Throughout my report onto how to become a famous director I will aim to interview professionals that could already be considered to be professional directors, in doing this I ensure I have some kind of first hand account of the journey to get there and what it takes. Whilst conducting these interviews I will need to be careful what I ask and be sure that the questions I ask are tailored to get the kind of information I am looking for and the level of detail I need. The first way to do this is to ask a mixture of both open and closed questions, that way the level of detail I require can be dictated by the type of questions I ask.
Open questions are called open as they have no set parameters for an answer and as such they can lead to very long experience or opinion based answers that can can be very useful to me as I can use these to see if people are of similar opinions and I can also use the depth of the answer to strengthen opinions and such so that I have a more informed opinion on what it is I am saying.
Closed questions, by definition, are the opposite, these have very rigid answer parameters and are often followed by the question of "why" because they give very clear concise answers but give no indication of any feeling or opinion behind them. These are most commonly in yes no form or things like "what is your favourite...". These can be useful questions to ask as they are much easier to draw hard facts and statistical information from, take the example of the yes no question; we may find that 60% of people agree and 40% don't, but if we asked "what do you think of..." which is an open question then it is much more difficult to draw statistics as everyone who has been asked is giving a different opinion despite potentially meaning the same thing that can be then quantified.
Bearing all this in mind, I feel that I should only ask open questions and I have a few reasons for this. The first of which is time, if I am to be taking time from a very busy professional so that they can answer my questions, it seems best that I ask them open questions so as to ring out every drop of information from them so I do not want to limit what I can get from them with closed questions. The second reason is that I have very little use for the quantitative (statistical) data I can get from interviews as I will in all likelihood not be interviewing many people, therefore, with such a small sample size there will be relatively no strong conclusions to be made based on the stats I find, as there is no way there is any integrity behind a sample size of less than 5 people, regardless of how high up on a career ladder they are. The final reason I have for this is that qualitative research in this case will be more useful to me as I already know that becoming a director has no set path so asking open questions will give me more of a personal feel for how it is to be done.
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