06 • Asking Thoughtful Interview Questions
09m 11s
Know the different types of questions to ask for an oral history interview and how to prepare them.
LESSON OUTLINE
1. Types of questions
2. How to get started
3. Asking your questions during the interview
TRANSCRIPT
Lesson 06: Asking Thoughtful Interview Questions
Hello hello and welcome back to Self Evident's oral history training and archiving program. This is Lesson 06: Asking Thoughtful Interview Questions. So today we're going to go through how to get started with your questions, the different kinds of questions, and how to ask these questions during your interview.
Types of questions
There are a few types of questions that are especially helpful during our oral history interview. We've got open-ended questions, follow-up questions, and backpocket questions. And we'll dig into each one of these individually.
Open-ended questions are ones that can't be answered with a yes, no, or just a single word answer. These questions are really great for oral history interviews because it allows for your narrator to lead on how they respond and also interpret your question. So it gives them multiple ways to think about the question. It also gives them multiple ways to answer the question.
What does an open-ended question look like? Well, let's practice. Let's try with this first question. Where were you born? With this question, your narrator could just answer the city or country that they were born in and then that could be it. So instead, let's think about how we can make this into an open-ended question. So questions like, can you tell me about your childhood? What was it like growing up in your home? What are some of your favorite memories growing up? All of these still relate to the early parts of their life and allow for your narrator to decide how to answer where they grew up, their experience growing up, and have way more ways for your narrator to respond and to think about your question. And more stories may come from them too.
Let's try this next question. Where did you go to school? Just like the last question, they could easily answer with just the school they went to, the city that they were in. So instead, let's try to make that into an open-ended question. What was going to school like for you? What are some of your favorite memories from school? So these questions still relate to their experience growing up and in school, where they went, but you'll get more stories with these open-ended questions.
Alright, let's try one more with this last question. What is your favorite fruit? So again, this could be just a one-word answer of what their favorite fruit is. So instead let's change it into an open-ended question. Can you tell me about your favorite fruit? What are some fruits you always have at home? And why? Both of these questions also talk about your narrator's favorite fruit, but also allow for your narrator to tell stories and talk about why these are their favorite fruits.
How to get started
So now that we know what an open-ended question is, how do we prepare them? Well, we use what we've learned about our narrator as starting points for your questions to learn even more about them. After your pre-interview, think back to what you learned from your narrator, focusing on a few key things: what your narrator shared that was especially important to them, what you heard your narrator get excited about, and also what you got excited about hearing from your narrator. This will show that you, as the interviewer, have taken the time to understand, as best you can, your narrator's background. To the narrator, this can be seen as you being genuinely interested in hearing and learning more about their story.
From this, choose three to four topics or stories that you want to hear and learn more about. And these themes and stories will guide the flow of your conversation and allow you to make connections with each other so that your questions can try to answer as much of it as possible.
This is also especially helpful to focus the conversation for yourself and for your narrator. For example, it's way harder to answer the very broad question, "What was your childhood like?" than to answer the more specific question, "Can you tell me about the family members you grew up with at home?"
So an example of how we can tie in what we've learned about our narrators into our questions is this, "So you told me a little bit about your involvement in the I-Hotel protests. Could you tell me more about what the I-Hotel protests were and how you were involved in them?"
It's really important to remember that your narrators should be explaining these stories in their own words. Even if you did extra research on the topics and stories you're asking them about, we're asking our narrators for their personal perspective on these events, on these stories. And even if we did our research and we read one version of the event, we want to hear from our narrators in their own words. So remember that your narrator should be the one doing most of the talking.
The number and order of your questions that you prepare is also going to be really important for keeping the flow of the conversation. So we want to come to the interview with about eight to ten questions prepared, starting with our light warmup questions. This is a great way for your narrators to start getting comfortable with you, get comfortable sharing stories, and talking about them. Just think about when you are having a conversation with someone and if the first question they ask you is to tell them your deepest, darkest secrets, would you feel comfortable with that? Probably not. So we want to start with the light warmup questions to get ourselves comfortable with each other. A great example of a warmup question is "What is a favorite memory you have of growing up?"
Then we want to move into our more in-depth questions about the important topics and stories you want to learn more about. So for example, could you tell me more about what the I-Hotel protests were and how you were involved in them?
And then finally, we want to close out with some reflection questions that revisit previous questions. Questions like, "How has the I-Hotel protest impacted your work today?"
Asking your questions during the interview
On top of our list of prepared open-ended questions, during the interview, we probably will have even more questions to ask as our narrator is sharing stories and even more details about those stories. So we'll want to use follow-up questions to dig deeper into the why and the how of their stories in response to what they've told us. So these questions are not planned in advance because they are in response to our narrator's stories. And it's important to keep in mind that this is where we can use those simpler questions. Even if they're one word — the close-ended questions like, "What year were you born?" Because these questions allow for us to get all the details of our narrator's stories, because we want to be able to paint a picture, a full picture of the story that they're telling us.
These smaller questions can also spark memories and stories from our narrators. So don't be afraid to ask them, even if they're close-ended questions. We want to fill in — we want to paint a full picture for ourselves and for our future listeners of the story.
A great way to be ready to ask these follow-up questions is to have these backpocket questions ready. These questions are broad questions that can be used for any story that your narrator tells you, so you can learn more and paint a fuller picture of what they're trying to tell you. So questions like, what happened next? How did that make you feel? Why did you like that? Or dislike that? Can you paint a picture of that?
Here are some tips on how to ask these questions during your interview. First, you want to jot down your questions, thoughts, connections, all throughout the conversation. This way you won't forget them and also you won't have to interrupt your narrator.
You'll also want to keep asking follow-up questions to make sure that you get the fullest picture of the story that your narrator's trying to tell you. One of my favorite follow-up questions to ask, to make sure that I'm fully there and understanding and seeing the picture they're trying to paint for me is to ask them, "Can you walk me through it as if I was right next to you?"
And finally, you want to keep your backpocket questions ready always. This is especially helpful if you're nervous for your first interview or your third or hundredth interview. These questions can be broad and apply to just about any story that they tell.
Before the next lesson
Now that you know how to write your questions and how to prepare them for your interview, before jumping into our next lesson, take some time to think back to your pre-interview with your narrator and prepare a list of eight to ten thoughtful, informed interview questions.
Once you're feeling ready and excited to get started preparing for your recording, then you can head to our next lesson: Your Interview Recording Day.