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Semi-Structured Interview | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on January 27, 2022 by Tegan George . Revised on June 22, 2023.

A semi-structured interview is a data collection method that relies on asking questions within a predetermined thematic framework. However, the questions are not set in order or in phrasing.

In research, semi-structured interviews are often qualitative in nature. They are generally used as an exploratory tool in marketing, social science, survey methodology, and other research fields.

They are also common in field research with many interviewers, giving everyone the same theoretical framework, but allowing them to investigate different facets of the research question .

• Structured interviews : The questions are predetermined in both topic and order.
• Unstructured interviews : None of the questions are predetermined.
• Focus group interviews : The questions are presented to a group instead of one individual.

Table of contents

What is a semi-structured interview, when to use a semi-structured interview, advantages of semi-structured interviews, disadvantages of semi-structured interviews, semi-structured interview questions, how to conduct a semi-structured interview, how to analyze a semi-structured interview, presenting your results (with example), other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about semi-structured interviews.

Semi-structured interviews are a blend of structured and unstructured types of interviews.

• Unlike in an unstructured interview, the interviewer has an idea of what questions they will ask.
• Unlike in a structured interview, the phrasing and order of the questions is not set.

Semi-structured interviews are often open-ended, allowing for flexibility. Asking set questions in a set order allows for easy comparison between respondents, but it can be limiting. Having less structure can help you see patterns, while still allowing for comparisons between respondents.

Semi-structured interviews are best used when:

• You have prior interview experience. Spontaneous questions are deceptively challenging, and it’s easy to accidentally ask a leading question or make a participant uneasy.
• Your research question is exploratory in nature. Participant answers can guide future research questions and help you develop a more robust knowledge base for future research.

Just like in structured interviews, it is critical that you remain organized and develop a system for keeping track of participant responses. However, since the questions are less set than in a structured interview, the data collection and analysis become a bit more complex.

Differences between different types of interviews

Make sure to choose the type of interview that suits your research best. This table shows the most important differences between the four types.

Semi-structured interviews come with many advantages.

Best of both worlds

No distractions, detail and richness.

However, semi-structured interviews also have their downsides.

Low validity

High risk of research bias, difficult to develop good semi-structured interview questions.

Since they are often open-ended in style, it can be challenging to write semi-structured interview questions that get you the information you’re looking for without biasing your responses. Here are a few tips:

• Define what areas or topics you will be focusing on prior to the interview. This will help you write a framework of questions that zero in on the information you seek.
• Write yourself a guide to refer to during the interview, so you stay focused. It can help to start with the simpler questions first, moving into the more complex ones after you have established a comfortable rapport.
• Be as clear and concise as possible, avoiding jargon and compound sentences.
• How often per week do you go to the gym? a) 1 time; b) 2 times; c) 3 times; d) 4 or more times
• If yes: What feelings does going to the gym bring out in you?
• If no: What do you prefer to do instead?
• If yes: How did this membership affect your job performance? Did you stay longer in the role than you would have if there were no membership?

Once you’ve determined that a semi-structured interview is the right fit for your research topic , you can proceed with the following steps.

Step 1: Set your goals and objectives

You can use guiding questions as you conceptualize your research question, such as:

• What are you trying to learn or achieve from a semi-structured interview?
• Why are you choosing a semi-structured interview as opposed to a different type of interview, or another research method?

If you want to proceed with a semi-structured interview, you can start designing your questions.

Step 2: Design your questions

Try to stay simple and concise, and phrase your questions clearly. If your topic is sensitive or could cause an emotional response, be mindful of your word choices.

One of the most challenging parts of a semi-structured interview is knowing when to ask follow-up or spontaneous related questions. For this reason, having a guide to refer back to is critical. Hypothesizing what other questions could arise from your participants’ answers may also be helpful.

Step 3: Assemble your participants

There are a few sampling methods you can use to recruit your interview participants, such as:

• Voluntary response sampling : For example, sending an email to a campus mailing list and sourcing participants from responses.
• Stratified sampling of a particular characteristic trait of interest to your research, such as age, race, ethnicity, or gender identity.

Step 4: Decide on your medium

It’s important to determine ahead of time how you will be conducting your interview. You should decide whether you’ll be conducting it live or with a pen-and-paper format. If conducted in real time, you also need to decide if in person, over the phone, or via videoconferencing is the best option for you.

Note that each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages:

• Pen-and-paper may be easier for you to organize and analyze, but you will receive more prepared answers, which may affect the reliability of your data.
• In-person interviews can lead to nervousness or interviewer effects, where the respondent feels pressured to respond in a manner they believe will please you or incentivize you to like them.

Step 5: Conduct your interviews

As you conduct your interviews, keep environmental conditions as constant as you can to avoid bias. Pay attention to your body language (e.g., nodding, raising eyebrows), and moderate your tone of voice.

Relatedly, one of the biggest challenges with semi-structured interviews is ensuring that your questions remain unbiased. This can be especially challenging with any spontaneous questions or unscripted follow-ups that you ask your participants.

After you’re finished conducting your interviews, it’s time to analyze your results. First, assign each of your participants a number or pseudonym for organizational purposes.

The next step in your analysis is to transcribe the audio or video recordings. You can then conduct a content or thematic analysis to determine your categories, looking for patterns of responses that stand out to you and test your hypotheses .

Transcribing interviews

Before you get started with transcription, decide whether to conduct verbatim transcription or intelligent verbatim transcription.

• If pauses, laughter, or filler words like “umm” or “like” affect your analysis and research conclusions, conduct verbatim transcription and include them.
• If not, you can conduct intelligent verbatim transcription, which excludes fillers, fixes any grammatical issues, and is usually easier to analyze.

Transcribing presents a great opportunity for you to cleanse your data . Here, you can identify and address any inconsistencies or questions that come up as you listen.

Your supervisor might ask you to add the transcriptions to the appendix of your paper.

Coding semi-structured interviews

Next, it’s time to conduct your thematic or content analysis . This often involves “coding” words, patterns, or recurring responses, separating them into labels or categories for more robust analysis.

Due to the open-ended nature of many semi-structured interviews, you will most likely be conducting thematic analysis, rather than content analysis.

• You closely examine your data to identify common topics, ideas, or patterns. This can help you draw preliminary conclusions about your participants’ views, knowledge or experiences.
• After you have been through your responses a few times, you can collect the data into groups identified by their “code.” These codes give you a condensed overview of the main points and patterns identified by your data.
• Next, it’s time to organize these codes into themes. Themes are generally broader than codes, and you’ll often combine a few codes under one theme. After identifying your themes, make sure that these themes appropriately represent patterns in responses.

Analyzing semi-structured interviews

Once you’re confident in your themes, you can take either an inductive or a deductive approach.

• An inductive approach is more open-ended, allowing your data to determine your themes.
• A deductive approach is the opposite. It involves investigating whether your data confirm preconceived themes or ideas.

After your data analysis, the next step is to report your findings in a research paper .

• Your methodology section describes how you collected the data (in this case, describing your semi-structured interview process) and explains how you justify or conceptualize your analysis.
• Your discussion and results sections usually address each of your coded categories.
• You can then conclude with the main takeaways and avenues for further research.

