By Vijay Tailor-Hamblin,
Hi my name is Walter and I was one of 6 YPAG members who took part in three evening training workshops on Qualitative Interview training in April and May 2022. Below is a Q&A where I tell you about our experiences. You can also listen to myself, Sarun, Niamh and Orla telling other YPAG members about the training at one of our YPAG meetings in July (click play on the audio above to hear). Above is the poster we designed to describe our training journey at the UKCRF Network Annual Conference ‘Collaborating for Success’.
So why did you want to take part in this training?
We wanted to learn how to best do face to face interviews, learn more about interview skills, find out how best to keep the listener engaged, learn more about the world around us and about how to make people calm and open up to us. We were also were keen to meet new people and be able to add the training to our CVs.
How were you all feeling before the training?
We were asked how we were feeling before the training in a questionnaire. We felt: a bit worried, excited, interested, happy to do it, calm, nervous, inspired, confident.
What was the format of the training?
We had three evening meetings over Zoom and they ran from 5pm-6.45pm
What did you like about the training?
We enjoyed the breakout rooms a lot because we could have small group discussions.
The polls and quizzes were good fun because they were interactive and engaging. I also enjoyed the whole group discussion because you could hear different people’s point of view on different subject matters.
What did you think about the length of the sessions?
I thought the length was quite good but I felt it could’ve been 5 minutes longer.
We all enjoyed it being a small group of 6.
Everyone said they got to join in as much as they wanted to.
What topics did you cover?
Privacy, qualitative research, the various rules and regulations you have to follow when interviewing people.
Do you feel like you learnt more about qualitative interviews for research?
I would absolutely say that I’ve learned a lot from this training and I now know the way to present myself in an interview.
What did others say?
Everyone felt it had helped them build up their confidence to be a young interview assistant.
How were you all feeling after the training?
We were asked how we were feeling after the training in a questionnaire. We answered that we felt: happy, excited, safe, interested, joyous, inspired, and intrigued.
What’s happened since?
We have produced a Jargon Buster which we plan to upload to the GenR website soon and our work has been accepted as a Poster at this year’s UK Clinical Research Facility Conference! We are also continuing to work on a role description for ‘Young Interview Assistants’.
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This exercise develops knowledge of different types of research and related terminology. The task requires young people to match a phrase with its definition.
