Interview Guide and Schedule of Questions

Instructions: Your interview guide should be designed around theexperiences, ideas, and issues that you believe to be most important to gain from your interviews with business owners. In particular, you should design questions that will help you identify challenges the business owners faced in starting up and maintaining their businesses, as well as how communication skills aided or hindered their businesses’ development.

Prepare an interview guide and a moderatelystructured schedule of questions. You should develop at least 10 questions, but no more than 15 (so that you do not take too much of the interviewee’s time).

Tips for conducting the interview:

• Make your primary and secondary questions count, and plan to probe and ask follow-up questions. If you only ask 10-15 questions throughout the interview, something went wrong.
• Interviews conducted in person are preferable, but you can also conduct them over the phone, through Skype, or through any other call-based application. Written or email interviews are NOT permitted.
• Plan to take detailed written notes. You can also record the interview if you get the interviewee’s permission to do so beforehand (and even if you record the conversation, make sure you still take notes, in case there are problems with the recording).
• After your interviews are complete, review your interview notes and compare answers from different interviewees. Look for themes and major ideas. Identify quotes from the interviewee that capture the essence of a major point, if any. These steps will help you decide what you want to write in your final report.
• Follow up the interview with a thank you email or a typed letter. Show your thank you letter(s) to your recitation leader (before sending them) to earn five extra credit points.

Grading Rubric for Interview Guide & Schedule of Questions