Conducting interviews and focus groups

Interviews and focus groups can be conducted online using MS Teams or in person (subject to changes in the university’s Covid policy restrictions).

If you’re a dissertation student, your study should be hosted on SONA so the psychology students can sign up for it, unless your supervisor has agreed that you can recruit outside of the university.

Online recruitment

Full training videos can found on the Research Training page. In the meantime, here’s an overview of how things work:

  • Online interviews and focus groups are conducted using MS Teams.
  • Teams allows you to make video recordings. It’s not possible to make audio recordings only, so make sure to state this in your ethical application form if you intend to run online interviews.
  • All Brighton University students have access to Teams, so they’ll be able to join the interviews or a focus group using a link that you generate for the meeting.
  • You can also add people into the meeting directly from the Teams session, so people from outside of uni can also join, provided your supervisor and the ethics committee have agreed to this.
  • At the end of the meeting, the recording gets saved to your Microsoft Stream account, which you can sign into using your usual Office 365 credential (using e.g. a.surname@brighton.ac.uk as your username).
  • You can download your recording from Stream and use the automatic transcription function which provides an editable script for you.

Before your interview / focus group:
(Setting-up Teams and recording consent)

In-person recruitment

In-person interviews are normally conducted in one of the experimental booths or larger group rooms in the Psychology Lab, unless agreed otherwise with your supervisor. Small experimental rooms can be booked through SONA. If you want to book one of the larger spaces, please e-mail us to check availability.

The lab can provide recording equipment including voice recorders and video cameras. If you intend to make video recordings, make sure you include this in your ethics application. After your data are recorded, we can provide software and a pedal to help you with manual transcription. We can also help you upload the recording to MS Stream if you would prefer to work with automatically generated transcripts described in the section on online recruitment.