Example of interview methodology for a research paper

Let’s say you are interested in vegan students on your campus. You have noticed that the number of vegan students seems to have increased since your first year, and you are curious what caused this shift.

You identify a few potential options based on literature:

• Perceptions about personal health or the perceived “healthiness” of a vegan diet
• Concerns about animal welfare and the meat industry
• Increased climate awareness, especially in regards to animal products
• Availability of more vegan options, making the lifestyle change easier

Anecdotally, you hypothesize that students are more aware of the impact of animal products on the ongoing climate crisis, and this has influenced many to go vegan. However, you cannot rule out the possibility of the other options, such as the new vegan bar in the dining hall.

Since your topic is exploratory in nature and you have a lot of experience conducting interviews in your work-study role as a research assistant, you decide to conduct semi-structured interviews.

You have a friend who is a member of a campus club for vegans and vegetarians, so you send a message to the club to ask for volunteers. You also spend some time at the campus dining hall, approaching students at the vegan bar asking if they’d like to participate.

Here are some questions you could ask:

• Do you find vegan options on campus to be: excellent; good; fair; average; poor?
• How long have you been a vegan?
• Follow-up questions can probe the strength of this decision (i.e., was it overwhelmingly one reason, or more of a mix?)

Depending on your participants’ answers to these questions, ask follow-ups as needed for clarification, further information, or elaboration.

• Do you think consuming animal products contributes to climate change? → The phrasing implies that you, the interviewer, do think so. This could bias your respondents, incentivizing them to answer affirmatively as well.
• What do you think is the biggest effect of animal product consumption? → This phrasing ensures the participant is giving their own opinion, and may even yield some surprising responses that enrich your analysis.

After conducting your interviews and transcribing your data, you can then conduct thematic analysis, coding responses into different categories. Since you began your research with several theories about campus veganism that you found equally compelling, you would use the inductive approach.

Once you’ve identified themes and patterns from your data, you can draw inferences and conclusions. Your results section usually addresses each theme or pattern you found, describing each in turn, as well as how often you came across them in your analysis. Feel free to include lots of (properly anonymized) examples from the data as evidence, too.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Student’s  t -distribution
• Normal distribution
• Null and Alternative Hypotheses
• Chi square tests
• Confidence interval
• Quartiles & Quantiles
• Cluster sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Data cleansing
• Reproducibility vs Replicability
• Peer review
• Prospective cohort study

Research bias

• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Placebo effect
• Hawthorne effect
• Hindsight bias
• Affect heuristic
• Social desirability bias

A semi-structured interview is a blend of structured and unstructured types of interviews. Semi-structured interviews are best used when:

• You have prior interview experience. Spontaneous questions are deceptively challenging, and it’s easy to accidentally ask a leading question or make a participant uncomfortable.

The four most common types of interviews are:

• Structured interviews : The questions are predetermined in both topic and order. 
• Semi-structured interviews : A few questions are predetermined, but other questions aren’t planned.

Social desirability bias is the tendency for interview participants to give responses that will be viewed favorably by the interviewer or other participants. It occurs in all types of interviews and surveys , but is most common in semi-structured interviews , unstructured interviews , and focus groups .

Social desirability bias can be mitigated by ensuring participants feel at ease and comfortable sharing their views. Make sure to pay attention to your own body language and any physical or verbal cues, such as nodding or widening your eyes.

This type of bias can also occur in observations if the participants know they’re being observed. They might alter their behavior accordingly.

The interviewer effect is a type of bias that emerges when a characteristic of an interviewer (race, age, gender identity, etc.) influences the responses given by the interviewee.

There is a risk of an interviewer effect in all types of interviews , but it can be mitigated by writing really high-quality interview questions.

Inductive reasoning is a bottom-up approach, while deductive reasoning is top-down.

Inductive reasoning takes you from the specific to the general, while in deductive reasoning, you make inferences by going from general premises to specific conclusions.

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Introduction

• Published: June 2013
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This introductory chapter describes the semi-structured interview, which addresses specific dimensions of the research question while also allowing for study participants to offer new meanings to the topic of study. It is particularly instrumental in creating openings for a narrative to unfold, while including questions informed by theory. It also leaves a space through which one might explore with participants the contextual influences evident in the narratives. To illustrate this methodological approach and philosophical orientation, the book provides a qualitative study focused on a particular social problem with a long history in education and psychology. Referred to throughout as “the desegregation study,” its inclusion is intended to illustrate in a concrete and detailed manner the use of the semi-structured interview within a multimethod qualitative study.

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Semi-structured Interviews

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• First Online: 01 January 2020
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Magaldi, D., Berler, M. (2020). Semi-structured Interviews. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_857

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• Assignment Articles (PDFs for Download)

From The sage handbook of qualitative data collection (Flick, 2018):

"We can identify some common features of qualitative research despite the multiplicity of approaches to qualitative research. First of all, qualitative research is approaching the world(s) ‘out there’ (instead of doing studies in specialized research settings such as laboratories). It intends to understand, describe, and sometimes explain social phenomena ‘from the inside’ in a number of different ways: First , experiences of individuals or groups are analyzed. Experiences can be related to biographical life histories or to (everyday or professional) practices; they may be addressed by analyzing everyday knowledge, accounts, and stories. Second , interactions and communications are analyzed in the making. This can be based on observing or recording practices of interacting and communicating and analyzing this material. Third , documents (texts, images, film, or sounds, and more and more digital documents) or similar traces of experiences or interactions are analyzed."

What are the objects or priorities of qualitive research? "Qualitative researchers take context and cases seriously for understanding an issue under study. A bigger part of the current qualitative research is based on case studies or a series of case studies, and often the case (its history and complexity) is an important context for understanding the issue that is studied. A major part of qualitative research is based on text and writing – from field notes and transcripts to descriptions and interpretations and finally to the presentation of the findings and of the research as a whole."

From Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011):

"Qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. It consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These practices transform the world. They turn the world into a series of representations, including field notes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings, and memos to the self. At this level, qualitative research involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to the world. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them (3)".

Aims of Qualitative Data Collection (Flick, 2018):

"The major aim of collecting qualitative data is to provide materials for an empirical analysis of a phenomenon that a study is about. This has less to do with finding phenomena in the field than with deciding to turn phenomena into something that we can analyze. This ‘turning’ is based on a number of decisions taken by the researchers", including a researcher's method (like surveys, interviews, of other embedded forms of  observation).

On interviewing (From Sage):

"In terms of organization, interviews range from the tightly structured format of standardized survey interviews in which questions are asked in a specific order using the same format, to semi-structured interviews, in which the organization of topics is less tightly formatted. In the semi-structured interview, the same topics form the basis for questioning, yet interviewers’ sequencing of questions is participant-led. At the other end of the spectrum from standardized or structured interviews are unstructured interviews, in which interviews are loosely formatted. Topics are participant-driven, and since the interviewer might not have a pre-formatted interview guide prior to the interview, talk is more likely to resemble everyday conversation."

"In semi-structured interviews, follow-up questions – also referred to as probes – are formulated relative to what interviewees have already said. Researchers sequence questions to generate free-ranging conversations about research topics that are directed by what participants have to say".

