How Friendly Should We Be with Participants?

An issue that has come up a few times this past week is that of being 'friendly' (i.e. chatty, etc...) with the participants we interview. Specifically, the question of 'Am I being too friendly?' has arisen.

First, it is always important to remember to review our Research with Human Participant training, whenever we are thinking about interactions with our participants.

Beyond the Human Participant training as foundation, it is important to remember that how we interact with our participants/interviewees *does* matter. Plenty of research demonstrates the considerable effect an interviewer can have on the interviewee (see: Davis, Couper, Janz, Caldwell, & Resnicow, 2010; Hilliard & Macan, 2009; Hoffman, 2008; Kirkevold & Bergland, 2007).

Why? How? Well, think about your interactions with others and with others who may be interviewing you for some reason. How might you respond if someone interviewing you acts more like a pal or friend in the interview? How might this impact your willingness to respond truthfully? How might this impact the credibility you have for the interviewer? Interviewer characteristics and behavior impacts how your interviewer views you and our study, how he/she may respond, and can ultimately effect data quality.

This is true for both qualitative and quantitative interviewing - even though the goals of interviewing in these methodologies may differ (Creswell, 2009). As our study is a mixed methods design - we therefore must be cognizant of both approaches to interviewing. As a reminder, for those in our lab, there are plenty of resources on interviewing skills in our Course Info area.

I am thrilled to hear students asking themselves/others this question - you absolutely *should* be thinking about this.

As Dr. Giles pointed out in class this week, it may be useful to think about how you interact with your interviewees much like you would interact on a job interview; you want to be professional and pleasant and not overly 'friendly'. We want our participants to trust us, to feel safe and comfortable, and we want the best possible data quality as a product of this interaction.



AES

Creswell, J.W. (2009). Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Davis, R.E., Couper, M.P., Janz, N. K., Caldwell, C. H., & Resnicow, K. (2010). Interviewer effects in public health surveys. Health Education Research, 25(1), 14-26.

Hilliard, T. & Macan, T. (2009). Can Mock Interviewers' Personalities Influence Their Personality Ratings of Applicants? Journal of Psychology, 143 (2), 161-174.

Hoffman, E. A. (2008). The emotionally challenging open-ended interview. Business Communication Quarterly, 71(3), 387-390.

Kirkevold, M. & Bergland, A. (2007). The quality of qualitative data: Issues to consider when interviewing participants who have difficulties providing detailed accounts of their experiences. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health & Well-Being, 2(2), 68-75.