General Guidelines for Conducting Interviews

A useful guide for conducting interviews - one of the strategies for community consultation, participation and story telling.

Interviews are particularly useful for community work as the interviewer can pursue in-depth information around a topic.

Interviews may be useful as follow-up to survey questionnaires.

Usually open-ended questions are asked during interviews.

Before you start to design your interview questions and process, clearly articulate to yourself what achievement, story, problem or need is to be addressed using the information to be gathered by the interviews. This helps you keep clear focus on the intent of each question.

(NOTE: Much of the information in these guidelines was adapted from Michael Patton's book, "Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods" (Sage Publications, 1990).

Follow this link to The Management Assistance Program for Nonprofits website for the Interview guidelines

Follow this link to The Management Assistance Program Library for more information on interviews

For further information

Contact	:	Management Assistance Program for Nonprofits
Address	:	2233 University Avenue West, Suite 360, St. Paul, MN, USA 55114-1629
Phone	:	(651) 647 1216
Fax	:	(651) 647 1369
Email	:	mail@mapnp.org

WWW

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http://mapfornonprofits.org