Question cards: Putting your cards on the table in the interview process

Abstract

This research note introduces the use of question cards as a technique that can aid the interviewing process. Question cards provide a dynamic checklist of themes and questions, affording interviewers and interviewees increased flexibility in shaping dialogue. This approach empowers interviewees by allowing them to influence the interview's direction, determine question order, and contribute their own questions. The transparency facilitated by question cards clarifies the interview's purpose and reduces ambiguity. Additionally, question cards act as visual aids, aiding navigation and enabling both interviewer and interviewee to have a clear sight of the topics for discussion. Importantly, this technique levels the information playing field, granting all parties access to the interview's structure, questions and themes. Post-interview, question cards prove invaluable as prompts for coding and analysis, streamlining data extraction. As such, the research note suggests, the use of question cards has many potential benefits for the qualitative researcher.

Introduction

Interviews have been central to my practice as a qualitative researcher working on gender, sexuality and democracy for many years. My experience runs the gamut from tightly structured surveys to narrative biographies that begin with just one question and go from there. But I’ve never before thought to enlist my interviewees in determining the path of an interview. In this short article, I tell the story of how I stumbled across the method I share here and reflect on what it might offer other researchers.

I used to approach interviews as a structured journey through a topic, designing question sequences carefully and carrying the plan I’d made in advance into the interview. This kind of planning remains an important part of my preparation process, even if – as is often the case – the interview itself takes a different direction from what I was anticipating. But as time has gone on, I’ve come to feel my way into interviewing in a more iterative way. Interviews evolve, sometimes circling around a single question with prompts and further questions, sometimes diving into sequences that take my interviewees and myself along a set of trails that anticipate some of what I’ve thought through in advance but also open up new pathways and possibilities.

I’ve tended to prepare for interviews by writing out lists of possible areas for discussion in my notebook. Sometimes this has been schematic, a mix of images and words, with lines of connection drawn between potential themes. Sometimes it has involved unpacking some of the themes in a bit more detail in prose so that I can nail down exactly how best to ask about them. Sometimes I have specific questions I want to put to people, and I list them and then spend some time thinking about how to frame them and try out possibilities. After doing this, I would look through the notes to think about possible sequences of questions and then put together a checklist, at which to glance as surreptitiously as possible while conducting the interview.

I aim at a narrative interviewing style that has an invisible structure, and transitions that make the interview flow rather than a staccato set of questions that people answer one by one, waiting for the next one. It matters to me that the interview is smooth and that people don’t feel I am plying them with a volley of unconnected questions. As a result, I’m the kind of interviewer who improvises to achieve that sense of flow; and one of the hazards of my style of interviewing is that I go with the flow and sometimes end up getting so interested in where we’re going in the conversation, I forget to find out about the very things that I lined up the interview to explore in the first place.

This article narrates an experiment that did three things. First, it helped me stay on track: I came away with all the questions I’d thought of in advance answered, along with some others that I hadn’t thought to ask. Second, it shifted the power relationship in the interview situation, devolving the power of structuring the interview to the participants; they chose where to begin, where to end, and how to tackle the things I’d told them that I wanted to find out about. And third, it provided a level of transparency about what was in my head and what I wanted to know about that would have been difficult to convey in introducing the interview, making visible my otherwise out-of-sight checklist in a form my interviewees could engage with.

From checklist to question cards

As I sat preparing for an interview with two activists whose work I’d admired for many years, who I will call Joana and Fabiana, I reached for my notebook and started sketching out a plan for the interview. I’d taken copious notes as I put together ideas for how I might use the interview, going through documents and articles I’d found about their work online. Now I looked down at the mess of my notes. I needed to find a way to navigate through them in the interview. I realised I’d have to flick clumsily between the pages of my notebook during the interview to connect up some of the areas for questioning. It would be distracting. I began to think about writing out the themes and questions again, more clearly, on a bit of paper, and using that as my checklist. But I was wary of over-structuring the conversation in advance, because there were lots of potential directions in which it might go and lots of potential connections that might be made. I started creating a mind-map, with bubbles for themes. But it soon got so crowded it was difficult to decipher.

