GUIDE FOR INTERVIEWING
An opportunity for youth to interview older adults about their advice for living through a crisis!
While many elders will share their own advice, we are also encouraging young people to reach out to and interview an elder or older adult they know – grandparents and other family members, neighbors, church members, former teachers - regarding the elder’s advice about living through a crisis. The youth can then share that advice on our website. They can share in writing or can audio or video tape their interview and upload those files. We will be posting interviews on the Share Your Advice page.
We have extensive experience with youth interviews of elders through our Building a Community Legacy Together (BCLT). The BCLT is an intergenerational program for youth and older adults where the youth interview elders about their general advice for living. We have developed a detailed manual for this program that includes an evidence-based curriculum for the youth regarding interviewing skills. Please feel free to download a copy of our free manual from our BCLT website.
Based on our experience with the BCLT, here are some tips for interviewing…
1. There is only one question for this interview!
The CCAP has a singular focus, that is, what advice an older adult has for living through a crisis. Although some older adults you interview may have multiple pieces of advice to give on this topic (which is great!), there is really only one question to ask. Here are several ways that you could ask the question…
What advice do you have for living a happy life and for overcoming challenges?
In this time of the coronavirus pandemic, what advice do you have for young people for living through this crisis?
2. The Cornell Crisis Advice Project vs. an Oral History project
The CCAP interview is different than an oral history project. In oral history projects, the goal is to collect life stories or a history of an older adults life. However, the main goal of the CCAP interview is asking elders to frame their experiences in terms of wisdom and advice for the younger generations. While we do want to hear a little bit of the elder’s life story, especially the parts of their lives that relate to the question you are asking, we primarily want to hear what the elders have learned from those life experiences.
If an elder shares a life story but does not offer any advice or lessons learned from that life experience, you could follow-up with: “Is there something you have learned from that experience that could be useful to young people?” Conversely, if the elder shares a lesson without any background or story, you may want to ask something like: “Can you give me an example of that from your own life?”
3. CCAP interviews look for detailed responses regarding advice from older adults
The CCAP interview is somewhat like a conversation, where the interviewer searches for in-depth information, often asking multiple follow up questions.
Sometimes the elder will only tell their story and not share enough about what lessons they learned or what advice they have about a particular question topic. One of the most important skills you need for this interview is to be able to redirect the person you are interviewing from storytelling back to giving advice and sharing lessons.
You can redirect someone back to the interview questions by saying something like…
“I’m enjoying hearing about this story, but I want to make sure we talk about what lessons you have learned from experiences like the one you just told me about.”
4. Use follow-up questions
Using follow-up questions is an important technique in qualitative interviewing. We can ask follow-up questions when we do not fully understand a response, when answers are vague or ambiguous, or when we want to obtain more specific or in-depth information.
A follow-up question can be as simple as: “Anything else?” or “Can you tell me a little more about that?” or “Do you have any more advice about it?” These particular follow-up questions can be asked after every main question in the interview. It is standard practice to always give the interviewee a chance to add to their answer by using these simple follow-up questions. When the interviewee runs out of answers, the interviewer then moves on.