Structured questions are important in both employment interviews and research studies. Here are examples of what they look like in practice.
In the past few weeks, I’ve written a couple of articles about how structured questions can help improve the reliability and validity of interviews:
I’ve also written a few articles about how structured questions can help improve the reliability and validity of research surveys:
In this article, I’ll give you some concrete examples of what structured questions look like in practice — both in employment interviews and in academic research.
Employment interviews
Let’s start with an example from employment interviews. In many employment interviews, interviewers ask applicants to describe a situation in which they dealt with difficult individuals. Then they ask follow-up questions about that situation. This is called a “lead-plus-probing” format. For example, the interviewer might say:
Describe a situation in which you dealt with individuals who were difficult, hostile, or distressed.
Who was involved?
What happened?
This is a lead question followed by planned follow-up probes. The lead question gives the applicant an opportunity to talk about a relevant experience, while the probes ensure that the interview gets information about the candidate’s behavior in specific situations.
The importance of structured questions in employment interviews is well established. In fact, there is even a recognized typology of structured interview question types (Campion et al., 1997). There are four types:
Situational questions: These ask the candidate to imagine that they’re faced with a hypothetical scenario at work. They typically ask for a description of how the candidate would respond to the situation.
Past behavioral questions: These ask the candidate to describe how they responded to a situation in the past. The goal is to get the candidate to describe their actual behaviors rather than their opinions or beliefs.
Background questions: These ask the candidate to provide information about their educational background, work history, etc.
Job knowledge questions: These ask the candidate to demonstrate their knowledge of the job, such as by answering technical questions.
Each of these types of questions is intended to target a different kind of candidate information. Situational questions are meant to assess the candidate’s problem-solving skills, past behavioral questions are meant to assess the candidate’s actual behaviors, background questions are meant to assess the candidate’s qualifications, and job knowledge questions are meant to assess the candidate’s knowledge of the job.
Research
Now let’s take a look at how structured questions are used in research. In research, structured questions are usually asked in the form of fixed response options. These are questions that have a set of possible answers, and the researcher wants the participants to choose one of those answers. This ensures that the data collected will be uniform and comparable across all participants. For example, if a researcher wants to know whether students find healthcare options on campus to be excellent, good, fair, average, or poor, they might ask the following question:
Do you find healthcare options on campus to be: excellent; good; fair; average; poor?
This is a closed pre-set scale. It has a fixed number of response options, and it asks each participant to select one of those options. This makes the data easier to analyze because it ensures that every participant answered the same question in the same way.
Fixed response questions are very common in surveys. In fact, most survey questions are structured in this way. This is because fixed response questions make it easier to collect and analyze data. If you want to compare your results to other people’s results, you need to make sure that everyone is answering the same question in the same way.
In summary, structured questions are important in both employment interviews and research studies. In employment interviews, structured questions help interviewers to gather reliable and valid information about candidates. In research, structured questions help researchers to collect uniform and comparable data from participants.