A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

6. Notes or recordings of interviews / chats with 
individuals
In an individual interview, some people may share more 
with you than they would in a group situation. However, 
don’t forget that if you are interviewing a student of yours 
– or even a parent – they may wish to ‘please’ you with
their answers (in other words, they are unlikely to tell
you the ‘whole truth’ about what they think or feel). 
Anonymous reflective writing – or completion of an 
anonymous questionnaire – can sometimes get you
more honest answers! In any case, try to relax the
person being interviewed via social talk before the
‘proper interview’ begins. 
One advantage of an individual interview – or even an 
informal conversation – is that you can go deeply into
a particular issue; more deeply, perhaps, than with a 
questionnaire. Prepare your questions in advance, but be 
open to the idea of going in unpredicted directions with 
further questions if you feel you are uncovering new and 
useful information. Finally, don’t forget to take notes during 
interviews (focus group as well as individual interviews), 
and turn these notes into a fuller account soon after the 
interview – before you forget what was said. If you make
a recording, you can, of course, make your account even 
more accurate, but it can take a long time to transcribe
an interview – and good notes, taken during and/or 
immediately after an interview, can be equally useful. 
7. Responses to a questionnaire
Gathering information about people’s attitudes, feelings, 
ideas and opinions (‘perceptions’, in short) is very often 
done via questionnaires in both classroom research and 
other forms of research (for example, political opinion or 
market research surveys). In fact, when many people think 
of ‘research’ they may tend to think automatically of 
‘questionnaires’. However, we’ve deliberately put 
questionnaires at number 7 (i.e. not number 1) in order to 
show you that there are other, equally good, if not better, 
ways of finding out about people’s perceptions (numbers
1 to 6 above). 
Questionnaires have the major advantage that they make
it possible to gather perceptions of a relatively large 
number of people quite easily. However, questionnaires 
have disadvantages, too. For example, in an interview you 
can go deeper and deeper into a particular topic according 
to what someone replies, but a questionnaire doesn’t allow 
you to do that. Also, it can be quite time-consuming to 
make a questionnaire, and the questions need to be very 
clear. It can sometimes be easier just to ask for students’ 
quick reflective writing, (4. above) or to have conversations 
or hold interviews (5. and 6.). Or you can do these things 
first and use the responses to help you make a 
questionnaire. 
This is exactly how Javier Ávalos, another Champion 
Teacher, made his own questionnaire. He was interested
in finding out his students’ feelings or attitudes towards 
learning English. First he sat down and talked with his 
students and noted down their individual replies. Because 
he wanted to know if the whole class shared these 
perceptions, he then put the individual replies he’d 
received into a grid, as you can see below. The original 
survey was in Spanish (we have translated the 
questionnaire items into English below), since Javier 
wanted to make sure his students could understand
the questions.

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