Homework 4: interview

In this assignment, you will be interviewing someone on the subject of privacy or security.

Due

This homework is due 23:59 on Tuesday, April 2.

Collaboration

This assignment should be completed in groups of 2.

Assignment

Your task is to conduct an interview on a topic related to privacy or security. You will choose an interview guide from published literature and recruit a real person to ask the questions to.

Below are the steps you should complete.

Decide on the interview guide that you’ll follow

For this assignment, you will be following an interview guide from a published paper in security or privacy.

At this link, I’ve pre-selected some papers that make their interview guide available. (It is typically found in the appendix, or in supplementary materials linked from the text, and occasionally directly in the body of the paper.)

You’re more than welcome to find and use the interview guide from a paper not on this list; however, you must get my approval before using it.

Recruit your participant

A typical interview study will have 10–25 participants (though, occasionally, there will be studies with fewer, or many more). For this assignment, you only need to recruit and interview one person.

The person you recruit must not be someone else in this course.

Additionally, the background of your interviewee must match the target population of the study from which you took your interview guide. For example, if your interview guide is from a study that focused on older adults, you must interview an older adult; if the study interviewed software developers, your interviewee must also be one.

Reserve 30–60 minutes of your participant’s time to make sure you’re not rushed.

Conduct your interview

Read about how to conduct interviews

To prepare to conduct the interview, I’d like you to read section 8.8.3, “During the Interview” from Lazar et al.’s Research methods in human-computer interaction. You can access it for free from a campus connection by following this link.1

Interviews are a very widely used technique, and you can find many other online resources with advice about various important aspects of them, like building rapport and asking follow-up questions.

Conduct a semi-structured interview

Before you conduct your interview, you should get consent from your participant to audio-record and transcribe it. You are not required to turn in the audio, but you will need to turn in the transcript of your conversation. Transcripts can be generated by video-calling software (e.g., Zoom, Google Meet), third-party services, or fully offline using OpenAI Whisper (there is other speech-to-text software but, as far as I know, this is currently the best).

Pretty much all of the interview guides you’ll be following are for semi-structured interviews. This means that the questions in your interview guide are, well, a guide, and not a strict script to follow. You should not simply read off a question, wait for your participant to answer it, then move on to the next question. Instead, ask follow-up questions and probe for deeper understanding using the techniques you read about previously.

One person in the pair can be the lead, but both team members should actively engage during the interview.

Organize your findings

In a typical interview study, after conducting the interviews, the researcher would engage in thematic analysis or a similar process to identify common themes across participants. Since you will only be talking to a single person, this will not be possible.

Still, after the interview is over, you should read back your transcript and collectively decide on the major takeaways. Think about the research questions posed by the study where you found the interview guide. How would the answers you got help answer them? Then, consider the study’s results. Were the answers of your participant similar to those reported by the study?

What to turn in

You must submit 2 things:

  1. The transcript of your interview. While it does not need to be perfectly cleaned, it should be more legible than the raw output of your transcription process, meaning that you should:
    • Remove timestamps and group responses by who’s speaking
    • Separate and identify the different speakers
      • Interviewee: …
        First interviewer: …
    • Fix obvious mis-transcriptions
    • You do not need to remove speech disfluency (ums, uhs) or fix grammar.
  2. Your write-up, described next (as a PDF created using LaTeX.)

Your write-up should include the following:

  • Title and citation for the paper whose interview guide you used
  • A full text of the interview guide that you used
  • A description of the background and any relevant experience of your participant
  • A description of the major themes and findings from your interview
  • A reflection of how your findings relate to the research questions in the study, and how similar or different they are to the study’s results

Late policy

  • Assignments submitted up to 24 hours late receive a deduction of one letter grade (10 percentage points).
  • Assignments submitted more than 24 hours late receive no credit.
  • The late penalty will be waived for up to 3 homework assignments.
    • However, this cannot be stacked (you can’t use more than one late day per assignment).
    • Even with this waiver, an assignment submitted more than 24 hours late receives no credit.

Footnotes

  1. If that link opens a blank page, try refreshing it. Another way to access this reading is by first signing in to O’Reilly using this link (which can be found from the library’s list of online databases that you might find generally useful) and then following this link directly to section 8.8.3 of the book.↩︎