Interview script

As part of my preparations for the interviews, one of the most important tasks is to have a decent interview script. Can't be too long - I want the interviews to take less than an hour; can't be too short, as I need to get all the important information out of the students.

My final script ended up being two solid pages of questions and probes. It took a while to put together - I wrote up a first draft, then realized that I had put together a script as part of my Ethics application two years ago, so I dredged that one out. I was surprised at how good it was - in many ways it was a better script than my new one (I think that is probably just an indicator that back then I had recently  completed a Qualitative Methods course and had spent the previous year think hard about methodology, whereas now I've spent the last year gathering data and learning statistics). So I've merged the two interviews and come up with something that I hope is better than both.

The script I wrote two years ago, while well written, made a lot of assumptions about how the research would progress. I had assumed the interviews would be done on the back of much more substantial usage of the system, so many of the questions were about the levels of usage and interactions between students. I've had to amend those, asking the students instead about their own usage, and more about what they thought about these sorts of systems and what other systems the used.

The interview is broken into three main segments: questions about the system, questions about learning with the system, and questions about online social interaction focused on social online learning. Each section has a few questions, each with a set of prompts for more information. I'm hoping it will take about 45 minutes in total - that allows the more talkative students to talk without us exceeding an hour.