On the practice of interviewing--Asking questions:

"[The] literature on qualitative interviewing has proliferated lengthy lists of recommendations for both what to do and what not to do...our recommendation is that interviewers come to interviews well-prepared with respect to the topic of the interview, with a good sense of what they hope to learn from the questions they anticipate asking, and with a willingness to listen carefully and learn from participants (Jacob and Furgerson, 2012; Roulston et al., 2003).

Both novice and more experienced interviewers who talk more than they listen are likely to generate the kinds of data that they seek to find through asking leading questions and contributing their own viewpoints. These sorts of interviews jeopardize the scientific process, since they potentially provide more information about interviewers than interviewees, and inhibit participants from openly expressing their own views.

Formulating an Interview Guide (A loose script w/ themes and sequence):

"Researchers consider the topics of talk about which questions might be asked, how to sequence the questions – usually beginning with broader questions before moving to more specific questions, and formulating open, rather than closed questions. For example, if one were to examine the research topic of online learning, a broad open question asked at the beginning of the interview might be:

• Tell me about your experiences with online delivery of course work prior to taking this course.

Potential follow-up topics might be suggested in the interview guide should participants not mention those. For example, a follow-up topic related to the question above might focus on tools used".

What makes an interview good?

"From a researcher's perspective, ‘good’ interviewing practice is commonly seen to involve:

• appropriate preparation.
• demonstration of respect for interviewees.
• intensive listening by the interviewer.
• development of thoughtful interview guides.
• interview guides that include fewer questions.
• formulation of short, open-ended questions,
• flexibility on the part of the interviewer to deviate from prior plans when necessary,
• effective use of follow-up questions to elicit extended descriptions.
• ability to help participants tell their stories.

https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-handbook-of-qualitative-data-collection/i1709.xml#section17 (Please review Figure 15.1 

Flick, U. (2018). The sage handbook of qualitative data collection. SAGE Publications Ltd, https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526416070

• Strategies for Qualitative Interviews (Harvard_Sociology)
• Conducting semi-structured interviews (Practical Program Evaluation 2015)
• Teacher attitudes regarding barriers

Strategies for Qualitative/ Semi-Structured Interviews

A Few General Points:

• Stop and Think: should interviews be included in your research design?
• Are there alternative ways of answering your research question through documentary review, observation or unobtrusive measures?
• Be clear about the possible biases and limitations of interviews
• The point of a qualitative interview is to let the respondent tell their own story on their own terms.
• THIS IS NOT A SURVEY!  The guide acts as a prompt, reminding you of necessary topics to cover, questions to ask and areas to probe.  As such, it should be simple so that your primary focus can stay on the respondent.  It’s best to memorize your guide!
• How much time will you spend with each respondent?  Adjust your guide accordingly (it may take several interviews to judge the correct length). 
• Try out a new guide (or parts of it) on friends and get their feedback before using it in the field.

A Successful Interviewer is...

1. Knowledgeable: is thoroughly familiar with the focus of the interview; pilot interviews of the kind used in survey interviewing can be useful here.

2. Structuring: gives purpose for interview; rounds it off; asks whether interviewee has questions.

3. Clear: asks simple, easy, short questions; no jargon.

4. Gentle: lets people finish; gives them time to think; tolerates pauses.

5. Sensitive: listens attentively to what is said and how it is said; is empathetic in dealing with the interviewee. 6. Open: responds to what is important to interviewee and is flexible.

7. Steering: knows what he/she wants to find out.

8. Critical: is prepared to challenge what is said, for example, dealing with inconsistencies in interviewees’ replies.

9. Remembering: relates what is said to what has previously been said.

10. Interpreting: clarifies and extends meanings of interviewees’ statements, but without imposing meaning on them.

11. Balanced: does not talk too much, which may make the interviewee passive, and does not talk too little, which may result in the interviewee feeling he or she is not talking along the right lines.

12. Ethically sensitive: is sensitive to the ethical dimension of interviewing, ensuring the interviewee appreciates what the research is about, its purposes, and that his or her answers will be treated confidentially.

Guidelines for Developing Interview Questions 

• Questions should be simple.  Do not ask more than one question at a time.
• The best questions are those which elicit the longest answers from the respondent.  Do not ask questions that can be answered with one word. Don’t ask questions that require your respondents to do your analysis for you.  This is YOUR job. 
• Likewise, do not ask for hearsay or opinions on behalf of the group they are a part of “What do people around here think of x?”  You rarely get anything interesting.
• Don’t be afraid to ask embarrassing questions.  If you don’t ask, they won’t tell.  
• Direct questions: ‘Do you find it easy to keep smiling when serving customers?’; ‘Are you happy with the way you and your husband decide how money should be spent?’ Such questions are perhaps best left until towards the end of the interview, in order not to influence the direction of the interview too much. o Indirect questions: ‘What do most people round here think of the ways that management treats its staff?’, perhaps followed up by ‘Is that the way you feel too?’, in order to get at the individual’s own view. 
• Structuring questions: ‘I would now like to move on to a different topic’.
• Follow-up questions: getting the interviewee to elaborate his/her answer, such as ‘Could you say some more about that?’; ‘What do you mean by that . . .?’
• Probing questions: following up what has been said through direct questioning.
• Specifying questions: ‘What did you do then?’; ‘How did X react to what you said?’
• Interpreting questions: ‘Do you mean that your leadership role has had to change from one of encouraging others to a more directive one?’; ‘Is it fair to say that what you are suggesting is that you don’t mind being friendly towards customers most of the time, but when they are unpleasant or demanding you find it more difficult?’ 

Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Interview Questions 

1. Write down the larger research questions of the study.  Outline the broad areas of knowledge that are relevant to answering these questions.  

2. Develop questions within each of these major areas, shaping them to fit particular kinds of respondents.  The goal here is to tap into their experiences and expertise.  

3. Adjust the language of the interview according to the respondent (child, professional, etc.).

4. Take care to word questions so that respondents are motivated to answer as completely and honestly as possible.

5. Ask “how” questions rather than “why” questions to get stories of process rather than acceptable “accounts” of behavior.  “How did you come to join this group . . .?”

6. Develop probes that will elicit more detailed and elaborate responses to key questions.  The more detail, the better!

7. Begin the interview with a “warm-up” question—something that the respondent can answer easily and at some length (though not too long).  It doesn’t have to pertain directly to what you are trying to find out (although it might), but this initial rapport-building will put you more at ease with one another and thus will make the rest of the interview flow more smoothly.

8. Think about the logical flow of the interview.  What topics should come first?  What follows more or less “naturally”?  This may take some adjustment after several interviews.  

9. Difficult or potentially embarrassing questions should be asked toward the end of the interview, when rapport has been established.

10. The last question should provide some closure for the interview, and leave the respondent feeling empowered, listened to, or otherwise glad that they talked to you.

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Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond

From research design to analysis and publication.

• Anne Galletta
• Preface by: William E. Cross
• X / Twitter

Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Copyright year: 2013
• Audience: Professional and scholarly;
• Published: June 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9780814732953

Designing a semi-structured interview guide for qualitative interviews

But what exactly do semi structured interviews mean? What exactly counts as in-depth? How structured are semi-structured interviews?

Daniel Turner

Interviews are a frequently used research method in qualitative studies. You will see dozens of papers that state something like “We conducted n in-depth semi-structured interviews with key informants”. But what exactly does this mean? What exactly counts as in-depth? How structured are semi-structured interviews?

