The overall aim of training for peer interviewers is to prepare people to carry out high-quality interviews that are respectful of interviewees and generate useful and relevant information for the project. This involves:
As with any training for professional interviewers, training for peer interviewers needs to cover:
An important and unique aspect of training peer interviewers is helping them to channel their personal experience in a way that’s relevant and useful to the research – to make sure it brings added value. Problems can arise from assumed common knowledge, for example the interviewee might assume the peer interviewer knows what they are talking about and say something like ‘You know what I mean’ or ‘You’ll know what that’s like’ without going into any depth. Peer interviewers therefore need to be prepared to:
Useful practical approaches include: