How to encourage questions to actually focus on the 'interacting' part of Interpersonal Skills?

Question

Arthur summarized most of the problem very well in chat:

We give people plaintext area to speak about their problems, so they just fill with what matters to them and not what's a good question.

I can confirm this. Recently, it seems, IPS has seen more bad and mediocre questions than good ones. I think most of them have the same problem in common, as I left comments on quite a few of them: These questions include little or lots of contextual information, but none or nothing about 'the interpersonal interaction'. They're really filled with what matters to the OP and not with a good question.

Coming from the definition that Interpersonal Skills are the behaviors people use to interact well with others, we've made our scope such that we require questions to include what you've tried when interacting. To quote our help/on-topic:

Interactions between people happen in relation to just about any subject. On IPS, our focus is the interpersonal interaction, not the subject of the interaction. While the context is important to the situation, it is secondary to the interpersonal interaction. As such, questions (and answers and comments) should focus on the interpersonal concerns rather than the contextual ones..

A good recent example of a question that lacks any information on what was tried or happening at all is this recent question, where the OP gives us a load of information on their relatives behavior, but there is no interaction between OP and the subject of the question at all!

Even if a question does include examples of "things that were tried", they often miss the mark: Instead of writing about interactions that took place, the 'things tried' include things like 'turned off my phone', 'locked the door'... and nothing else. Those aren't really interactions people take in an attempt to solve a problem, they are attempts to avoid any interaction at all. In such cases, our good question guidelines ask people to include an explanation of why they haven't tried interacting yet.

We have our good question guidelines and help/on-topic page, and one option to attempt to 'fix' this problem would be to try and rewrite those. But I'm open to any other ideas as well:

What do you think is needed for questions on IPS to focus better on the 'interacting' part of 'behaviors used to interact with people'?

Answer 1

My idea might take quite a bit of effort with regards to editing, but I propose we edit the help/on-topic page, our good question guidelines, and our custom close reasons.

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For the help center, I'd be in favour of simplifying the section titled 'Questions must be specific enough to be answered', and make it just a bulleted list that links to our good questions guidelines faq post for more explanation.

Right now, it says questions should include:

What you've already tried, if anything, and what effect that approach had.

I propose we split that up into two bullet points to keep it short and sweet. If anything, I'd love it if the bullet points would match the good question guidelines faq post. I would also propose replacing the aforementioned bullet point with two new ones that hopefully clarify it is important to include things tried/considered trying during the interaction.

• What you've already tried or considered trying during the interaction you're asking about.
• What effects you've noticed or think might occur as a consequence of your behavior during the interaction you're asking about.

Also, I propose we move that section to come after the section that says questions must focus on the interpersonal interaction, to hopefully make it clear that this means the 'what you've tried' should be something related to interpersonal interactions and not things like 'locked the door' or 'wore headphones'. We need to know why you've been avoiding tackling your problem until now more than how you've been avoiding it.

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I'm hoping that editing the good question guidelines to match the new bullet points in help/on-topic will go a long way too.

That way we can let each bullet point in the help centre link to its respective answer in the good quality guidelines, where we can explain a bit more in detail why we need to know the things we're asking for, and link users to good example questions with their explanation so they can see how it's supposed to be done when needed.

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Last, I'm wondering about adding a specific close-reason for these types of questions. Right now, we've been using the 'needs details or clarity', but since it's a very specific kind of details we're after, I wonder if it's not better to have a custom close reason that links to more relevant guidance. Something like:

This question lacks details on behavior during the interpersonal interaction. Questions need to include what you've (considered) trying, and the effects you've observed or think might occur during the interaction you're asking about. Please edit your question to include this."

Hopefully, such a close reason with some private guidance for the post owner will be more useful to them than the generic 'needs more details/clarity'.

Answer 2

To me, the problem with question quality is explained by the fact the seemingly 'soft' nature of this Q/A make it falsely appear we are doing advice. This is in my view a misconception that is easy to do but skew both questions and answers toward low reusablility and low browsing quality.

Requests for advice or requests for opinions are in my mind the biggest reason askers do not put the necessary effort to document the problem (they are asking for advice, not solutions) and the reason people answering do not back up their answer; because in an exchange of opinion on a given subject, no one is making an effort to be precise or true, which unfortunately is the only thing that could be valuable to readers.

I don't really know how to reach them, but of course the problem is especially true for first-time posters here. I often advise browsing to newcomers as a way to grasp a little bit better what are good questions and what aren't.

By contrast, if a problem is specific, the nature is interpersonal, and someone is actually focusing on requesting a communication skill and not an advice about what to say, I'm usually confident the question is if not directly answerable is at least improvable to get to that state.

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As requested I think highlighting particularly good question (and answers) could help people identifying the scope, the style what would include a good question.

Work in progress, but I found these to be fairly concise, on topic and well written.

Refusing free goods as a blind person

Answer 3

status-completed

This probably won't do much, but just notice that we don't have a link to the sandbox in https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic Maybe we should add one at the end? (in the part where we suggest users to pop in chat if they don't know if there question is on topic or not)

Answer 4

I know this isn't a perfect solution, but I think we should take advantage of the Tour page. Currently, it is displaying a fack question about a unicorn. In the past, we tried to find a good question to replace the unicorn one, but we failed mostly because good IPS questions are long, not short and it's even truer for good IPS answers.

So, I don't think finding a real IPS question to replace the unicorn one would do. However, what I believe we could do is write a clearly "template question" that would show what we expect of questions and answers on IPS.

Something like:

How to communicate Y to person X?

Situation A happened. I tried to solve it by telling <this> to person X and their reaction was <that>. Given all this, how can I communicate Y to person X? I don't want situation Z to happen.

To be very clear, I am not suggesting that we should replace all the "X", "Y", etc.. by something "real". Instead, we should let this question in the tour page be a template.

Answer 5

Warning: This alternative solution would involve some dev by SE and is thus less likely to happen.

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Some time ago, I asked a question on the forum gitlab and I noticed that they are guiding users in how to write a good question in a very effective way.

Basically, when you start writing a question, there is already a template in place that guides you in what to include in your question. Here is a screenshot of it:

The template boils down to: what do you see? What were you expecting to see? What have you tried to fix it so far?

I believe that having something similar on our "write a question" page could greatly increase the quality of questions we receive.

To be more effective such a template would need to be personalizable for each SE site but I think a general one for the whole of SE could still do the trick.