Interviews

You may want to choose this type of activity if you need a more personal, in-depth response from participants. This method can be very effective for gathering personal stories or case studies to include in a range of resources. Interviews can be conducted over the phone or face to face; think about which will be easier for the interviewee to participate in and the interviewer to conduct.

Things to consider:

• What skills and experience does the interviewer have?
• What emotional responses might you expect from interviewees? How will you manage this?
• Are there any issues around consent? Think about age and capacity, you may need to ask for a consent form from a parent / guardian as well as the person taking part. Be sure you communicate how you will use what people say and how much personal information will be shared.
• Is confidentiality a consideration? How can you assure interviewees that you have taken the necessary steps to protect their identity or personal data, if necessary?
• Make sure you prepare your questions in advance? Remember to keep them as consistent as possible during all interviews as this will help your analysis later on.
• Think about how you will feedback the results and what you will do as a result of this. The You said…We did tool (With instructions | Without instructions) in this toolkit is a simple way of doing this and can be shared in a digital format or in hard copies. This isn’t the only way however, you may want to create charts or an infographic to visually represent what you learnt.

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