DBA 8100 Module 3 Interview Guide Paper: Building, Piloting and Conducting Semi-Structured Interviews Example

Tell Me About Your First Week as Supervisor: Building an Interview Guide That Opens Doors

Student Name

Doctor of Business Administration, Thomas Edison State University

DBA-8100: Qualitative Research Methods and Applications

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Tell Me About Your First Week as Supervisor: Building an Interview Guide That Opens Doors

Introduction

In a qualitative interview study, the interview guide is the main instrument alongside the researcher. A poor guide produces short, guarded or leading answers that no analysis can rescue. This paper develops the guide for the supervisor study, explains each design choice, reports a pilot and plans how interviews will be conducted.

A Framework for the Guide

Kallio et al. (2016) systematically reviewed methodological literature on semi-structured interview guides and proposed five phases. First, identify the prerequisites for using semi-structured interviews, confirming that the topic suits open but focused questioning. Second, retrieve and use previous knowledge from literature and experience to understand the topic. Third, formulate a preliminary guide with main themes and follow-up questions. Fourth, pilot test the guide, through internal testing with colleagues, expert assessment or field testing with potential participants. Fifth, present the complete guide in the study's reports so that readers can judge it.

Prerequisites and Prior Knowledge

The study's research question asks how supervisors describe their first year and what shapes decisions to stay or leave, which calls for open questions with room to follow participants' stories. Prior knowledge comes from research on role transitions, which describes the challenge of supervising former peers and the gap between technical skill and people management, and from the firm's exit forms, where pay and schedule were the boxes most often ticked. The guide must go beyond those boxes.

The Interview Relationship

DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree (2006) described the qualitative interview as a relationship that develops through stages: apprehension at the start, exploration as the participant begins to describe their experience, cooperation as trust builds and, sometimes, participation, when the participant takes an active role in guiding the conversation. They recommended opening with a broad grand tour question that invites description, then using probes to deepen answers, and they stressed recording and transcribing interviews faithfully.

Brinkmann and Kvale (2015) described research interviewing as a craft learned through practice, in which the interviewer's main skill is listening. They distinguished types of questions, including introductory, follow-up, probing, specifying, direct, indirect and interpreting questions, as well as the use of silence to allow a participant to continue. They warned that leading questions can be useful when deliberate but often distort answers when used carelessly.

The Preliminary Guide

The guide has an opening, four main questions and a closing.

Questions avoid the words pay and schedule so as not to steer participants toward the exit form's categories, while leaving room for them to raise those topics.

Pilot

Following Kallio and colleagues, the guide was field tested with two supervisors from a sister company who are outside the sample. Both found the opening question easy to answer and spoke for several minutes. The peers-to-crew question produced the richest stories. One pilot participant misunderstood the support question as asking only about formal training, so it was reworded to ask about who or what helped. The decision question felt abrupt to one participant, so a transition was added: Many people think about their jobs from time to time. Interviews ran 50 and 65 minutes, confirming a planned length of about an hour.

Conducting the Interviews

Each interview will be held either by video or in a quiet room away from the participant's warehouse, at the participant's choice, outside working hours with travel time compensated. Each will begin with a review of consent and a reminder that the participant can skip any question or stop. A professional service bound by confidentiality will produce exact transcripts of each recording, and I will check every transcript against the audio. I will write brief field notes after each interview recording impressions, nonverbal cues and my own reactions, which will feed the reflexive journal described in module five.

Insider Interviewing

Because I sit in the firm's HR leadership, participants may see me as part of management and edit their answers. At the start of each interview I will explain that I am speaking as a doctoral researcher, that nothing they say will affect their employment and that I will not share identifiable information with their managers. I will avoid defending company practices during interviews, even when participants criticize them.

Video Interviews

Several participants, especially former supervisors who have moved away, are likely to choose video. Video interviews save travel and may feel safer to people who prefer not to visit a company site, but they can make rapport harder and are vulnerable to interruptions at home. I will ask participants to choose a private space, check audio quality at the start and allow extra time for small talk before the first question, which DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree's stages of rapport suggest is important.

Limits

A guide piloted with two people may still have weaknesses that appear later. Interviews depend on participants' memory of events up to three years ago.

Conclusion

Kallio and colleagues' five phases structured the guide's development, DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree's account of rapport and probes shaped its questions and Brinkmann and Kvale's emphasis on listening shaped how it will be used. A grand tour opening, four main questions with probes, a pilot that led to two revisions and careful procedures for an insider interviewer prepare the study for data collection.

References

Brinkmann, S., & Kvale, S. (2015). InterViews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.

DiCicco-Bloom, B., & Crabtree, B. F. (2006). The qualitative research interview. Medical Education, 40(4), 314-321. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2006.02418.x

Kallio, H., Pietilä, A., Johnson, M., & Kangasniemi, M. (2016). Systematic methodological review: Developing a framework for a qualitative semi-structured interview guide. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 72(12), 2954-2965. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13031