Asking Better Questions
One of the things we hope for in our photovoice projects is to help participants and community members to see deeply — to see deeply into the beliefs, values, and concerns of our neighbors, our communities, & even ourselves. By seeing deeper into the things that make our neighbors’ hearts tick and the obstacles blocking them from fully flourishing, our own field of vision grows stronger.
One thing that helps this process go smoother and richer is when participants ask thoughtful and provocative questions that invite the person sharing their photos to go deeper and to get to the heart of the matter. A good question, and the way we ask our questions, can also help people feel belonging by helping them to feel safe, trusted, and heard in the process.
If carrots are good for our ocular vision, good questions can be carrots for the scope of our perspective. Here are a few tips to asking better questions.
Listen deeply.
It’s impossible to ask a good question if we don’t listen deeply, actively, and sincerely. It may seem ironic, but you will ask better questions if you focus on what the other person is saying and sharing rather than trying to formulate your question(s) while they are talking or sharing their photos.
A few practices to help you refine your deep listening skills include suspending judgment, maintaining eye contact and good body language, and to reorder your goal from “listening to respond” to “listening to understand” (Naz Beheshti, “Reclaim The Lost Art Of Deep Listening,” Forbes).
Ask yourself questions about your own question before asking.
Sometimes the first question that comes to the tip of our tongue is not actually the question that will advance dialogue or help the answerer dive deeper into a topic. Our good friends at Essential Partners came up with a series of questions to ask your own question to help improve and refine what you’re trying to ask. Here are those five questions:
Will asking this question achieve its intended purpose?
Does the question invite new information, understanding or meaning?
Does the question have an implicit assumption of a right or wrong answer?
Can everyone answer the question—speaking from their own experiences?
How will this question impact the relationships between those responding? Does it encourage connection or separation?
Bring a spirit of genuine curiosity.
The best questions are curious questions, ones that invite the person being asked to dive deeper into something important to them. Find something that you’re actually curious about rather than pretending to be curious or walking through the motions of asking a question. These points of curiosity will be easier to find if you listen deeply.
Ask why or how questions more than yes or no questions.
Sometimes a yes or no question is useful and can be meaningful. But more often than not, a question that asks why or how will solicit more through responses that dig deeper into the heart of the matter than yes or no questions do.
If you’re stuck and don’t know what to ask, thinking about the journalistic 5 Ws (+H) may help spark something you’re curious about.
Who
What
When
Where
Why
How
Be creative and be yourself.
Some of the best questions are questions that only you can ask because they come out of your own experiences, interests, expertises, and curiosities. The prompt in a recent photovoice project in North Idaho, facilitated by Amy Hebert, is a wonderful example of this idiosyncratic question asking at its best. The prompt asked “What qualities in your dog would you like to see in people?”
You are you and that’s awesome! Consider asking the weird question that you thought of but initially had some hesitation about sharing.
