The Interculture Project
HEFCE Project No 97/68

Guidelines for Debriefing Interviews

Time of the Interview

Interviews should preferably be administered as soon as possible after the period of residence abroad.  For students who have been abroad for one academic year, we would suggest the interview process should be completed by the end of the following November.

Preparation for Interview

Before each interview, the interviewer should:
-	familiarise him/herself with the proposed interview questions
-	study the student’s answers to related questions in the questionnaire
-	read relevant portions the of student’s diary.

Duration of Interview

Interviews can last up to an hour and should be at least half an hour.

Aim of Interview

The aim of this interview for the Interculture Project was to follow up, complement and deepen the knowledge we had already gained about returnees’ cultural and linguistic impressions from the questionnaires and diaries.  This would also be a viable aim for debriefing purposes, but the debriefing interview would also seek to give the student an opportunity to reflect on their intercultural experiences in conversation with the interviewer.  The interview should be exploratory, with the interviewer saying as little as possible.  Students’ remarks that seem particularly relevant to the development of intercultural awareness should be followed up.  This also applies to interesting remarks from the questionnaires and diaries.  If necessary, students should be given time to think!  The interviewers ought to remain alert to the way in which previous cross-cultural encounters may have coloured the PRA experience.

Recording the Interview

If the interview is to be audio-taped, the tape recorder must have a good quality microphone  so that the interviewee’s words are clearly recorded.  If possible, switch off all other electronic office equipment (e.g. PCs) during the interview session in order to avoid interference.  Interviewers should check the recording system and sound quality before starting the interviews, and should make sure that the RECORD button is on during each interview.  It is particularly important, if tapes are to be kept, that the name of each interviewee be clearly indicated both on the tape itself and on the cover of the tape box.

Interview Questions

The questions below represent the principal concerns of the Interculture Project, and were designed to elicit accounts of intercultural incidents and of the development of intercultural awareness.  Of course for debriefing purposes these questions could be adapted as the tutor sees fit. 
Core questions are marked with a , double indented questions are suggested follow-up questions to the core questions.  The Additional Questions at the end of the document were only asked if there was interview time left over.  References to questions on the questionnaire are made in the format Q #.

The interview questions were designed with the following definition of culture in mind:

A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. Culture is not a natural phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people’s behaviour or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models of perceiving, and otherwise interpreting them.								Goodenough (1964: 36)

and also drew on the linguistic notions of ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ choices:

‘markedness’ is correlated with issues of frequency, regularity, normality, and so forth, marked has also come to mean strange, deviant, unexpected, unusual in a given context, that is, stylistically marked … pragmatically marked … sociolinguistically/socioculturally marked …; certain kinds of discourses/texts are marked; … breaking the norms of a discourse type is marked; and so forth.						Asher, R.A. (1994: 2382)

Interview Questions

 You have just come back from  , 
	What’s it like to be back?
Did you have a good time in ?

 Going back to the end of your second year at university,
Did you want to go abroad?	Why?/Why not? (cf. Q 42 of the questionnaire)

 Before you went on your Period of Residence Abroad (PRA),
Did you have any ideas [attitudes] what the  people would be like?
Did they turn out to be as you expected? (cf. Q 25 & 44)

You say in your questionnaire (Q 6 & 7) that you had (had not) been to  before?
If yes, 	In which respects did the two experiences (previous stay & PRA) differ?

	Did you have particular expectations? (cf. Q 44)
	Were they fulfilled?

 When you got to  ,
What aspects of  (PRA place) struck you as most different from those of your home (UK) environment?
	Can you describe your first impression of the place?
	(i.e. the town, city, village; the landscape; your accommodation; your workplace; 
the people; the smell, the sounds you heard around you)
	Can you remember how you reacted to only hearing  (language) around you?
	Can you describe how you reacted when you first turned on the radio/the TV?

 Did you feel foreign? How?(cf. Q 31)

 What [aspects of the foreign culture] did you find difficult to adapt to? (cf. Q 32)

 What steps did you take to immerse yourself in the  culture? (cf. Q 26 – 30)

 Did you take any conscious steps to improve your language? (cf. Q 35 – 41)

 Did you come back to Britain for Christmas?
If yes,	Did the whole place [abroad] feel different after Christmas?
	Can you describe how/why?

 Was there anything you particularly liked about 
 culture/the way  people interact with each other 
 language/the way  people communicate/express themselves?

 Were there people you found particularly easy to understand/ talk to?

 When with  people,
Did you sometimes feel they interacted according to certain [social] rules/norms you were unfamiliar with - and therefore you didn’t know how to react?
(e.g. ‘They shared some understanding which I lacked and if someone just gave me a few guidelines, it would be easier for me to deal with this situation.’)

Can you give an example of this kind of situation?
What happened?
Who were the people involved?	Were they female or male or mixed?
					Do you know anything about their background?
					Were they your age?
					Were they in a similar social position?

 When you were with  speakers, (cf. Q 40)
	Did it sometimes happen that you understood what they said,
	i.e. you understood every word in the sentence and the construction,
	but you still didn’t know what they actually meant by what they said?

		Can you remember a situation like this?
Can you remember the topic of the conversation?
		Who were the people participating in the discussion?

 Can you think of any other misunderstandings that arose? (cf. Q 40)
E.g. times when you intended to be polite but were thought to be rude, or when you wrongly thought a local person was being rude?

 Have your views about your own country/people changed? (cf. Q 45)

Additional Questions 

 What was your placement like? (cf. Q 22 – 24)
	Did you notice any differences in the work environment,
- attitude to work/ work ethic
- how people interact in a work environment
between Britain and  (country)?

 What was the most useful preparation that you were given for your PRA? (cf. Q 16 – 17)
	Why?

 What other sorts of preparation would have been helpful?