Interviews: Developing your questions

The basic concepts

You don’t have to be an expert to interview someone on a topic, but you do need to do your homework to develop intelligent questions.

I suggest 5 solid questions for a 30-minute interview. In fact, 3 are usually enough if they are well-constructed open-ended questions and leave a lot of room for reply—whatever you do, do not use “yes” or “no” questions. I keep the last 2 questions in my back pocket in case I need them.

Often the reader needs a setup to understand what the interview is about. Thinking about the setup also helps me to narrow my focus and develop strong questions. So let’s start by looking step-by-step at the editor’s page interview I conducted and wrote for Contagion. We’ll begin with the deck, which is a short intro explaining what the reader can expect and why they should continue reading.

Here’s the deck on my deck: I knew that there had been a misunderstanding in the media’s interpretation of Dr. Margolis’s research results, and that became the springboard for constructing the questions I planned to ask. I was also knowledgeable about the direction of HIV/AIDS research at the time, because of the editorial content I worked on. That might not have been the readers’ experience though, so I wrote a brief deck to set up the background for the reader, and to focus where I would start my questions, as follows:

The deck: Dr. David M. Margolis and colleagues’ recent proof-of-concept study on depletion of latent HIV-1 infection in vivo created a bit of a media stir when it appeared in the August 13, 2005 issue of The Lancet. I asked our HIV/AIDS section editor-in-chief to discuss the fuss with us in lieu of his usual editor’s page. Our conversation took place by telephone and e-mail.

~Gail M. Pfeifer, RN, MA, Editorial Director, Contagion.

Read the pdf file online

So that’s the deck, and my next posts will take you through the questions, one by one. Ask me your own questions along the way.