Conducting an interview

Overview

The interview uses a framework of numbered Sections, Subsections and Questions presented on a succession of forms. Questions are ordered to provide a logical progression; however, they can be completed in any order. There is no requirement that every question should be answered; and at several points you are invited to exclude blocks of questions because they clearly do not bear upon the case in hand.

The interview is built from 11 Question Types which differ in the kind of information they capture, and how you enter your response.

Questions are disabled when your responses to other questions show them to be inapplicable.

Question status is reflected graphically on the interview forms, making it easy to spot questions which have not been answered, have become inapplicable, or are bookmarked.

The Interview Explorer provides a tree view representation of the interview’s structure which shows at a glance the extent of progress with the interview and the whereabouts of questions you have chosen to ‘bookmark’, enables you to jump directly to any question, and enables you to find questions containing a specified word or phrase.

The Route Explorer offers the same features as the Interview Explorer, but in relation to any of several pre-defined routes through the interview – a route being a subset of questions drawn from many parts of a complete interview which are in some way related and which it might be helpful to ask or review sequentially.

Tailored text ensures that the patient’s name, and the names of the parents, are inserted in the text of questions on the interview forms. This gives the questions a conversational rather than an impersonal feel.

Moving around the interview

With the exception of Repeating Answer questions, you can move from question to question using the keyboard:

<Tab> takes you to the next question
<Enter> also takes you to the next question
<Shift + Tab> takes you to the prior question

You can skip to any question by clicking either on the text of the question or on the place where you enter your response.

There are three special cases:

From the last question on an interview form, tapping <Tab> or <Enter> takes you to a Next question button. To move to the first question on the next form, tap <Tab> or <Enter> or click the button with the mouse.
From the first question on an interview form, tapping <Shift + Tab> takes you to a Previous question button. You must then either click the button or tap <Enter> to move to the last question on the prior form – a further <Shift + Tab> won’t do the trick.
If you are completing a Repeating Answer question, you can move to the next (or any another question) only by clicking on the text of the question or on the place where you enter your response
- exceptionally, if you’re moving to another Repeating Answer question you have to click where you enter your response

Jumping to a different place in the interview

Although the interview questions are ordered to provide a natural progression, you can jump directly to any point in the interview by using the Interview Explorer or the Route Explorer.

Question status

Question completion and other aspects of question status are shown graphically on the interview forms.

Questions where a Don’t know (?) button has been set are counted as answered (because no better reply can be got) – see 7.5.12
Disabled questions are counted as answered (because the answers to other questions have shown that they cannot sensibly or usefully be asked) – see 7.5.16
Repeating Answer questions (not illustrated) display a green question number when you have clicked Mark as done, and a red question number when you have clicked Mark as to do
Question status is reflected in the Interview Explorer and Route Explorer

A right-click on a question number (eg 7.5.12) in the interview opens a context menu relating to that question:

Mark question marks the question so that it appears in the interview with a yellow border around the question number and in the Explorers with a ‘folded corner’ icon.

Show guidance opens a Help file where detailed interviewer guidance on the question is given.

Unanswer question reverts a question to the unanswered state. This applies to all question types except Repeating Answer.

Question IDs

Every question in the 3di has a unique system Qid (question ID) as well as its number in the Section, Subsection and Question hierarchy. This Qid persists across different versions of the 3di (which may change the order of some questions, for example), and is used to name the SPSS variable which stores the exported response to that question. You will also see question Qids in your Notes documents: each note opens with details of the question on this pattern:

7.4.2 (Qid 176): How good is she at using a crayon or pencil for drawing purposes?

To determine a question’s Qid, hover the pointer over the question’s number within the interview. A tooltip will pop up showing the corresponding Qid. Below, question 10.2.1 has the Qid 983:

If you need the Qids of all questions, you could go to the Case Manager and generate a Route Report for All questions. Alternatively you could read the Qids from the Route Editor.

The Interview Explorer

The Interview Explorer enables you to

see a graphical representation of the structure of the entire interview
move directly to any chosen question in the interview
get immediate visual feedback on the progress of the interview
identify and move directly to questions you have chosen to mark
find questions containing a specified word or phrase

To open the Interview Explorer:

click the button on the ribbon:

or press <Ctrl + Shift + E> (think of E-xplorer)

With the Question ID or Number box you can jump to any question by entering either its Qid (eg 966) or the question number which gives its hierarchical position in the interview (eg 8.1.3), and then tapping <Enter>.

