Open and closed questions.

Open and closed questions can be used in a variety of ways and situations. We see open and closed questions used in everyday conversations but mostly we usually see them in interviews as due to the amount of information you can get of your interviewee by just asking the one question. Also it ensures through using both open and closed question that you get a broader answer and not just a yes or no answer every time. Also it ensures the answers given by the interviewee are expanded.

A closed question is a question you would ask to purely get a yes or no answer. Whereas an open question is asked to get a more detailed answer about the subject.

During an interview we are more likely to find the interviewer using an open question more than a closed question, as through the use of an open question it helps to extract more information on a subject.

The use of a closed question such as "Do you exercise?" would only receive a yes or no answer from the interviewee. Whereas through using an open question such as "What type of exercise do you take part in?", would enable you to obtain a wider range of responses to enable you to find out a lot more about your subject matter.

Another thing that is good about using both open and closed questions such as "do you enjoy eating out?" and the alternative question "If you were to eat out what type of restaurant would you go to and what type of food do you prefer?". This enables the interviewer to have a range of questions and answers which gives the interview variety and depth. We can normally recognise an open question straight away as it follows the pattern of the five W's and the H.(who, what, where, when, why and how).

The strengths of an open question is that by asking the one question you can get a lot of information or feedback from the interviewee. Another strength of an open question is that through the use of them you can get qualitative data which gives you more detailed and emotional responses.  However, there are also weaknesses of an open question because due to the length of the question or the answer it could take a long time and limit the amount of questions you can ask. Also a weakness of an open question is that you won't be able to receive any quantitative data which could then be used to create bar charts and statistics.

The strengths of a closed question is that you can get quick responses and answers that can then be transformed into quantitative data to be used in graphs, bar charts, pie charts or statistics. However, there are also weaknesses to asking closed questions as the interview could become boring if the only answers you receive are yes or no and also the answers you would receive wouldn't be very detailed and you wouldn't know why the interviewee answered the question yes or no.

Open question interview

The interview above with Rihanna being interviewed by Diane Sawyer about being abused by Chris Brown is a good example of using open question in an interview to get more information out of the interviewee on the topic so in this instance that would be about the attack. The interviewer poses the question 'how could this happen to someone so strong?', with the use of this question Rihanna gives out more information about how it happened to her and it can happen to anybody. Also through the use of this question Rihanna talks about how hard it was for her to have to deal with the attack in the public eye. Throughout the interview the questions that Diane Sawyer poses to Rihanna all start with one of the five W's and this is part of the reason that Diane Sawyer gets more information out of one question.   
Closed question interview 

The interview with Chris Brown where he talks about what happened with Rihanna is a good example of using closed questions during an interview. This is because when the interviewer asks Chris Brown about the video she has just shown of Rihanna the question she asks is 'is this accurate?' and by her asking the question the way she does Chris Brown doesn't fully answer the question with a detailed and definite answer. 
Leading Questions
A leading question is a question such as 'do you have a good relationship with your mum?'. This type of question makes you think more about your relationship with your mum and can sometime make the interviewee share more information. A leading question prompts or encourages the answer wanted from the interviewee.