Then I had an idea. I ripped out some pages from my notebook. I folded and tore them into small card-like pieces. I wrote a question or question area on each of them. I took the stack of cards in my hands and laid them out on the table. I arranged and rearranged them, looking at possible clusters. I then arranged them into sequences. This allowed me to test out possible pathways for the interview process and rehearse the way in which I’d frame the issues and direct the discussion. Seeing the cards clustered and ordered in particular ways got me thinking about other questions I hadn’t thought of asking, and also about why these themes were the ones that I wanted to spend the precious interview time exploring.

The exercise of re-situating my checklist from the pages of my notebook onto cards that could be laid out in such a way as to give me an overview was very useful in helping me prepare for the interview. It also helped me refine my questions. Putting the questions on the cards prompted me to rewrite them. I discarded some of them and merged a couple of others. Working with them in this way made me much clearer about the purpose of the interview, and also about what I might expect in terms of the scope of answers to my questions. It helped me tweak the questions to get them right for the work I needed from them, as well as to see some of the cul-de-sacs I might have led the interview down if I hadn’t taken this time to step back, reflect and reframe.

I had intended to keep the cards as an aide memoir. But once I arrived at the interview and began chatting, I took the cards out of my bag and put them on the table in front of me. ‘These are my questions’, I said. ‘I’ve spent some time thinking about what I want to ask you, and this is what I came up with’. I sifted through them, then laid them out – turning them around for my interviewees to see – and said, ‘these are the things I wanted to ask you about’. They picked up the cards one by one and began to read them out. We sat there for a few minutes, working with the cards. Did they cover the kinds of things we’d discussed talking about in the interview? What was missing? Which ones belonged together and which ones would open up a separate track for our discussion?

Having the cards in front of us created a context for the kind of conversation that I can’t recall ever having had at the start of an interview: one that enlisted my interviewees in the strategy of the interview itself, gave them a sense of the scale and scope of my questions, and offered them the chance to evaluate my questions and the themes I’d chosen and add their own. I’ve worked in contexts where the people I am interviewing are not literate, and while what I did relied on the written word, it is possible to substitute words for pictures if images can be drawn or found and to use picture cards as prompts. This is an approach that has been used by clinical psychologists when interviewing children using what are known as ‘cue cards’, as well as for the purpose of research. ¹

Using question cards to frame questions is especially helpful when working in a language in which the researcher is not a completely confident and fluent speaker. While I speak and understand the language I was interviewing in well, I sometimes stumble when framing questions and undoubtedly miss the nuances that are part of interviewing in my mother tongue. I’d looked up a couple of the phrases on Google Translate as I created the cards and was glad for the opportunity to have them sitting there in front of me, reassuringly accurate. An unexpected benefit of my question cards was that they offered clarity that I might have struggled with had I made them up on the spot. This can also make them useful to those who are interviewing using an interpreter, as the cards can be prepared and checked for accuracy of translation prior to the interview.

Engaging interviewees

Seeing what was in my head gave Joana and Fabiana a chance to figure out how they’d tell me about the issues I was interested in exploring with them. Giving them my checklist meant they could see what they were letting themselves in for. It meant we could potentially collaborate on regulating the time so that we covered the ground I’d anticipated asking them without taking up too much of their time or coasting too quickly through the questions. ‘Where would you like to begin?’, I asked, reasoning that as they’d seen what I wanted to find out about, let them choose the entry point. They began with a theme that I’d probably have come to later, but which quickly gripped us all as it was so rich and interesting, and the interview unfolded from there.

From time to time, they’d look at the cards to check that we were working our way through them. As they spoke, I reordered the cards from time to time, clustering together the ones that had been touched upon and also those that had been connected in their narrative. When there was a lull in the conversation, I was able to reach forward and pluck out a card. This made changing the subject feel less abrupt or staged than in an interview setting, where one might seek to guide the interviewee to the next set of questions through content paraphrases that summed up and closed a theme before moving on to another. The card that had been selected and held up served that purpose, taking us into the next round of themes and questions.

