they cannot be predicted in advance, specific follow-up questions that come up during an interview cannot be known; however, the content of such questions often fall into discernible categories, such as:

Questions to clarify an acronym, jargon, specialized term, etc.: Asking interviewees to spell-out an acronym and describe specialized equipment, processes, or concepts aids in clarifying the content of the response.

Questions to clarify a generality: The interviewee responds to a question that “I really liked that project.” The generality here is the word “like,” and one way to help specify what the interviewee means is to ask “You said that you liked this project. What was it about the project that you liked?” When one gets a response that includes general statements, the interviewer should consider this a possible opportunity to ask a follow-up question.

Questions to pursue a topic in more depth: During the interview, it’s highly likely that the interviewee will respond with information that the interviewer couldn’t possibly have known about beforehand—details about a project, professional dynamic, specialized process, etc. The interviewer may then find opportunities to ask additional questions not on the prepared list that will enable the interview to pursue other topics important to the interviewee.

Avoiding Leading Questions

Below you’ll find examples of how to identify common closed-ended, leading questions, and how to modify such questions to make them open-ended.

How to Turn a Closed-ended “Yes-No” Question into an Open-ended Question

The most common shortcoming in the way students frame questions is to cast an otherwise solid question in a manner that can be answered by either a “yes” or a “no.” Thus, a perfectly feasible question becomes closed-ended, which is precisely the opposite dynamic one wants to foster in an oral history interview. For example:

Closed-ended format: Can you tell me about why you moved to Portland?

The core of this question is great, as it helps establish the motivations for why the interviewee made the decision to move to Portland, thereby bringing to light qualitative information about the interviewee. However, the most direct response to this question is either a “yes” or a “no.”: Can you tell me about . . . “ might be answered “No, I can’t,” or “Yes, I can.” Period.

With this in mind and a slight modification, the question above becomes open-ended:

Open-ended format: Please tell me about why you moved to Portland.

There are other questions that conform to this pattern. When one uses the phrases listed below, one has framed framed the question in a closed-ended way, and should re-cast the question in the same manner outlined above:

** “Can you . . . ?”
** “Will do . . . ?”
** “Are you . . .?”
** “Did you . . . ?”
** “Have you . . .?”

How to Turn a Closed-ended Either-Or Question into an Open-ended Question

The “yes-no” pattern of questions described above is but a variant of a broader category of closed-ended questions that are framed in an either-or manner. The defining characteristic of this kind of question is that the response is “closed” because the interviewee is presented with only one of two choices. In the former case, these choices are “yes” or “no.” In the latter case, these choices are X or Y. For example:

Closed-ended format:Did you move to Portland for work, or for personal reasons?

With this particular question, what if the reason was neither work nor personal, or if it was a combination of work and personal, or something else entirely? Rather than allowing the interviewee to tell her or his story in her or his own words, this question leads to a restricted response. This question can be re-cast to achieve the goals of the oral history interview—to allow the interviewee to reply with their lived experience:

Open-ended format: Please tell me about why you moved to Portland.

How to Turn a Closed-ended Leading Question into an Open-ended Question

Both the “yes-no” structure and the broader either-or structure are but sub-categories of a larger class of closed-ended question, the leading question. Leading questions are to be avoided because they limit the range of an interviewee’s response, which is in direct contradiction to the goal of the oral history: to collaborate with the interviewee to document subjective, lived, experiences. A classic leading question is:

When did you stop beating your wife?

This is a leading question because if the response is “I haven’t stopped beating my wife . . .” or if it is “I stopped beating my wife . . .,” the respondent is stuck. Both responses assume that the person is a wife-beater—reformed or otherwise. The question as framed also avoids completely another valid option: What if the person is not and has never been a beater of wives?

In terms of the SHP, a potential leading question might be:

Closed-ended format:What are the environmental reasons behind your move to Portland?

This is a leading question because it assumes that there were environmental reasons why the person moved to Portland. What if there were no such reasons? The question does not make room for this option. This question, re-phrased in an open-ended way, might read:

Open-ended format: Please tell me about why you moved to Portland.

Another examples of a leading questions, followed by a re-phrasing suggestion:

Closed-ended format:How does your definition of sustainability correlate with the definition of the Brundtland Commission?
Open-ended format:What is your definition of sustainability?

Problem resolved: What if the person has no idea what the Brundtland Commission’s definition is?

—
James V. Hillegas, Nov. 11, 2010