FOCUSED INTERVIEWS 245

need to know more than you can read about in books. This is particularly true
for the skills necessary to carry out a group focused interview.

FOCUSED INTERVIEW UPDATE

The design and research case studies that conclude each chapter of this book
include interviewing—often focused interviewing. Vischer (Chapter 6) carried
out focused walk—through interviews with managers to discover attitudes
toward office planning; Preiser (Chapter 13) interviewed administrators to
understand the needs of visually impaired students; Farbstein and Kantrowitz
(Chapter 9) conducted group interviews focused on customers’ experience with
post-office design; Zeisel (Chapter 5) conducted group focused interviews with
news teams in the Star Tribune newsroom employing photos by participants
and 3-D models as probes. He also used focused interviews with HEB managers
(Chapter 4) to find out how a grocery chain works. This method is so pervasive
that researchers tend to report their use of focused interviews in an off-hand
manner. “We also carried out several interviews,” they might write as an aside.
Interviewing—and most interviews are closely related to the focused inter—
view—is widespread not because it is a useful extra, but because it is such a
basic tool, almost seamlessly integrated with other methods in E-B studies.

Interviewing techniques have been refined and elaborated, rather than
fundamentally altered. Interviews are being employed not only to explore a
respondent’s definition of a situation directly but to do so indirectly using
informants who can expose a third party’s View of the environment. For exam-
ple, Michael and colleagues inventively conducted interviews with detectives
to understand how auto burglars relate to the environment in which they carry
out their crimes (2001). The process of developing interview schedules is
becoming more sophisticated with the systematic use of multiple methods to
determine topics and questions, and in their analysis with the use of estab-
lished content—analysis software programs to help interpret and quantify open-
ended data. Finally, visual aids are increasingly being used as probes to explore
psychological dimensions of environments. Despite this, one challenge that
remains for the field of environment-behavior is developing standardized inter-
view procedures, such as those outlined in this chapter, that will enable
researchers to compare and build on interview data across studies and between
researchers.

With remarkable effectiveness, Michael, Hull, and Zahm (2001), employ
the focused interview as their only method to explore the role environmental
factors play in public park car burglaries—thefts from inside parked cars. The
project’s goal was to assess whether typical anti-crime environmental changes,
such as removing vegetation Where criminals can hide was effective in reducing
crime of this sort and if so, why. If it was effective, was it because it reduced the
number of places to hide as intended, because such actions indicated that atten~
tion was now being paid to the site, or because there was a concomitant surge
in police presence? The team wanted to broaden its understanding of this type