This post is hosted by Quirkos, simple and affordable software for qualitative analysis. Download a 14 day free trial !

The term “in-depth” is defined fairly vaguely in the literature: it generally means a one-to-one interview on one general topic, which is covered in detail. Usually these qualitative interviews last about an hour, although sometimes much longer. It sounds like two people having a discussion, but there are differences in the power dynamics, and end goal: for the classic sociologist Burgess (2002) these are “conversations with a purpose”.

Qualitative interviews generally differ from quantitative survey based questions in that they are looking for a more detailed and nuanced response. They also acknowledge there is no ‘one-size fits all’, especially when asking someone to recall a personal narrative about their experiences. Instead of a fixed “research protocol” that asks the same question to each respondent, most interviewees adopt a more flexible approach. However there is still a need “...to ensure that the same general areas of information are collected from each interviewee; this provides more focus than the conversational approach, but still allows a degree of freedom and adaptability in getting information from the interviewee” – MacNamara (2009) .

Turner (2010) (who coincidentally shares the same name as me) describes three different types of qualitative interview; Informal Conversation, General Interview Guide, and Standardised Open-Ended. These can be seen as a scale from least to most structured, and we are going to focus on the ‘interview guide’ approach, which takes a middle ground.

An interview guide is like a cheat-sheet for the interviewer – it contains a list of questions and topic areas that should be covered in the interview. However, these are not to be read verbatim and in order, in fact they are more like an aide-mémoire. “Usually the interviewer will have a prepared set of questions but these are only used as a guide, and departures from the guidelines are not seen as a problem but are often encouraged” – Silverman (2013) . That way, the interviewer can add extra questions about an unexpected but relevant area that emerges, and sections that don’t apply to the participant can be negated.

So what do these look like, and how does one go about writing a suitable semi-structured interview guide? Unfortunately, it is rare in journal articles for researchers to share the interview guide, and it’s difficult to find good examples on the internet. Basically they look like a list of short questions and follow-on prompts, grouped by topic. There will generally be about a dozen. I’ve written my fair share of interview guides for qualitative research projects over the years, either on my own or with the collaboration of colleagues, so I’m happy to share some tips.

Questions should answer your research questions Your research project should have one or several main research questions, and these should be used to guide the topics covered in the interviews, and hopefully answer the research questions. However, you can’t just ask your respondents “Can the experience of male My Little Pony fans be described through the lens of Derridean deconstruction?”. You will need to break down your research into questions that have meaning for the participant and that they can engage with. The questions should be fairly informal and jargon free (unless that person is an expert in that field of jargon), open ended - so they can’t be easily answered with a yes or no, and non-leading so that respondents aren’t pushed down a certain interpretation.

Link to your proposed analytical approach The questions on your guide should also be constructed in such a way that they will work well for your proposed method of analysis – which again you should already have decided. If you are doing narrative analysis, questions should be encouraging respondents to tell their story and history. In Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis you may want to ask more detail about people’s interpretations of their experiences. Think how you will want to analyse, compare and write up your research, and make sure that the questioning style fits your own approach.

Specific ‘Why’ and prompt questions It is very rare in semi-structured interviews that you will ask one question, get a response, and then move on to the next topic. Firstly you will need to provide some structure for the participant, so they are not expected (or encouraged) to recite their whole life story. But on the other level, you will usually want to probe more about specific issues or conditions. That is where the flexible approach comes in. Someone might reveal something that you are interested in, and is relevant to the research project. So ask more! It’s often useful in the guide to list a series of prompt words that remind you of more areas of detail that might be covered. For example, the question “When did you first visit the doctor?” might be annotated with optional prompts such as “Why did you go then?”, “Were you afraid?” or “Did anyone go with you?”. Prompt words might reduce this to ‘Why THEN / afraid / with someone’.

Be flexible with order Generally, an interview guide will be grouped into several topics, each with a few questions. One of the most difficult skills is how to segue from one topic or question to the next, while still seeming like a normal conversation. The best way to manage this is to make sure that you are always listening to the interviewee, and thinking at the same time about how what they are saying links to other discussion topics. If someone starts talking about how they felt isolated visiting the doctor, and one of your topics is about their experience with their doctor, you can ask ‘Did you doctor make you feel less isolated?’. You might then be asking about topic 4, when you are only on topic 1, but you now have a logical link to ask the more general written question ‘Did you feel the doctor supported you?’. The ability to flow from topic to topic as the conversation evolves (while still covering everything on the interview guide) is tricky, and requires you to:

Know your guide backwards - literally I almost never went into an interview without a printed copy of the interview guide in front of me, but it was kind of like Dumbo’s magic feather : it made me feel safe, but I didn’t really need it. You should know everything on your interview guide off by heart, and in any sequence. Since things will crop up in unpredictable ways, you should be comfortable asking questions in different orders to help the conversational flow. Still, it’s always good to have the interview guide in front of you; it lets you tick off questions as they are asked (so you can see what hasn’t been covered), is space to write notes, and also can be less intimidating for the interviewee, as you can look at your notes occasionally rather than staring them in the eye all the time.

Try for natural conversation Legard, Keegan and Ward (2003) note that “Although a good in-depth interview will appear naturalistic, it will bear little resemblance to an everyday conversation”. You will usually find that the most honest and rich responses come from relaxed, non-combative discussions. Make the first question easy, to ease the participant into the interview, and get them used to the question-answer format. But don’t let it feel like a tennis match, where you are always asking the questions. If they ask something of you, reply! Don’t sit in silence: nod, say ‘Yes’, or ‘Of course’ every now and then, to show you are listening and empathising like a normal human being. Yet do be careful about sharing your own potentially leading opinions, and making the discussion about yourself.

Discuss with your research team / supervisors You should take the time to get feedback and suggestions from peers, be they other people on your research project, or your PhD supervisors. This means preparing the interview guide well in advance of your first interview, leaving time for discussion and revisions. Seasoned interviewers will have tips about wording and structuring questions, and even the most experienced researcher can benefit from a second opinion. Getting it right at this stage is very important, it’s no good discovering after you’ve done all your interviews that you didn’t ask about something important.

Adapting the guide While these are semi-structured interviews, in general you will usually want to cover the same general areas every time you do an interview, no least so that there is some point of comparison. It’s also common to do a first few interviews and realise that you are not asking about a critical area, or that some new potential insight is emerging (especially if you are taking a grounded theory approach). In qualitative research, this need not be a disaster (if this flexibility is methodologically appropriate), and it is possible to revise your interview guide. However, if you do end up making significant revisions, make sure you keep both versions, and a note of which respondents were interviewed with each version of the guide.

Test the timing Inevitably, you will not have exactly the same amount of time for each interview, and respondents will differ in how fast they talk and how often they go off-topic! Make sure you have enough questions to get the detail you need, but also have ‘lower priority’ questions you can drop if things are taking too long. Test the timing of your interview guide with a few participants, or even friends before you settle on it, and revise as necessary. Try and get your interview guide down to one side of paper at the most: it is a prompt, not an encyclopaedia!

