Research Interview

Conduct a structured interview to help formalize a research idea into a concrete specification.

Input: $ARGUMENTS, a brief topic description or "start fresh" for an open-ended exploration.

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How This Works

This is a conversational skill. Instead of producing a report immediately, you conduct an interview by asking questions one at a time, probing deeper based on answers, and building toward a structured research specification.

Do NOT use AskUserQuestion. Ask questions directly in your text responses, one or two at a time. Wait for the user to respond before continuing.

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Interview Structure

Phase 1: The Big Picture (1-2 questions)

• "What phenomenon or puzzle are you trying to understand?"
• "Why does this matter? Who should care about the answer?"
• After the user answers, optionally ask: "Do you have a sense of what kind of paper this would be, reduced-form / structural / theory+empirics / descriptive / formal-theory / survey-experiment / unsure?" (See .claude/agents/methods-referee.md for the type definitions and .claude/references/discipline-cards.md for field-default frequencies.) Record the answer in the saved spec under the **Paper type:** header field; "unsure" is fine and is recorded as **Paper type:** unsure.

Phase 2: Theoretical Motivation (1-2 questions)

• "What's your intuition for why X happens / what drives Y?"
• "What would standard theory predict? Do you expect something different?"

Phase 3: Data and Setting (1-2 questions)

• "What data do you have access to, or what data would you ideally want?"
• "Is there a specific context, time period, or institutional setting you're focused on?"

Phase 4: Identification (1-2 questions)

• "Is there a natural experiment, policy change, or source of variation you can exploit?"
• "What's the biggest threat to a causal interpretation?"