Elevate Your Interviews with Laddering and Scaffolding | New England Chapter

Determining the questions to ask during a research interview can be one of the most important skills in pursuit of qual mastery. There are many techniques in a researcher’s toolbox, and laddering is one. Interviewing a respondent using laddering can be tricky, especially if it is not used often or with a respondent who is not comfortable with self-reflection.

Laddering is designed to help explore deeper meaning in a respondent’s relationship to a product or service through questions that build on feedback and move from broad to a deeper understanding of their purchase motivators. Interviewer skill in listening and reading cues is key. Incorporating scaffolding, a technique primarily used in academia, can provide an alternative way to determine follow up questions and to assess the next step with a respondent. Incorporating thinking from both these techniques can offer more versatility and flexibility in questioning.

In this session, we’ll explore the basics of laddering, and how some additional perspective using scaffolding can create more opportunity for success with this technique. This will be useful both for professionals early in their career as well as experienced researchers who wish to refresh their perspective and bring new insight into their next interview.