Hopefully these points will help demystify qualitative interview guides, and help you craft a useful tool to shape your semi-structured interviews. I’d also caution that semi-structured interviewing is a very difficult process, and benefits majorly from practice. I have been with many new researchers who tend to fall back on the interview guide too much, and read it verbatim. This generally leads to closed-off responses, and missed opportunities to further explore interesting revelations. Treat your interview guide as a guide, not a gospel, and be flexible. It’s extra hard, because you have to juggle asking questions, listening, choosing the next question, keeping the research topic in your head and making sure everything is covered – but when you do it right, you’ll get rich research data that you will actually be excited to go home and analyse.

Don’t forget to check out some of the references above, as well as the myriad of excellent articles and textbooks on qualitative interviews. There’s also Quirkos itself , software to help you make the research process engaging and visual, with a free trial to download of this innovative tool. We also have a rapidly growing series of blog post articles on qualitative interviews. These now include 10 tips for qualitative interviewing , transcribing qualitative interviews and focus groups , and how to make sure you get good recordings . Our blog is updated with articles like this every week, and you can hear about it first by following our Twitter feed @quirkossoftware .

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Library Guides

Dissertations 4: methodology: methods.

• Introduction & Philosophy
• Methodology

Primary & Secondary Sources, Primary & Secondary Data

When describing your research methods, you can start by stating what kind of secondary and, if applicable, primary sources you used in your research. Explain why you chose such sources, how well they served your research, and identify possible issues encountered using these sources.  

Definitions  

There is some confusion on the use of the terms primary and secondary sources, and primary and secondary data. The confusion is also due to disciplinary differences (Lombard 2010). Whilst you are advised to consult the research methods literature in your field, we can generalise as follows:  

Secondary sources 

Secondary sources normally include the literature (books and articles) with the experts' findings, analysis and discussions on a certain topic (Cottrell, 2014, p123). Secondary sources often interpret primary sources.  

Primary sources 

Primary sources are "first-hand" information such as raw data, statistics, interviews, surveys, law statutes and law cases. Even literary texts, pictures and films can be primary sources if they are the object of research (rather than, for example, documentaries reporting on something else, in which case they would be secondary sources). The distinction between primary and secondary sources sometimes lies on the use you make of them (Cottrell, 2014, p123). 

Primary data 

Primary data are data (primary sources) you directly obtained through your empirical work (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill 2015, p316). 

Secondary data 

Secondary data are data (primary sources) that were originally collected by someone else (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill 2015, p316).   

Comparison between primary and secondary data   

Use  

Virtually all research will use secondary sources, at least as background information. 

Often, especially at the postgraduate level, it will also use primary sources - secondary and/or primary data. The engagement with primary sources is generally appreciated, as less reliant on others' interpretations, and closer to 'facts'. 

The use of primary data, as opposed to secondary data, demonstrates the researcher's effort to do empirical work and find evidence to answer her specific research question and fulfill her specific research objectives. Thus, primary data contribute to the originality of the research.    

Ultimately, you should state in this section of the methodology: 

What sources and data you are using and why (how are they going to help you answer the research question and/or test the hypothesis. 

If using primary data, why you employed certain strategies to collect them. 

What the advantages and disadvantages of your strategies to collect the data (also refer to the research in you field and research methods literature). 

Quantitative, Qualitative & Mixed Methods

The methodology chapter should reference your use of quantitative research, qualitative research and/or mixed methods. The following is a description of each along with their advantages and disadvantages. 

Quantitative research 

Quantitative research uses numerical data (quantities) deriving, for example, from experiments, closed questions in surveys, questionnaires, structured interviews or published data sets (Cottrell, 2014, p93). It normally processes and analyses this data using quantitative analysis techniques like tables, graphs and statistics to explore, present and examine relationships and trends within the data (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2015, p496). 

Qualitative research  

Qualitative research is generally undertaken to study human behaviour and psyche. It uses methods like in-depth case studies, open-ended survey questions, unstructured interviews, focus groups, or unstructured observations (Cottrell, 2014, p93). The nature of the data is subjective, and also the analysis of the researcher involves a degree of subjective interpretation. Subjectivity can be controlled for in the research design, or has to be acknowledged as a feature of the research. Subject-specific books on (qualitative) research methods offer guidance on such research designs.  

Mixed methods 

Mixed-method approaches combine both qualitative and quantitative methods, and therefore combine the strengths of both types of research. Mixed methods have gained popularity in recent years.  

When undertaking mixed-methods research you can collect the qualitative and quantitative data either concurrently or sequentially. If sequentially, you can for example, start with a few semi-structured interviews, providing qualitative insights, and then design a questionnaire to obtain quantitative evidence that your qualitative findings can also apply to a wider population (Specht, 2019, p138). 

Ultimately, your methodology chapter should state: 

Whether you used quantitative research, qualitative research or mixed methods. 

Why you chose such methods (and refer to research method sources). 

Why you rejected other methods. 

How well the method served your research. 

The problems or limitations you encountered. 

Doug Specht, Senior Lecturer at the Westminster School of Media and Communication, explains mixed methods research in the following video:

LinkedIn Learning Video on Academic Research Foundations: Quantitative

The video covers the characteristics of quantitative research, and explains how to approach different parts of the research process, such as creating a solid research question and developing a literature review. He goes over the elements of a study, explains how to collect and analyze data, and shows how to present your data in written and numeric form.

Link to quantitative research video

Some Types of Methods

There are several methods you can use to get primary data. To reiterate, the choice of the methods should depend on your research question/hypothesis. 

Whatever methods you will use, you will need to consider: 

why did you choose one technique over another? What were the advantages and disadvantages of the technique you chose? 

what was the size of your sample? Who made up your sample? How did you select your sample population? Why did you choose that particular sampling strategy?) 

ethical considerations (see also tab...)  

safety considerations  

validity  

feasibility  

recording  

procedure of the research (see box procedural method...).  

Check Stella Cottrell's book  Dissertations and Project Reports: A Step by Step Guide  for some succinct yet comprehensive information on most methods (the following account draws mostly on her work). Check a research methods book in your discipline for more specific guidance.  

Experiments 

Experiments are useful to investigate cause and effect, when the variables can be tightly controlled. They can test a theory or hypothesis in controlled conditions. Experiments do not prove or disprove an hypothesis, instead they support or not support an hypothesis. When using the empirical and inductive method it is not possible to achieve conclusive results. The results may only be valid until falsified by other experiments and observations. 

For more information on Scientific Method, click here . 

Observations 

Observational methods are useful for in-depth analyses of behaviours in people, animals, organisations, events or phenomena. They can test a theory or products in real life or simulated settings. They generally a qualitative research method.  

Questionnaires and surveys 

Questionnaires and surveys are useful to gain opinions, attitudes, preferences, understandings on certain matters. They can provide quantitative data that can be collated systematically; qualitative data, if they include opportunities for open-ended responses; or both qualitative and quantitative elements. 

Interviews  

Interviews are useful to gain rich, qualitative information about individuals' experiences, attitudes or perspectives. With interviews you can follow up immediately on responses for clarification or further details. There are three main types of interviews: structured (following a strict pattern of questions, which expect short answers), semi-structured (following a list of questions, with the opportunity to follow up the answers with improvised questions), and unstructured (following a short list of broad questions, where the respondent can lead more the conversation) (Specht, 2019, p142). 

This short video on qualitative interviews discusses best practices and covers qualitative interview design, preparation and data collection methods. 

Focus groups   

In this case, a group of people (normally, 4-12) is gathered for an interview where the interviewer asks questions to such group of participants. Group interactions and discussions can be highly productive, but the researcher has to beware of the group effect, whereby certain participants and views dominate the interview (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill 2015, p419). The researcher can try to minimise this by encouraging involvement of all participants and promoting a multiplicity of views. 

This video focuses on strategies for conducting research using focus groups.  

Check out the guidance on online focus groups by Aliaksandr Herasimenka, which is attached at the bottom of this text box. 

Case study 

Case studies are often a convenient way to narrow the focus of your research by studying how a theory or literature fares with regard to a specific person, group, organisation, event or other type of entity or phenomenon you identify. Case studies can be researched using other methods, including those described in this section. Case studies give in-depth insights on the particular reality that has been examined, but may not be representative of what happens in general, they may not be generalisable, and may not be relevant to other contexts. These limitations have to be acknowledged by the researcher.     

Content analysis 

Content analysis consists in the study of words or images within a text. In its broad definition, texts include books, articles, essays, historical documents, speeches, conversations, advertising, interviews, social media posts, films, theatre, paintings or other visuals. Content analysis can be quantitative (e.g. word frequency) or qualitative (e.g. analysing intention and implications of the communication). It can detect propaganda, identify intentions of writers, and can see differences in types of communication (Specht, 2019, p146). Check this page on collecting, cleaning and visualising Twitter data.

Extra links and resources:  

Research Methods  

A clear and comprehensive overview of research methods by Emerald Publishing. It includes: crowdsourcing as a research tool; mixed methods research; case study; discourse analysis; ground theory; repertory grid; ethnographic method and participant observation; interviews; focus group; action research; analysis of qualitative data; survey design; questionnaires; statistics; experiments; empirical research; literature review; secondary data and archival materials; data collection. 

Doing your dissertation during the COVID-19 pandemic  

Resources providing guidance on doing dissertation research during the pandemic: Online research methods; Secondary data sources; Webinars, conferences and podcasts; 

• Virtual Focus Groups Guidance on managing virtual focus groups

5 Minute Methods Videos

The following are a series of useful videos that introduce research methods in five minutes. These resources have been produced by lecturers and students with the University of Westminster's School of Media and Communication. 

Case Study Research

Research Ethics

Quantitative Content Analysis 

Sequential Analysis 

Qualitative Content Analysis 

Thematic Analysis 

Social Media Research 

Mixed Method Research 

Procedural Method

In this part, provide an accurate, detailed account of the methods and procedures that were used in the study or the experiment (if applicable!). 

Include specifics about participants, sample, materials, design and methods. 

If the research involves human subjects, then include a detailed description of who and how many participated along with how the participants were selected.  

Describe all materials used for the study, including equipment, written materials and testing instruments. 

Identify the study's design and any variables or controls employed. 

Write out the steps in the order that they were completed. 

Indicate what participants were asked to do, how measurements were taken and any calculations made to raw data collected. 

Specify statistical techniques applied to the data to reach your conclusions. 

Provide evidence that you incorporated rigor into your research. This is the quality of being thorough and accurate and considers the logic behind your research design. 

Highlight any drawbacks that may have limited your ability to conduct your research thoroughly. 

You have to provide details to allow others to replicate the experiment and/or verify the data, to test the validity of the research. 

Bibliography

Cottrell, S. (2014). Dissertations and project reports: a step by step guide. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lombard, E. (2010). Primary and secondary sources.  The Journal of Academic Librarianship , 36(3), 250-253

Saunders, M.N.K., Lewis, P. and Thornhill, A. (2015).  Research Methods for Business Students.  New York: Pearson Education. 

Specht, D. (2019).  The Media And Communications Study Skills Student Guide . London: University of Westminster Press.  

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• Last Updated: Sep 14, 2022 12:58 PM
• URL: https://libguides.westminster.ac.uk/methodology-for-dissertations

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Semi-Structured Interview – Definition & Examples

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In contrast to survey questionnaires , qualitative interviewing seeks to go further below superficial responses to uncover the underlying meanings individuals ascribe to events and the complexity of their attitudes, behaviors, and experiences.

Semi-structured interviews stand as a key methodology in both qualitative and mixed-methods research, offering a balance between structure and flexibility.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• 1 Semi-Structured Interview – In a Nutshell
• 2 Definition: Semi-structured interview
• 3 When to use a semi-structured interview
• 4 Pros and cons of a semi-structured interview
• 5 Semi-structured interview: The questions
• 6 Conducting a semi-structured interview
• 7 Analyzing your semi-structured interview
• 8 Results of your semi-structured interview

Semi-Structured Interview – In a Nutshell

• In qualitative research , semi-structured interviews are utilized to acquire qualitative, open-ended data.
• Semi-structured interviews allow you to focus on the topic of interest while allowing you the freedom to explore any pertinent thoughts that may arise throughout the interview.
• Semi-structured interviews in qualitative research are a combination of structured and unstructured interviews in which some questions are predefined while others are not.

Definition: Semi-structured interview

A semi-structured interview is a data collection method that focuses on asking questions within a preplanned topic framework. However, neither the order nor the phrasing of the questions is specified.

In semi-structured interviews, structured and unstructured interviews are combined:

• Structured interviews : The topics and sequence of the questions are decided beforehand.
• Unstructured interviews : Have no predefined questions.

When to use a semi-structured interview

When to use semi-structured interviews most effectively:

• You have conducted interviews in the past. You can easily ask the wrong question or make someone feel uncomfortable while making impromptu inquiries.
• The nature of your study question is exploratory. The participants’ responses can drive future research questions and aid in developing a more substantial knowledge basis for future studies.

Different interview types

Choose the sort of interview that best fits your research needs. This table illustrates the most significant distinctions between the four categories.

Pros and cons of a semi-structured interview

Semi-structured interviews have several benefits.

• Best of both: Frequently, semi-structured interviews are viewed as “the best of both worlds.” Combining elements of organized and unstructured interviews give them comparable, reliable data and the capacity to ask follow-up questions.
• Zero distractions: Establishing a conceptual framework in advance helps the interviewer and the interviewee focus, preventing distractions and fostering two-way dialogue.
• Detail and richness: Although the process of semi-structured interviews is comparable to that of structured interviews, surveys, and questionnaires, its more open-ended nature allows for more depth and detail. If necessary, participants might be asked to clarify, expand, or rephrase their responses.

Disadvantages

However, semi-structured interviews have disadvantages as well.

• Poor validity: The adaptability of semi-structured interviews might also compromise their validity. Comparing responses amongst participants can be difficult depending on how far the interviewer deviated from the specified questions.
• Risk of bias: The open-ended nature of semi-structured interviews might lead to the urge to ask leading questions, which can influence your answers. Inversely, your respondents may also attempt to provide you with the responses they believe you want to hear, resulting in social desirability bias.
• Challenging to develop good semi-structured interview questions: It might be tough to conduct semi-structured interviews effectively due to the delicate balance between prior planning and impromptu asides. Everyone’s willingness to share differs. It might be challenging to be both supportive and impartial.

