Interview Follow-up

Content Analysis is Essential Follow-up

Content analysis is an essential part of the follow-up to any type of interview. You want to summarize or describe the responses and associate them with the source or group of sources, who were the sample of people who responded. You want to summarize who said what, and when. If have engaged in a one-on-one in-person interview, the you will want to use your best informational listening and note-taking skills to capture the content of what was said. If you used an online synchronous or asynchronous interview method, you will already have a transcript or archive of the content, but will need to reliably summarize the responses to your interview questions. The different methods of interviewing will require different methods of follow-up to capture the content and prepare it for use.

In-person Interview

If you have interviewed synchronously one or two experts in person, telephone, or video conference, then you will want to listen to the recording of the interview and mark points of interest . You can either take notes, transcribe relevant answers, or mark with a time stamp the location of important content that relates to your topic for replay or review later.

Online Synchronous Interview

Online synchronous interviews use simple text chat functions that can be recorded or archived for later analysis. If you have conducted an online synchronous interview using chat, make sure you have actually activated the archive feature so that you have a recorded transcript of the chat and are able to review each of the questions and responses at a later time. Since you can chat interview with a number of people about your topic, you may eventually want to summarize and analyze the data for patterns in the responses.

Online Asynchronous Interview

An asynchronous online interview is one where the researcher and the researched do not need to be online at the same time. Typically these interviews will use email, but other technologies might also be employed.

If you conducted an online interview asynchronously, you may have a large sample of geographically dispersed respondents. You will need to summarize the content or tabulate the ratings if you used rating scales for the interview questions.

If you asked closed questions, you can tabulate the frequency of responses in the different categories. However, if you asked more open-ended questions, you will find it useful to code the content of the interviews with some system so that you can group the responses into meaningful categories in order to summarize the results.

Citing the Interview

Once you have completed your content analysis, you will want to consider how to cite or credit the source(s) of the respondents. Since the results of your interview are usually not published, they will be considered "personal communication." Generally, you will indicate the person, date, and manner of data collection. Here are some examples:

Personal Interview face to face—Expert , A. (2013, May 2) Personal Interview.

Personal interview by telephone or chat—Expert, A (2013, May 3) Telephone (chat) Interview.

Personal interview by email—Expert, A. ( 2013, May 4) Email Interview.