This digest reviews the basic building blocks of a structured interview, points out some of the pitfalls in interviewing, and suggests ways for researchers to avoid these difficulties to produce questions that have the best possibility of generating reliable and accurate data on the topics of interest. The data collection instrument is a document…

The original impetus for this monograph was a grant from the New Jersey Basic Skills Council of the New Jersey Department of Higher Education to evaluate two college basic skills remedial programs (one in a four-year state college, one in a two-year community college) and to produce a handbook for conducting such evaluations. This monograph is…

Practical information is provided, in a question and answer format, for community college officials who are planning to conduct a community needs assessment. A brief discussion of the usefulness of needs assessment surveys to the college planning process is followed by descriptions of eight steps to be followed in planning and conducting a survey:…

Directed at practitioners in adult and career education, this document defines qualitative research, compares qualitative research to quantitative research, describes the "war" between proponents of each kind of research, describes how to assess qualitative research, and explains how to choose and use qualitative techniques. Pitfalls of…