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Posted by: Nick325 Jan 5 2008, 10:08 PM

hey guys

i have this interview project and i chose my family member. i have some questions already like whens your birthday, where were u born, and basic questions like that but i need some more that are a little more interesting. so am asking for your guys help if you have some good ones. thanks

Posted by: Stevie·Ray·Vaughn Jan 5 2008, 10:10 PM

Do they play guitar?

Posted by: Nick325 Jan 5 2008, 10:10 PM

QUOTE (Stevie·Ray·Vaughn @ Jan 5 2008, 04:10 PM)

Do they play guitar?

Posted by: Ayen Jan 5 2008, 10:21 PM

Well, if they're old, say around sixty to seventy years, ask what it was like to grow up with WW2. Or if they were younger, Vietnam.

Posted by: Tomy Jeon Jan 5 2008, 10:39 PM

What's better:

Fender Strat or Gibson Les Paul?
John Lennon or Paul McCartney?
Metallica or Meagdeth?

Posted by: tonymiro Jan 5 2008, 10:39 PM

When you interview you can often ask two main types of questions:

Closed questions - that are 'factual' and basically need a yes/no or a reply that contains the 'fact', ie 'How old are you?'. Generally questions here are yes/no or quantitative (how old, how big, how many) or otherwise 'factual' ('What is the capital of France?').

Open questions - that basically focus more on feeling/likes-dislikes/beliefs etc. Generally questions are ''why' ('Why do you like Ibanez guitars?').

An interview often contains a mixture of both. You need some facts about the interviewee: these questions get the person used to be interviewed, starts them talking and establishes some basic 'facts' about them. But you also need to get them to talk - and not just say 'yes/no' to everything . Open questions can't be answered properly by a 'yes/no' response - ie 'Why do you play guitar' - 'yes' isn't a proper answer. A good interview should let the interviewee speak for about 70-80 per cent of the time btw.

What you should try to do is focus you interview around the theme of the interview: why are you interviewing, what do you need to find out, etc? If your theme is guitar playing that's the focus so don't ask questions about the US Space Mission. If the interviewee wanders off the theme then you need to gently nudge them back to it - closed questions on the theme can be good here btw. (Interviewee 'yeah well when Armstrong stood on the lunar surface and said...' You, 'Gee that's fascinating but tell me again, how many years have you played the electric guitar?').

With the theme - this is basically a structured/semi structured interview. Closed questions tend to move towards a structured interview, open towards semi/unstructured. Just allowing the interviewee to talk about what matters to them is unstructured and to get a good interview here, in my experience, requires quite a bit of training and experience both in interview technique and interpretation of interview data. I'd suggest going with a structured/semi structured interview.

So what's the theme/purpose Nick (in an open questioned kind of way )?

Cheers,
Tony

Posted by: DeepRoots Jan 5 2008, 10:40 PM

great post tony cheers

Posted by: Nick325 Jan 5 2008, 10:48 PM

Tony

its both of those. becuase some questions i want facts about themself but other i need to be more in depth to make it interesting. so i would need more open end questions.


(great post by the way)