Any journalist worth her salt would prefer a “real” face-to-face interview to a phone interview or an email interview. But one has to reluctantly admit that the latter two have practical advantages and hence as methods they are attractive to certain journalists under certain situations. For example, Mary Jaksch, editor of WriteToDone, had to rely on email interviews simply because she lives in New Zealand and her time-zone poses challenges while scheduling interviews with people on the other side of the world.
Interviewing by email or by phone might not be choices to apply to the same interviewing exercise. Rather they are more or less mutually exclusive in terms of applicability and intended results. Before we discuss these parameters that you should examine to decide on your method, let’s take a look at the broad advantages and disadvantages of either method.
Interviewing by Email
Advantages
The most obvious advantage of conducting your interviews by email is that you can reach a large a number of participants with minimal effort. It allows you to send hundreds of questionnaires with the single click of a button.
Emailing your questionnaire also means that your participants can take their time and answer each question, thoughtfully, and on their own schedule. This may sometimes lead to better answers than would come from a short, rushed phone call.
Disadvantages
While sending mass emails might save you some time, you run the risk of ending up in the spam folder of your recipients. Do this several times, and you even run the risk of permanently getting into the spam blacklist of email service providers. Once that happens, even regular emails you send may begin to land up on people’s spam folders.
If your recipients do not know you already, they have little reason to reply to your questionnaire. Unless they know you, the brand you represent, or the cause you are working for, it is unreasonable to expect people to take time off their busy schedules to reply to your email.
It is a passive method and will elicit responses only if the participants have something extreme to say – either something remarkable or something atrocious.
Interviewing over Phone
A phone interview is likely to be more acceptable to your participants compared to an interview by email. The reason is that you are also investing your own time while you request time from your recipients.
Advantages
If you want to dive deep into your subjects’ thoughts and experiences, you have to talk to them. You have to probe them with meaningful questions, you have to assure them should there be any sensitive narratives involved, you have to lead them in the direction you want them to talk about. This can only be achieved with an interview over a phone call, vis-a-vis an interview over email.
Conducting interviews by phone is much more personal since it is a conversation after all. People love to talk about their experiences, their passions and hence they are more likely to open up if you ask them meaningful questions.
Disadvantages
Yes, we all love to use technology to be more efficient and productive; calling up every participant on your list is not exactly being productive.
The entire process of scheduling appointments for a call, carrying out interviews with your participants, recording their responses and making sense of it is likely to be time-consuming, tiring and expensive. You can however record the phone calls, get their transcripts and make the exercise more fruitful.
When to Interview by email and When to Interview by Phone
Below we list a few parameters you can examine to choose whether you would like to carry out your interview exercise by email or by phone.
| To Consider | Should you Interviewing by Email? | Should you Interviewing by Phone? |
|---|---|---|
| Your interviewees familiar with you or the brand you represent or there a cause you represent that your audience identifies with | Yes | Yes |
| Your audience comprises of senior, experienced professionals in their fields | No | Yes |
| Your interview is about uncovering new ideas or surfacing deep concepts from your participants | No | Yes |
| You intend to statistically establish a hypothesis that does not require probing your participants | Yes | No |
| You have sufficient time, budget or help for the exercise | Yes | No |
You should also reward your interviewees to make them more enthusiastic about the interview process. Sometimes getting a quote in a reputed publication is enough; however that is absent you can extend a monetary reward such as coupon from Amazon.
We hope this has helped you decide on your interview process. If you have experiences to share please do so in the comments below. Happy interviewing!