You can also jump to the first question in any subsection by entering just the section and subsection numbers. For example, entering 3.2 would take you to 3.2.1.

Double-clicking a section folder takes you to the first question in its first subsection; double-clicking a subsection folder takes you to the first question in the subsection.

To go to the corresponding question in the interview, either double-click the question, or highlight the question and tap <Enter>.

Green icons denote answered questions, subsections and sections.

Red icons denote unanswered questions, subsections and section.

A white icon denotes a question which has become non‑applicable – it counts as answered.

A yellow ‘folded corner’ denotes a marked question. The device is echoed in the parent subsection and section icons.

For users running Office 2013 or earlier, to expand or hide a subfolder you must click the folder icon and tap the left or right cursor keys.

Making notes on any question

The AddNote system provides the equivalent of a marginal note in a paper-based interview: you can record in a Word document supplementary material relating to any question.

Double-clicking a question number in the interview allows you to record a separate note in an automatically generated Word document. The first time you add a note in an interview, there may be a delay of a few seconds while Word opens the document.

The note is inserted in question order amongst any similar notes and sub-headed with the number and text of the question to which it applies. Where a note has already been recorded on a question, the cursor is placed at the end of the existing note.

Your notes are automatically integrated at appropriate points in system generated reports – unless you choose not to include notes using the Edit report preferences button in the Case Manager. Of course you can edit individual included notes, or remove them altogether. You can also read and edit your Notes file directly – although if you delete any bookmarks in the document the report generator will be unable to collect the related notes. If you wish to add to the Notes file material relating to questions not already represented in the file, then you can only do so safely by revisiting the patient’s interview and double-clicking the particular question numbers.

The Notes file is created in the patient’s Case folder, with a filename on the pattern

Notes_000080

in which 000080 is the patient’s system ID written as 6-digits.

The Notes file is a named document when it first opens and is saved automatically at short intervals; however, you should save it when the interview is over to be sure of preserving the most recent changes.

Handling over-long text entries

Where a question expects a text response you are limited to 255 characters – the equivalent of about 3 lines of text on an A4 page.

If your entry exceeds the limit, then when you attempt to move to another question a warning message displays the excess text and offers an option to have the whole entry copied to the Notes file. The copying of the problem entry is done in the background to avoid interrupting your interview. You will need to edit the text down below the character limit before proceeding to the next question.

Where you do need to exceed the limit on text length it will often be best to proceed as follows:

accept the option to have the whole of the entry copied to the Notes file
delete all your typing in the text box and replace it with “see Notes file”
double-click the question number, and complete your entry by adding to what has been copied across for you

This approach enables you to complete your text with the benefit of being able to see it all. It has the minor side-effect that for any text question whose content is included in a Report, that Report will include your “see Notes file” entry; such inclusions are easily found and deleted, of course.

Note that this approach is not suitable if you are interested in looking at text entries in data exported to SPSS – contents of the Notes document do not appear in SPSS.

Keyboard shortcuts

<Alt + Tab> is a Windows shortcut. Holding down <Alt> and repeatedly tapping <Tab> cycles you through a series of icons representing each of your open windows, beginning with the icon for the window you used most recently. When you release <Alt> the window corresponding to the current icon is opened. You enter the Notes window from an interview form, so holding down <Alt> and giving <Tab> a single tap returns you to the interview.

What if the 3di crashes?

If the computer or the 3di crashes while an interview is underway, almost certainly there will be no loss of data: responses are saved as each question is completed. Proceed as follows:

either: if the computer has crashed, restart the computer and re-open the 3di
or: if the 3di has crashed but the computer is still running, close the 3di
- if you can’t close the 3di, and you are not familiar with closing an application via opening the Windows Task Manager using <Ctrl + Alt + Delete>, simply save any other work you were doing (in Word, for example), and hold down the machine’s power button until it closes down; then restart the computer and re-open the 3di
revisit the interview
revisit the question you were on when the problem arose: it alone may not have been updated – complete the question if necessary