Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Open-Ended or Closed-Ended Questions
Ethnographers use both open-ended and closed-ended questions to pursue
fieldwork. An open-ended question allows participants to interpret it. For
example, in studying an emergency room, I asked a regular emergency room
nurse the following question: “How do you like working with the helicopter
nurses?” This question elicited a long and detailed explanation about how
aloof she thought they were and how unfair it was that the helicopter nurses
did not pitch in during the busy periods. She said she could list five or six
activities that emergency room and helicopter nurses did together during the
week, but she said these activities were all superficial.
This response opened new doors to my study. I followed up with questions
to helicopter nurses, who indicated that they did wait around a great deal of the
time waiting for a call to rush to the helicopter. They explained that they could
not pitch in during regular emergency room busy periods because they might
be called away at any time, and leaving in the middle of a task would be unfair
to both the regular nurses and the patients. Thus, an open-ended question
helped to illuminate the conflicting worldviews these two sets of nurses held
about the same emergency room experience—information that a closed-ended
question, such as “How many times do you interact with the helicopter nurses
each week?” might not have elicited.
Closed-ended questions are useful in trying to quantify behavior patterns.
For example, asking both sets of nurses how many times they interact with
each other in a week would be a useful test of varying perceptions of reality
and a means of documenting the frequency of that particular behavior pattern.
Differing responses would also be a useful cue to probe further about the qual-
ity of that interaction.
Ethnographers typically ask more open-ended questions during discovery
phases of their research and more closed-ended questions during confirma-
tional periods. The most important question to avoid is the stand-alone vague
question. Asking regular nurses whether they work with helicopter nurses
frequently—without defining frequently—is useful to neither the researcher
nor the participant.
Interviewing Protocols and Strategies
A protocol exists for all interviews—the product of the interviewer's and the
participant's personalities and moods, the formality or informality of the set-
ting, the stage of research, and an assortment of other conditions. The first ele-
ment common to every protocol is the ethnographer's respect for the culture of
the group under study. In an interview or any other interaction, ethnographers
