A Practitioner’s Guide to Puppet Interviews: Puppet Interviewing with Young Children in Informal Learning Environments

Puppet interviews can be helpful for getting feedback from young children in informal learning environments like libraries, museums, or afterschool programs. While puppets are a standby for interviewing children in clinical settings and are being used more frequently in some areas of qualitative research, they tend to be under-utilized in informal learning environments - natural settings for puppets because of their connections with play (Epstein et al., 2008). Our team developed a puppet interview protocol for the Gradient research project (Gender Research on Adult-child Discussion in Informal Engineering eNvironmenTs; GSE-RES #1136253). In this guide, we share ways to think about integrating puppet interviews into informal education evaluation or research projects, as well as tips on how to select, develop character, and interview with a puppet.