And lastly the parents frequently wanted to minimize tension with other parents.
The other parent in the family.
And this was actually something we found not only in divorced families,
where it kind of makes sense.
But also is work separated families.
Frequently the parent that's at home kind of has to take a greater
share of child care responsibilities.
They're the ones kind of making sure the routine still happens for the child and
the parent that's abroad may want to be really careful about how
they disrupts the routines of how much extra obligation they're introducing for
the parent who's still at home.
So we actually saw this theme across family types.
So this is just an example of an interview study and the results from it.
So now it's going to how to interview participants.
There's generally about four steps to it.
So you want to prepare your questions, you want to schedule and
arrange meeting, conduct interview, and then analyze.
So in terms of preparing your questions, it's very important to actually plan ahead
rather than to think okay well, on the spot I'll figure out what I wanted
to ask this, and it'll just be kind of like a conversation.
So typically I put together something that I call a protocol or
a list of questions that I want to ask and follow up questions.
We'll talk a little bit more about preparing a protocol in a later video but
I just want to make sure that you understand a few things about this.
Four things. So
one is You really want to have open-ended wording on interview questions.
The main strength of interview questions is develop the person tell their story.
And so you don't want to ask interview questions that can be answered with
the single word that or that ask the participant to select from a list of
choices or there a yes or no questions.
And this is actually the most common mistake that I see for
people who are first developing their set of interview questions.
So as you read through it if there is any question that starts with something like
do you or in other way can be answered with a yes or
no, you want to make sure to rewrite this.
So for example instead of asking do you connect with your child over the phone?
Ask, how do you connect with your child?
Or tell me a story about the last time you connected with your child while you
were apart.
You also want to make sure to plan the time.
So it can be very easy to miscalculate how much
time a particular section's going to take.
Or in both directions actually sometimes I think a certain set of questions is going
to take a very long time.
It doesn't actually end up getting them which response from participants and
end up ending short.
I also note follow-up questions from myself.
So generally the interview is kind of like a conversation that is lead by
the participant but sometimes I do want to get a specific pieces of information and
I may note those for myself in order to get back to them.