Semi-structured interview: The questions

Due to their frequently open-ended nature, it cannot be easy to construct semi-structured interview questions that elicit the desired information without biasing the responses. Listed below are some pointers:

• Before the interview, specify the regions or subjects you will focus on. This will assist you in building a framework of information-specific queries.
• Make a l ist of questions you want to ask yourself before the interview so you don’t get distracted. In the beginning, stick to simple questions and work your way up to more complex ones once you’ve established a rapport with the person.
• Avoid jargon and complex language and strive for clarity and concision.
• c) three times
• d) four or more times
• Do you love visiting the gym?
• If you do: What emotions do visiting the gym evoke in you?
• If you don’t: What would you rather do?
• Have you ever received a complimentary gym membership from your employer?
• If yes: how did your membership impact your performance? Did you remain in the position longer than you would have without membership?

Conducting a semi-structured interview

You can proceed to the subsequent phases if you’ve decided that a semi-structured interview suits your research topic.

Step 1 – Goals and objectives

As you begin to formulate your research question, you can use leading questions like:

• What do you hope to discover or accomplish through this interview?
• Why did you choose this interview over another type of interview or a different research method?
• What subjects or questions do you foresee having follow-up questions?

Step 2 – Designing the interview questions

Try to be straightforward and concise, and formulate your queries with clarity. Choose your words carefully if your issue is delicate or could provoke an emotional response.

Knowing when and how to ask follow-up or impromptu questions is among the most challenging aspects of conducting this interview. In light of this, it is essential to have a reference manual. In addition, it may be helpful to hypothesize what further questions may develop from your participants’ responses.

Step 3 – Finding participants

There are several sampling techniques you can employ to select interview participants, including:

• Voluntary response sampling: Example: mailing an email to a university mailing list and selecting participants based on the responses received.
• Your research could benefit from a stratified sampling of a particular character trait relevant to you.
• Convenience sampling of individuals nearby, such as other university students.

Step 4 – Choosing a medium

It is essential to plan how you will conduct the interview beforehand. It would help to determine whether it will be live or conducted using pen and paper. Additionally, you must choose between phone, in-person, and videoconferencing if the meeting is done in real-time.

Keep in mind that each of these approaches has some benefits and drawbacks:

• Pen-and-paper surveys may be easier to arrange and evaluate, but respondents will be more likely to have prepared responses, which may reduce your data credibility.
• In-person interviews can result in anxiousness or interviewer effects, in which the respondent feels compelled to answer in a way that they believe will satisfy them or encourage them to like them.
• Videoconferencing might feel awkward or unnatural, which may impact your performance.

Step 5 – Conducting the interview

Maintain as much environmental consistency as possible throughout interviewing to eliminate prejudice. Consider your body language and your tone of speech.

Similarly, among the most challenging aspects of semi-structured interviews is maintaining the objectivity of your questions. This can be especially difficult if you ask your participants impromptu questions or follow-ups that are not scripted.

Analyzing your semi-structured interview

After completing your interviews, you must assess your findings. For organizational purposes, assign each participant a number or a pseudonym.

Transcribing interviews

Choose between verbatim transcription and intelligent verbatim transcription before beginning the transcribing process.

• If pauses, laughs, or filler words such as “umm” or “like” impact your study and conclusions, you should conduct verbatim transcription and incorporate them.
• You can do intelligent verbatim transcription, which eliminates fillers, corrects grammatical errors, and is typically simpler to evaluate.

Thematic or content analysis?

The subsequent step is to undertake a theme or content analysis. Typically, this entails “coding” words, patterns, or repeated answers and splitting them into labels or groups for a more comprehensive analysis.

Because semi-structured interviews are more open-ended, a thematic analysis is more likely than content analysis.

• Scrutinize your data to uncover common themes, concepts, or patterns. Preliminary conclusions regarding your participants’ perspectives, knowledge, and experiences can be drawn in this way.
• After reviewing your responses, you can collect the data into categories based on their “code.” These codes provide a concise summary of the key data points and trends that have been identified.
• Next, these codes must be organized into themes . Generally, themes are more significant than codes, and several codes are frequently grouped under a single theme. After establishing your themes, ensure they accurately represent the replies’ patterns.

Results of your semi-structured interview

After you’ve analyzed your data, you’ll need to write up your results in a research paper.

• Methodology: Your methodology section shows how you obtained the data in this instance, outlining your semi-structured interview procedure, and justifies or conceptualizes your analysis.
• Discussion and results: Typically, your classified categories are addressed in the discussion and result sections.
• Conclusions: You might then end by highlighting the essential findings and potential possibilities for future research.

When should you use a semi-structured interview?

• You have conducted interviews in the past.
• The nature of your study question is exploratory.

What is an interviewer effect?

The interviewer effect is a bias when an interviewer’s characteristics influence the interviewee’s responses.

What's the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning?

• Inductive reasoning is a bottom-up methodology, whereas deductive reasoning is a top-down method.
• Inductive reasoning proceeds from the particular to the general, whereas deductive reasoning, concludes by moving from the general to the particular.

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Structured vs. unstructured interviews: A complete guide

Last updated

7 March 2023

Reviewed by

Miroslav Damyanov

Interviews can help you understand the context of a subject, eyewitness accounts of an event, people's perceptions of a product, and more.

In some instances, semi-structured or unstructured interviews can be more helpful; in others, structured interviews are the right choice to obtain the information you seek.

In some cases, structured interviews can save time, making your research more efficient. Let’s dive into everything you need to know about structured interviews.

Analyze all kinds of interviews

Bring all your interviews into one place to analyze and understand

• What are structured interviews?

Structured interviews are also known as standardized interviews, patterned interviews, or planned interviews. They’re a research instrument that uses a standard sequence of questions to collect information about the research subject. 

Often, you’ll use structured interviews when you need data that’s easy to categorize and quantify for a statistical analysis of responses.

Structured interviews are incredibly effective at helping researchers identify patterns and trends in response data. They’re great at minimizing the time and resources necessary for data collection and analysis.

What types of questions suit structured interviews?

Often, researchers use structured interviews for quantitative research . In these cases, they usually employ close-ended questions. 

Close-ended questions have a fixed set of responses from which the interviewer can choose. Because of the limited response selection set, response data from close-ended questions is easy to aggregate and analyze.

Researchers often employ multiple-choice or dichotomous close-ended questions in interviews. 

For multiple-choice questions, interviewees may choose between three or more possible answers. The interviewer will often restrict the response to four or five possible options. An interviewee will likely need help recalling more, which can slow down and complicate the interview process. 

For dichotomous questions, the interviewee may choose between two possible options. Yes or no and true or false questions are examples of dichotomous questions.

Open-ended questions are common in structured interviews. However, researchers use them when conducting qualitative research and looking for in-depth information about the interviewee's perceptions or experiences. 

These questions take longer for the interviewee to answer, and the answers take longer for the researcher to analyze. There's also a higher possibility of the researcher collecting irrelevant data. However, open-ended questions are more effective than close-ended questions in gathering in-depth information.

Sometimes, researchers use structured interviews in qualitative research. In this case, the research instrument contains open-ended questions in the same sequence. This usage is less common because it can be hard to compare feedback, especially with large sample sizes.

• What types of structured interviews are there?

Researchers conduct structured interviews face-to-face, via telephone or videoconference, or through a survey instrument. 

