Designing interview schedules and questionnaires - great resources

Many of my fellow students and I are starting to prepare for the 'hands on' elements of our research where we will be conducting interviews and / or questionnaires with a wide range of people.

Designing a good interview schedule and questionnaire is a fine art, and I found this fantastic website from Professor T.D . Wilson on this very subject. Here, Professor Wilson outlines the benefits and pitfalls of various types and approaches to interviews and techniques, and there are some really practical tips too. I have found this a most useful resource.

In the meantime, it's a while since I wrote about Newcastle United. What can you say? We continue to walk a relegation tight rope and we don't instil a great degree of belief in the fact that we can turn this around.
My top tip is that 4-5-1 just doesn't work; stop it right now! If Chelsea couldn't effectively play with Drogba in this formation we certainly can't, especially with one of the shortest teams in the premiership.
I'm off to see the Lads on Monday, v Birmingham City and as usual they will receive great support from our travelling fans. I just hope that the potential absence of James Milner won't impact too heavily on the team as I view him as a key player. Player 4.4.2 though, perhaps bringing in Shola to complement Owen and / or Martins, and we could do this you know. Now is the time to turn it around Lads.
Howay, you can do it!

Concepts, themes and mind mapping

So, I haven;t blogged in a while. This was primarily due to the fact that I had a few days out in Belfast and then went straight to Woking for a work trip. That and the continued demise of Newcastle United.....

Anyway before I end up like Marvin the Paranoid Android, I thought that I would share with you my mind mapping tool of choice which is FreeMind for OS X. Yes, I am one of those pesky Mac users.....

I took my time getting into Mind mapping. My mate and colleague, Andy, does it all the time and for identifying my initial research themes it's worked a treat. Yes, you still have to manually enter terms and then 'refind' the recurrent information, but I identified my common themes in a couple of minutes from my print out.

FreeMind is available via a link on Wikipedia where you can read all about it too. If you've never tried mind mapping, give it a whirl, especially if you have tasks that you need to think about.