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Clean Interviewing: Cleanness Rating Project

If you're involved in any kind of interviewing and gathering high-quality information from customers, research participants, patients or communities, then it is useful to know whether your questions are gathering information from the interviewee or whether you are constraining or leading their answers. Both can be useful in different circumstances, but how can we know if our unconscious biases are pushing us further than we intend?

One way is to carry out a 'normal' interview and then to submit it for assessment using the Cleanness Rating. This will allow you to see whether your interview, just as it is (leading questions and all) is mostly Clean (sticking to the client's own words), more Contextually Clean (introducing the topic with minimal presupposition), or mostly Leading (introducing your own assumptions).

This Cleanness Rating project will take place during the summer of 2026. Marian and Caitlin are collaborating with Steve Capel from Portsmouth University and Heather Cairns-Lee from IMD to create a digital tool that can rate interviews and interactions using James Lawley et al.’s cleanness rating. (Click here to read James's account of how the Cleanness Rating came about, which includes links to resources which show how it works.) We're inviting a group of interested people to join in this endeavour.

You'll submit two interviews (signed off for ethical reasons by the interviewee and yourself) and also be able to sit in with different trained assessors as they assess yours and others' interviews. Assessors will share when they are online, when they are marking, when they are wrangling about diverging ideas etc. You can join in all the sessions that suit your schedule and timezone and you will also be able to pre-mark the same interviews, so that you can compare and contrast your own thinking with that of the assessors - and be a part of the inside story of this project. 

There will be multiple opportunities to get involved over the summer. The sessions will also be recorded so you can watch on 'catch-up'. Participants will learn how to use the cleanness rating to assess any kind of interview and will pick up tips and tricks for being clean enough! 

Please note that by joining this project, you will be agreeing to strict confidentiality regarding the other participants - and to not sharing other people’s private thoughts and ideas which may come up during the process.

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