Face-to-face interviews help researchers collect data and gather more detailed information. They can collect and analyze facial expressions, body language, tone, and inflection easier than they might through other interview methods . 

However, face-to-face interviews are the most resource-intensive to arrange. You'll likely need to assume travel and other related logistical costs for a face-to-face interview. 

These interviews also take more time and are more vulnerable to bias than some other formats. For these reasons, face-to-face interviews are best with a small sample size.

You can conduct interviews via an audio or video call. They are less resource-intensive than face-to-face interviews and can use a larger sample size. 

However, it can be difficult for the interviewer to engage effectively with the interviewee within this format, which can inject bias or ambiguity into the responses. This is particularly true for audio calls, especially if the interviewer and interviewee have not met before the interview. 

A video call can help the interviewer capture some data from body language and facial expressions, but less so than in a face-to-face interview. Technical issues are another thing to consider. If you’re studying a group of people that live in an area with limited Internet connectivity, this can make a video call challenging.

Survey questionnaires mirror the essential elements of structured interviews by containing a consistent sequence of standard questions. Surveys in quantitative research usually include close-ended questions. This data collection method can be beneficial if you need feedback from a large sample size.

Surveys are resource-efficient from a data administration standpoint but are more limited in the data they can gather. Further, if a survey question is ambiguous, you can’t clear up the ambiguity before someone responds. 

By contrast, in a face-to-face or tele-interview, an interviewee may ask clarifying questions or exhibit confusion when asked an unclear question, allowing the interviewer to clarify.

• What are some common examples of structured interviews?

Structured interviews are relevant in many fields. You can find structured interviews in human resources, marketing, political science, psychology, and more. 

Academic and applied researchers commonly use them to verify insights from analyzing academic literature or responses from other interview types.

However, one of the most common structured interview applications lies outside the research realm: Human resource professionals and hiring managers commonly use these interviews to hire employees.

A hiring manager can easily compare responses and whittle down the applicant pool by posing a standard set of closed-ended interview questions to multiple applicants. 

Further, standard close-ended or open-ended questions can reduce bias and add objectivity and credibility to the hiring process.

Structured interviews are common in political polling. Candidates and political parties may conduct structured interviews with relatively small voter groups to obtain feedback. They ask questions about issues, messaging, and voting intentions to craft policies and campaigns.

• What do you need to conduct a structured interview?

The tools you need to conduct a structured interview vary by format. But fundamentally, you will need: 

A participant

An interviewer

A pen and pad (or other note-taking tools)

A recording device

A consent form

A list of interview questions

While some interviewees may express qualms about you recording the interview, it’s challenging to conduct quality interviews while taking detailed notes. Even if you have a note-taker in the room, note-taking may introduce bias and can’t capture body language or facial expressions. 

Depending on the nature of your study, others may wish to review your sources. If they call your conclusions into question, audio recordings are additional evidence in your favor.

To record, you should ask the interviewee to sign a consent form. Check with your employer's legal counsel or institutional review board at your academic institution for guidance about obtaining consent legally in your state. 

If you're conducting a face-to-face interview, a camcorder, digital camera, or even some smartphones are sufficient for recording.

For a tele-interview, you'll find that today's leading video conferencing software applications feature a convenient recording function for data collection.

If a survey is your method of choice, you'll need the survey and a distribution and collection method. Online survey software applications allow you to create surveys by inputting the questions and distributing your survey via text or email. 

In some cases, survey companies even offer packages in which they will call those who do not respond via email or text and conduct the survey over the phone.

• How to conduct a structured interview

If you're planning a face-to-face interview, you'll need to take a few steps to do it efficiently. 

First, prepare your questions and double-check that the structured interview format is best for your study. Make sure that they are neutral, unbiased, and close-ended. Ask a friend or colleague to test your questions pre-interview to ensure they are clear and straightforward.

Choose the setting for your interviews. Ideally, you'll select a location that is easy to get to. If you live in a city, consider addresses accessible via public transportation. 

The room where your interview takes place should be comfortable, without distraction, and quiet, so your recording device clearly captures your interviewee's audio.

If you're looking to interview people with specific characteristics, you'll need to recruit them. Some companies specialize in interview recruitment. You provide the attributes you need, and they identify a pool of candidates for a fee. Alternatively, you can advertise to participants on social media and other relevant avenues. 

If you're looking for college students in a specific region, look at student newspaper ads or affiliated social media pages. 

You'll also want to incentivize participation, as recruiting interview respondents without compensation is exceedingly difficult. It’s best to include a line or two about requiring written consent for participation and how you’ll use the interview audio.

When you have an interview participant, discuss the intent of your research and acquire their consent. Ensure your recording tools are working well, and begin your interview. 

Don't rely on the recordings alone: Note the most significant insights from your participant, as you could easily forget them when it's time to analyze your data.

You'll want to transcribe your audio at the data analysis stage. Some recording applications use AI to generate transcripts. Remove filler words and other sounds to generate a clear transcript for the best results. 

A written transcript will help you analyze data and pull quotes from your audio to include in your final research paper.

• What are other common types of interviews?

Typically, you'll find researchers using at least one of these other common interview types:

Semi-structured interviews

As the name suggests, semi-structured interviews include some elements of a structured interview. You’ll include preplanned questions, but you can deviate from those questions to explore the interviewee's answers in greater depth.

Typically, a researcher will conduct a semi-structured interview with preplanned questions and an interview guide. The guide will include topics and potential questions to ask. Sometimes, the guide may also include areas or questions to avoid asking.

Unstructured interviews

In an unstructured interview , the researchers approach the interview subjects without predetermined questions. Researchers often use this qualitative instrument to probe into personal experiences and testimony, typically toward the beginning of a research study. 

Often, you’ll validate the insights you gather during unstructured and semi-structured interviews with structured interviews, surveys, and similar quantitative research tools.

Focus group interviews

Focus group interviews differ from the other three types of interviews as you pose the questions to a small group. Focus groups are typically either structured or semi-structured. When researchers employ structured interview questions, they are typically confident in the areas they wish to explore. 

Semi-structured interviews are perfect for a researcher seeking to explore broad issues. However, you must be careful that unplanned questions are unambiguous and neutral. Otherwise, you could wind up with biased results.

What is a structured vs. an unstructured interview?

A structured interview consists of standard preplanned questions for data collection. These questions may be close-ended, open-ended, or a combination. 

By contrast, an unstructured interview includes unplanned questions. In these interviews, you’ll usually equip facilitators with an interview guide. This includes guidelines for asking questions and samples that can help them ask relevant questions.

What are the advantages of a structured interview?

Relative to other interview formats, a structured interview is usually more time-efficient. With a preplanned set of questions, your interview is less likely to go into tangents, especially if you use close-ended questions. 

The more structure you provide to the interview, the more likely you are to generate responses that are easy to analyze. By contrast, an unstructured interview may involve a freewheeling conversation with off-topic and irrelevant feedback that lasts a long time.

What is an example of a structured question?

A structured question is any question you ask in an interview that you’ve preplanned and standardized.

For example, if you conduct five interviews and the first question you ask each one is, "Do you believe the world is round, yes or no?" you have asked them a structured question. This is also a close-ended dichotomous question.

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