 In an interview, we cannot ask our research question as is. Had I asked Sher Singh what real art signifies and what transformations have come about in the art practice over time, it is possible I wouldn't have got much of an answer. Instead, Sher Singh and I had many conversations which led me to understand the place of painting in his life and in the life of his community. We talked about how he started painting, who taught him to paint and why they were painting on paper. We discussed how his status in the community was connected to his art and many such topics. Some of these conversations were prompted by questions that I had prepared beforehand. But some others emerged organically. Among these was the origin story about why the veils paint. But I had to prepare for these organic meandering conversations. This involved putting together a set of questions that would help me understand Sher Singh's relationship with his art. For many researchers, this is where the preparatory work for an interview begins with designing an interview guide. At its simplest, the guide is a set of topics or questions which we hope to discuss with our participants. But it is not a laundry list of questions which we can rattle off and then expect participants to answer them one by one. It is an attempt at designing and structuring the conversations we want to have so that we may learn about particular phenomena. So how do we exactly prepare? First, we must understand the basic structure of an interview. It is often like a wave. It starts slower and easy as the researcher and participant get to know each other. The intensity rises as we near the middle where we approach more complex topics and then it pulls off with simpler discussions towards the end. We are likely to have a limited period of time within which to conduct the interview. In this limited time, we need to hear from the participant as much as possible and therefore we need to ask questions or introduce topics that are important to us. For this to happen, we must plan ahead to ensure we have enough time. In an hour-long interview, we can hope to ask eight or maybe ten questions in all. Any more than that may leave the participant feeling too tired. The first few questions of any interview which may take up the first ten minutes or so are likely to be generic questions. With these, we open the conversation and put our participants at ease. The next few questions are the core questions. With these, we hope to generate complex discussions for which we need to factor in time. In this part of the interview, participants are likely to also introduce new topics. And for these two, we need to leave some time. We may have 30 to 40 minutes in all for eight to ten questions of this kind. And the last few minutes is where we ask a couple of relatively simple questions to wind down the conversation, just like the wave. Let us take a closer look at the different parts of this interaction. The first few questions are meant to build rapport between the participants and us, where we introduce them to our research. In this stage of the discussion, we try to introduce them to the interview process and include procedural clarifications. We request for their consent to have the interview, the permission to record and discuss their right to the recorded material and so on. Some researchers like to prepare a small note telling the participants about themselves and the research. A written version of this sometimes doubles up as a consent form. Our initial questions are designed to give us some background knowledge about our participants. We can start with questions about where they grew up, what they do for a living, the different cities they may have lived in and so on. Something that gives us a sense of their journey so far. Introducing themselves to us in their own way helps participants settle into the conversation. What we learn at this stage can help us contextualize the events that are brought up later in the conversation. Let us reflect for a moment on what kind of opening questions we may ask. Here's a scenario from an interview. A researcher prepared a guide to interview her participant, a woman in her mid-thirties. She began the interview by asking, what is the profession of your spouse? Do you think this was a good opening question? Why or why not? Think for a moment and write down your responses. Some of you may have said that this is a good opening question. It gives us some information about the participant and starts of the conversation on a neutral note. Some of you may have disagreed. You may have said the question is too personal or that it is based on certain assumptions. You are right. In asking such a question, the researcher is assuming that the participant is married and there is the additional assumption that her spouse has a profession. Both of these assumptions are quite problematic. The assumption that she has a spouse can be seen as judgmental and perhaps prying. Particularly in a society where men and women in their mid-thirties are often expected to be married. And by asking about her spouse's profession and not hers, the researcher is suggesting that the participant does not have a profession or that her profession is not as important as that of a spouse. A good opening question in this case may have been something less personal or more casual. Like asking someone how their day has been so far or asking them what their interests are or simply by asking them to tell us something about themselves. This way the participant can choose what they would like to share with us. From these opening questions, we move on to the core questions. These are the questions that relate to our central research topic. Discussions around these usually take a lot of energy and thought. So we give them plenty of space in our guide. We try to place them right after the opening questions so that they are not left for the end. Because by then, participants may be too exhausted or overbend to continue with intense discussions. As we have said earlier, our questions cannot be a direct translation of the research question. They are often formulated by deconstructing our research question. In drafting the core questions, we try to maintain a certain focus. Not everything that we need to learn can be formulated in words. So we put in those topics which can be best discussed through a verbal conversation. Interviews are best for learning about our participants' particular experiences. So we design our guide to seek out personal histories and experiences. We ask participants to share with us their personal opinions and perspectives. And through personal narratives, we can also try to grasp how a phenomena is situated in their society. That is, how is it experienced and perceived by others like them? Let us take an example to understand this better. Imagine that I am working on a project which requires me to understand the use of machines and tools by workers in a factory. As part of my fieldwork, I am going to interview a female employee who has been working there for almost a decade. I want to learn from her about her experiences of operating machines. I also want to learn her particular experiences as a female worker. That is, as a woman operating machines which were not necessarily designed for different genders. And I want to learn how her experience with these machines may have changed over the years. Can you suggest some questions that I should include in my interview guide? Take a moment to write them down. I hope you wrote down some questions that I can use during the interview. Here is a list that I made and see how many of yours matches with mine. What are the tasks you are expected to perform? Are there tasks that are segregated by gender or age? What tasks are these? Which tools or machines do you operate? Can you describe the process? What characteristics or skills does a person require to carry out these operations? Does it help to be tall or short? Does it require physical strength or flexibility? Are there certain tasks which you feel more comfortable performing than others? Can you describe these to me? What are the tasks which you feel uncomfortable doing? Or which you dislike? What do you dislike about them? Do you feel like your ability to operate machines in the factory has changed over the years? In what way? Through the discussion these questions generate, I hope to understand the particular experiences of this participant. Additionally, I may learn about the more general experiences of female workers at the factory and of workers who are in the same age group as her. I may also learn how the machinery and the tasks in the factory have changed over the last decade. This is one part of designing our guide, its structure and the content of the core discussion. The other part is its details, framing questions, structuring the discussion around every topic, moving from one topic to another and so on. We will discuss these in our next section.