We paused for tea, then came back to the cards. ‘Have we finished yet?’, Fabiana asked, picking over the cards and reading out the ones that we had not yet covered. At the end of the interview, Joana ran her hands through the cards as she stacked them into a neat pile on the table. Job done. I put them back into my bag. When I got home, I put the cards into a sequence using my memory of the trajectory of the conversation and wrote down my post-interview reflections with them at my side, flicking through the pile to prompt my memory of the points that were made.

Later, as I worked through the transcript of the recorded conversation, I was able to map some of those points onto what we actually said; this provided me with a layer of reflection that I had not anticipated. It also gave me a map of the interview that was more coherent and organic than a linear record of exactly what was said, laid out in chronological sequence. This got me thinking about what else had been going on in the interview, the energy levels, the level of engagement of my interviewees with the questions, and the emerging storyline.

Engaging questions

Visualisation can help make visible gaps and salient emphases, literally enabling us to ‘see’ what's missing and bring into view potential areas of connection and expansion. Being able to visualise the principal themes so easily can also help with analysis, especially if a similar approach is taken to coding, creating a series of code cards – perhaps in a different colour – that can be worked with alongside the question cards. Questions and themes arising in the interview situation that were not anticipated can be logged on a card and integrated into the process. Similarly, emergent insights and new questions can be put onto a card and can form part of the process of coding and analysis, providing a bridge to gathering further material.

One of the most interesting dimensions of this experience was seeing how the question cards engaged the participation of interviewees in the interview. They were able to participate in the design, depth and pace of the interview process in ways that conventional qualitative interview-based research often does not permit because it is so often the interviewer who dictates the route that the interview takes by the questions they ask, and who retains in their mind and on their checklist the questions to ask next. Enabling the interviewees to pick the questions they want to answer and choose their own pathways through the interview can shift power and in the context of this changed dynamic, interviewees can gain more control over the process of narration. This helps build and sustain rapport, especially where the researcher is able to ask if the questions hit the spot and what other questions, they’d have thought to ask that they feel are important to talk about. It may also assist the interviewee to feel more able to be forthcoming, as they would have had a hand in choosing the question they were answering, in the order chosen by them. This might be especially helpful in interviews on sensitive subjects, where there is a substantial power difference between the interviewer and interviewee(s) or where the interviewee is from a marginalised social group.

The next time I use question cards, I can imagine having more of a preparatory discussion with interviewees about the cards that would invite them into more pre-interview reflection on what we were going to talk about, with them suggesting themes and questions that could be written on cards and added to the pile. This might also include, for example, giving the cards a score or putting them in rank order in terms of what interviewees think is most essential to cover. If I’d been thinking of doing this in advance, I would have bought a pack of index cards rather than using torn-out pages from my notebook. I can also imagine getting one of those little index card boxes with dividers that could be labelled, into which question cards could be filed as a quick source of information on what was covered in different interviews. In this way, they could serve to help prepare for future interviews and as a source of reflection after those interviews, comparing the ways in which particular sequences or framing of questions worked over a series of a number of interviews, each of them with their cards, laid out in clusters, on a table or a floor. I’d also spend time at the end of the interview reflecting with the interviewees on their experience of the interview and of doing things this way; this would help feed into strengthening the elements of this practice that enable, encourage and empower interviewees.

Question cards are super easy and flexible to use, and as this article has explored there's scope in their use for innovation at any stage in the interview process – from the generation, structuring, clustering and organisation of research questions that spans the pre-interview preparation, to the interview itself, to coding and analysis. By inviting interviewees into the process of preparing the interview, they gain more of a hand in shaping the conversation and are able to direct the interview towards themes and questions that are significant to them. I can see question cards becoming part of my everyday qualitative research toolkit and I’m looking forward to experimenting more with them.