A. The trust required to successfully conduct an interview may be difficult to

achieve under certain circumstances. If honest answers to difficult questions may

have repercussions for your interviewees, they might be less than forthcoming.

If you were interested in developing a tool that would encourage teens to pay for

downloading music rather than illegally trading copyrighted songs, you might

consider interviewing teens to understand their attitudes and practices. However,

they may be reluctant to share information with you, for fear that their parents

would learn of any inappropriate activity that they have been involved in. As

parental consent is likely to be required for the participation of underage teens,

these concerns are not necessarily invalid. How might you build trust with these

teens? How might you evaluate their comments to determine whether they are

being truthful?

B. The development of a tool to encourage teens to pay for downloaded music

presents some challenges in data gathering. If teens are using home computers

for potentially inappropriate activities, parents may feel that they have a

legitimate interest and concern in what their children are doing. To better

understand the problem, you might decide to interview parents as well

as teens. Would you interview them separately or together? What sort of

questions would you ask parents and how would they differ from questions

that you might ask of teens? Would you use one-to-one interviews or focus

groups? Why?

C. Interviews can become awkward if the interviewees start asking difficult

questions about the research. Imagine you are interviewing hospital equipment

repair technicians about their practices for recording their workflow, including

repairs completed, time spent on each repair, and related tasks. What should

you do if the workers' concern for their job security leads them to ask tough

questions about why the data is being collected and what it will be used for?

If you know that management is trying to collect data that might be used

to raise expectations and workload or to reduce staff, what should you tell

the technicians? How can you resolve your responsibility to the client (the

management) who is paying the bills, while showing appropriate respect for the

workers you are interviewing?