The Hidden Art of Interviewing People: How to get them to tell you the truth

382 Pages·2007·5.59 MB·English

by  Neil McPhee

THE HIDDEN ART
OF INTERVIEWING
PEOPLE

THE HIDDEN ART
OF INTERVIEWING
PEOPLE
How to get them to
tell you the truth
Neil McPhee
and
Roger Terry
Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester,
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xvii
ABOUT THE AUTHORS xix
INTRODUCTION xxiii
1 TAKING THE BRIEF 1
What’s in this chapter? 1
The importance of the fi rst steps 1
Being at your best 3
The dance of communication 11
Reading the signposts 16
True listening 29
Quality questions 31
Eliciting values 39
Setting the scene – NLP frames 47
Checklist for taking the brief 51
vi CONTENTS
2 RESPONDING TO THE BRIEF 53
What’s in this chapter? 53
What’s the point of writing a proposal? 53
Proposal or action plan? 54
The power of words 55
Using values to enhance the action plan 60
Document style and construction 61
Thinking like the client 70
Action plan writing guidelines 73
3 THE SAMPLE 75
What’s in this chapter? 75
Recruitment 75
Characteristics 76
VAK subquotas 79
Recruitment approaches 80
4 RESEARCH INTERVIEWS 93
What’s in this chapter? 93
Overview 93
How we create our reality 97
How does the process of fi lters and communication
work? 100
Reframing 108
Envirometics 110
Rapport 116
Role 119
The topic guide 119
Handling individuals 124
Animating the group 127
CONTENTS vii
Groups vs depths 132
Projective and enabling techniques 134
5 UNDERSTANDING WHY PEOPLE BEHAVE
THE WAY THEY DO 141
What’s in this chapter? 141
Understanding people 141
The fi ve sensory fi lters 143
Eye accessing cues 147
Primary interest or focus of attention 149
Global–specifi c: chunk size 151
Relational sort for decision: sameness–difference
(matching–mismatching) 154
Motivating attention fi lters 157
Options–procedures 164
Time sort: past, present, future 165
Decision-making 167
Usage 169
6 THE ANALYSIS 171
What’s in this chapter? 171
To analyse or not to analyse? 171
One way of working 172
Recording the interview 173
Analysis 176
How do we elicit this information? 188
Summary 190
7 PRESENTING YOUR FINDINGS 193
What’s in this chapter? 193
Putting it all together 193
viii CONTENTS
The presentation process 195
Videoconferencing 240
8 ETHICS, ECOLOGY AND CODES OF
PRACTICE 247
What’s in this chapter? 247
What do we mean by ecology? 247
Manipulation 248
Ecology: NLP style 249
Ethics and qualifi cations 251
Codes of practice 253
9 CONVERSATION PIECES 257
GLOSSARY 305
REFERENCES 329
INDEX 331
FOREWORD
Resources for the education of qualitative market researchers
have grown dramatically as my own career has progressed over
the last twenty-fi ve years. As this fi eld continues to move from
a craft to a profession, more and better guides for practitioners
will continue to change the manner in which newcomers are
recruited, socialized and professionalized. McPhee and Terry’s
The Hidden Art of Interviewing People is an important milestone in
this progression.
When I faced the fi eld as a novice, a major barrier was the
nearly complete absence of published resources specifi c to the
applied practice of qualitative research. By the early 1980s, a con-
siderable academic literature had grown around the qualitative
orientation in the social sciences. Unfortunately, this outburst of
creative energy tended to be rather sectarian in its tenden-
tious argumentation about what constituted proper qualitative
research.
The fi eld’s intolerant denominationalism kept it bottled up in
academia. Advocates of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical perspec-
tive contended against proponents of Harold Garfi nkel’s Ethno-
methodology who sneered at the older Symbolic Interactionists