Appendix B

The FDR Group conducted 22 virtual IDIs between August 13 and September 4, 2020. All IDIs took place via Zoom video call. The interviews were recorded and averaged 49 minutes in length (ranging from 38–60 minutes).

Recruiting

Participants were screened to verify their status in these categories:

• High school students (n=8): students starting 11th grade or 12th grade in the 2020–21 school year who are considering going on for higher education after high school.
• Parents of high school students (n=7): those whose oldest child is a high school sophomore, junior, or senior in the 2020–21 school year.
• Adults who are considering higher education (n=7): those between 20 and 45 years old who do not have a degree or certificate beyond high school but are open to going back to school. These are NOT the parents of any college-age students.

To the extent possible, we tried to include people who had little or no experience with financial aid offer letters. The participants were mixed demographically: by race and ethnicity (9 African American; 2 Asian; 2 Hispanic; 10 white); household income (5 less than $35K; 4 more than $115K; 13 in between); and gender (15 female; 7 male).

The participants were recruited by Schlesinger Associates, a recruiting firm with a national database of potential research subjects. The facility recruits potential participants using its own opt-in databases that include thousands of people who have signed up to participate in qualitative research projects (e.g., focus groups, interviews, product testing). The databases grow by word of mouth, community outreach, and advertising.

Interviewing

The IDIs were structured to focus on the user experience of reviewing a financial aid offer letter. Each participant was shown either two or three prototypes of financial aid offer letters, in succession; asked a series of questions about each; and then shown the prototypes side by side and asked to compare them. Some questions were empirical and had right or wrong answers; others were subjective. All interviews were moderated by Ann M. Duffett, of the FDR Group.

Interruptions were common—children and pets appeared on camera, telephones rang, technology glitches occurred. We accepted this as an unintended benefit of the virtual interview; it allowed for real-life interruptions in a way that an interview taking place in a focus group facility could not. In all cases, participants were able to turn their attention back to the document and re-focus.

There were some unintended negative consequences of the virtual interview approach as well. For example, participants using Chromebooks were unable to accept control of the mouse, so the interviewer had to do the scrolling and magnifying for them. Some were less comfortable using a device to view the prototypes than they would have been seeing them on paper. In some instances, participants were unable to view the full document due to small screen size. But people were mostly able to view the entirety of the documents via scrolling, if not always at one glance.