Parallel Interviews?

[Community-Member]

Would you all recommend conducting parallel interviews using Network Canvas Interviewer? Or is this designed to be more of a 1:1 interview?

If we did utilize this to conduct many interviews at the same time, is that possible? Would each device need to have Network Canvas downloaded onto it and have the protocol involved also downloaded on each device?

After the interviews are completed if we did have a central server, would the data automatically be uploaded through that if each device was connected to that said server?

[Joshua]

@Community-Member

Would you all recommend conducting parallel interviews using Network Canvas Interviewer? Or is this designed to be more of a 1:1 interview?

This depends to a large extent on your participants, and the complexity of the interview. In general, we designed the software to be a 1:1 experience. This enabled us to make the interfaces very minimalist and streamlined. However, if your participants are comfortable with using technology, they may be able to figure out most things for themselves (or at least be able to get by with just a few additional information screes, with a researcher on hand should there be an issue).

As I mentioned, a further consideration is the nature of the interview itself. The interviewer is often most useful in ensuring the participant properly understands the task (sometimes needing to provide alternative phrasing, prompting, or framing), and that they enter correct and valid data.

With that said, if you can solve these issues we do know of other teams that have had a single interviewer guide a classroom group of ~20 students through an interview in parallel.

@Community-Member

If we did utilize this to conduct many interviews at the same time, is that possible? Would each device need to have Network Canvas downloaded onto it and have the protocol involved also downloaded on each device?

Yes, I’m afraid that is the case. Please note also that we designed the software to be installed on researcher-owned machines, so this isn’t something that you should ask participants to install and configure themselves. We are working on a browser based version of Interviewer, but it won’t be ready for quite some time.

@Community-Member

After the interviews are completed if we did have a central server, would the data automatically be uploaded through that if each device was connected to that said server?

There are two fundamental workflows with data: (1) Local export, and (2) using Network Canvas Server.

With local export, you have to manually export the interview sessions from the device(s) running Interviewer. You can choose export options as you do this, to (for example) determine CSV, GraphML or both. You then need some secure means of transferring the data, which is compatible with your ethics processes and/or IRB approval. Some studies use university services like secure file servers that can be remotely accessed, and others use cloud services like dropbox or google drive.

With Network Canvas Server, we designed a tool that lets data securely be sent in its raw form from one or more Interview clients to a different computer. It still needs to be triggered manually, and the computer running Interviewer must be securely “paired” with the one running Server as a prior first step. Although this approach has a number of advantages, we have found that it requires quite a bit of technical knowledge to use, and also frequently raises concerns at an institutional level (IT folks are typically not willing to deploy it) which can delay your project. For this reason, we most often suggest researchers use the local export features.