Listen more, talk less, and ask real questions is the fundamental approach to acquire desired outcomes from an interview. Real questions, here, indicate those questions whose answers you do not know or you try to anticipate. What does this prime rule want you to do while taking an interview? Avoid leading questions Leading questions are those that stimulate answers from interviewees that you want. The objective of an interview is to get accurate answers as much as possible to produce reliable results. Leading questions influence the direction of responses. The lead can be in intonation, syntax, and words. For instance, “Do you really mean to do that?” or “You were pushed by your parents not to use the internet, didn’t you?” Implicit in these questions is you are trying to foist your desired answer on your respondents. Another instance includes, “How satisfied were you with your teaching-training?” Instead of this question, you should ask “How was your teaching-training experience?” So you should be wary of choosing your words while designing real questions. Ask open-ended questions Introducing open-ended questions in a questionnaire is a nice way to allow your respondents to take any direction to answer your questions. You can divide open-ended questions into two segments: one that allows your participants to reconstruct instead of sharing memorised experience, and another that allows your respondents to share the subjective experience. You should directly ask your participants, for instance, “What happened?” or “What was your experience?” instead of “Do you remember how you felt when that happened?” If you ask questions that rely on memory, impediments to memory will pile up causing difficulty for your interviewees to answer. Reconstruction takes in the partial involvement of memory and partial senses about the past...
