Although I tried to ask a couple of probing questions in the interview, I think that I should have asked more probing questions where appropriate. After the first interview question was answered, I should not have moved to the next question quickly and should have asked a probing question to get more detailed answers (Braun & Clarke, 2013). This could have helped me understand the interviewee’s perception about health (Braun & Clarke, 2013). For example, I could have asked the interviewee to clarify how being financially unstable could have some effects on his health and what he meant by being financially unwell. Besides, it was not effective to ask this probing question in the interview “how frequently should a person exercise to be healthy?” This is because this question digs deeper for details that go beyond the aim of the research questions. Therefore, interviews in the future should focus on the purpose of the interview to ask more beneficial probing questions that would be appropriate to produce useful data (Braun & Clarke, 2013).
Although oriented questions were used in the interview, detailed use of the oriented questions in the interview could have been more beneficial. They could have generated a lot of data about the interviewee’s understanding of health and health changes over time. This could have been done by encouraging the interviewee to talk about his or her own experiences and social events (Braun & Clarke, 2013). For example, when the interviewee answered the question about the healthiest time in his life, I could have asked him to give some examples of why he thought that he was not healthy at any point in his life and why he thought that he was the healthiest when he was in college. Also, I could have asked him to draw on some memories and experiences to know his understanding of health. In the future, I will have to encourage interviewees to draw on some event, own experience, and some situational experience to generate detailed contextual data about the interviewee (Braun & Clarke, 2013).
Since my educational background is in health sciences, I wanted to know why the interviewee said that being socially unwell was considered as being unhealthy. I asked him “please tell me what you mean by being socially unwell?” After he answered the question, I asked him another question about the same thing to explore his further understanding of being socially unwell. The question was “if a person is socially unwell, then how can his or her well-being be affected?” Asking the two questions could have misled the interview conversation. Thus, instead of collecting data to know the interviewee’s perception about health and health changes over time, the conversation focused on social aspects of health. The more interviewing experience that can be gained through more practice is required to generate more useful data in the future. This is because it helps to reduce an interviewer’s stress and helps the interviewee to manipulate his/her background and beliefs positively.
Reference
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2013). Successful qualitative research: A practical guide for beginners. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.