 Let's first talk about interviews and how to plan them. Planning an interview is similar to planning any other form of communication. You begin by stating your purpose, analyzing the other person and formulating your main idea. Then you decide on the length, style and organization of the interview. Even as an interviewee, if you are the one who is being interviewed, you gain some control over the conversation by anticipating the interviewer's questions and then planning your answers so that the points you want to make will be covered. If you are an interviewee or an interviewee, in both circumstances, you will first plan something, then you will analyze your purpose, analyze your audience, think about what questions you want to ask. If you are an interviewee, you will anticipate what questions you want to ask and then you will practice your answers. You can also, as an interviewee, you can also introduce questions and topics of your own. So you need to prepare beforehand and think what are the questions that you can ask. In addition, by your comments and non-verbal clues, you can affect the relationship between you and the interviewer. If you are the interviewer, the responsibility of planning the session falls on you. On the simplest level, your job involves scheduling the interview, determining the time. It involves the location, planning where it's going to be held, that the location should be comfortable and convenient. Good interviewers are good at collecting information, listening and probing. And so they should develop a set of interview questions and decide on their sequence. Now obviously you will be planning these interview questions before, you will decide on their sequence before and you can obviously, depending on the situation and the context, you will change a bit as well keeping in mind the responses that you get. The purpose of the interview and the nature of the participants determine the types of questions that are to be asked. When you plan the interview, bear in mind that you'll ask questions to get information, to motivate the interviewer to respond honestly and appropriately and to create a good working relationship with the other person. Now in order to conduct a successful interview, you will ask different types of questions. To obtain both factual information and underlying feelings, you will use questions according to what you need. Open-ended questions invite the interviewee to offer an opinion, not just a yes, no or one word answer. If you use open-ended questions, then your interviewee will be able to give you an opinion, not just a yes, no or one word answer. You can learn some interesting and unexpected things from open-ended questions but they may diminish your control of the interview. If it is an open-ended question, if you give the interviewee more responsibility, more scope to answer, then it is possible that you may be able to reduce your control of the interview but the benefit is that you can learn very interesting things which you may not be able to understand if your question is not open-ended. Now what about the structure of the interview? Good interviews have an opening, a body and a close. The opening establishes RAPO and orients the interviewee to the remainder of the session. In the opening, as an interviewee, you establish a RAPO with your interviewee, you establish a link and the interviewee also tells you what the structure of the interview will be and how you will conduct the interview. You might begin by introducing yourself, by asking a few polite questions and then explaining the purpose and ground rules of the interview. For example, if you want to ask me a question, then you will say this in the introduction or if you want to ask me a question, then please ask me in the end of the interview. You will tell me the ground rules of your interview in the introduction. For an informational session such as a market research interview, you may want to structure the interview and prepare a detailed list of questions. This approach enables you to control the interview and use your time effectively. It also facilitates repeating the same interview with a number of respondents.