A Use for Leading Questions in Research Interviewing

Abstract

One of the values of the interview as a research technique, particularly in exploratory work, is that, with proper questioning, the informant may be induced to volunteer information beyond that requested by the interviewer. Questions of a nondirective, open-ended type have generally been used to encourage responses of this kind. Unfortunately, these questions are often inefficient because informants tend to respond to them not only by expanding their answers beyond the immediate question, but also by introducing some matters of no interest to the research worker.