Write story eliciting questions

In your PNI project, you will ask three kinds of questions:

questions that invite people to tell stories (which you write on this page)
questions about the stories people tell
questions about the people who tell the stories

These three sets of questions combine to create a story form.

What to do here

Add some eliciting questions to your list. For each question, write what you want to ask people.

Give each question a short name (so there's room to write the question name in tables and on graphs). As a general rule, short names should be less than 20 characters long.

You can copy questions from built-in templates (suggestions). Change the blank spaces (_____) in the question to suit your project and participants.

For help choosing, click the "Recommendations for eliciting questions" button. You'll see a table that shows the various options, color-coded with evaluations of risk, connected to the answers you gave to questions about your participant groups and resources.

Connections to other pages

The eliciting questions you create here will be available to use when you create a story form. Note that you are not designing a story form on this page. This list of questions is more like a question library from which you can choose when you create a story form.

Frequently-asked questions

What's a good story-eliciting question?

Good eliciting questions are respectfully curious and intrinsically interesting questions whose answers are stories.

If you are not sure whether a question is respectfully curious, find some project participants (or potential participants) and ask them the question. Then watch their faces and their body language. What emotional reactions do you see? Do they look (or lean or move) towards you or away from you? Do they seem happy to be invited to consider the question? Or do they seem confused, intimidated, or offended? Also, do they seem to consider the question a reasonable way to explore the topic you are exploring? Or do they seem to think it strange (or boring or uncomfortable or upsetting) that you are asking it of them?
If you are not sure whether a question is intrinsically interesting, again, try asking it of people. Then look for signs of genuine interest. Do they smile? Does their body language seem relaxed? Do they seem to enjoy the opportunity to look back over their memories and ponder the issue? Or do they seem to snap to attention, eager to conform to your expectations? Or do they seem to rush for cover, eager to find somewhere to hide?
If you are not sure whether the answers to a question are stories, try to answer it without telling a story. If it's easy to do that, reword the question.

How many eliciting questions should I write?

A larger variety of eliciting questions is good, because it means people will have an easier time finding a question they want to answer. But at the same time, people get bored and frustrated when lists are long. How many is too many depends on your project and its participants.

For a kiosk type project, in which people are just walking by and have no commitment to the project at all, ask no more than three eliciting questions.
For a volunteer type project, in which people feel socially obligated to participate, you can ask up to five eliciting questions.
For a commitment type project, in which people feel that participating is linked to their identities, you can go above five questions up to seven or eight.

The number of eliciting questions you can use also depends on your collection method. If you can hand people a sheet of paper with your questions on it, you can show them more questions at once. But if you're doing interviews (individual, group, or peer) you need to keep the number of questions smaller.

Can I write just one eliciting question?

Remember that the number of eliciting questions you write and the number of eliciting questions you include on a story form are not the same thing. You can write ten eliciting questions and include only one of them on your story form.

If you choose to use only one eliciting question on a story form, the question will simply be asked at the start of the form, without the participant being given a choice between eliciting questions.

How do I set the order of the eliciting questions?

You don't set the question order here. You only create the questions here. This is just a library of available questions. You set the order of questions when you design your story form.

Can I use HTML formatting for eliciting questions?

You can use these HTML tags for eliciting questions: b, big, em, i, s, small, sup, sub, strong, strike, and u.

HTML tags affect how your question texts appear in your online survey and in the "Enter or import stories" screen. They are stripped out when you print your story form.

To protect your NarraFirma installation from hacking, you cannot use attributes (such as "id") on any of these tags.

Do the question types (directed, undirected, etc) limit what I can write in the question? Do they limit how people can answer?

No. The question types are just here to help you think of questions you might want to ask. All eliciting questions are answered in the same way, with a large text area where the participant tells a story.

Can I create my own templates?

Only if you are comfortable editing the source code files in your installation of NarraFirma. If you are, find the file called "templates.js" and add your template to it. (Backup the file first!) Follow the formatting in the templates you see, and make sure you put your template in the right part of the file. If NarraFirma won't start up after you make your changes, check your browser's console to find out where the error lies.