Interview questions

I spent the morning writing my interview questions. John helped to type it up. Look at the nice format:

       

I chose to use a lot of questions from Brady, Verba and Schlozman's article (the one I discussed here). I want to ask the interviewees about their resources and civic skills in order to identify obstacles to participation, and since the questions by Brady et al. (Herafter BVS) were designed to do exactly that it makes sense to copy them; and this way the results can be cross-compared.

There are two major complications with importing BVS' questions. First of all, I am interviewing people in a mental health service, but a lot of the questions are not entirely relevant to their day-to-day life. For instance the question "Last week, were you working full time for pay, working part time for pay, keeping house, going to school, or something else?" can already be answered to some extent for probably all of the interviewees: they visited the service where I will be talking to them. In order to fix dis disparity I have added a couple more specific questions and slightly changed others - to the question in the example I added the option "visited the service".

The other complication is that this survey was designed for people in the United States, but this is Northern Ireland. The problem is not just that I have to edit the questions so that they apply to the local situation, so for instance "secondary school" instead of "high school". More importantly, because of the political situation in Northern Ireland people may feel scrupulous or hesitant to answer certain questions such as: what language do you speak at home? Are you a UK citizen? What is your religious denomination? I don't want to ask such questions unless strictly necessary. I added a disclaimer to let the interviewee know the research is not about the sectarian division and they do not have to tell me what side they are on.

BVS designed their questions for a large-scale quantitative interview. I am going to interview too few people to meaningfully compare my results, but still their results could serve as a way of placing mine in context. For instance, if a participant turns out to have very little time, we can refer to BVS who found that people with little time generally do not participate as much. The ease of integration of their questions in my interviews shows that a question is not inherently qualitative or quantitative; it depends on the number of research participants and on how the acquired information is processed.

P.S. I updated my consent form so that it is relevant to the actual questions. Here