The life history interviews ran for 40 – 60 minutes. The timing for sessions 2 and 3 is not provided.
Interviews are the most common data collection technique in qualitative research. There are four main types of interviews; the one you choose will depend on your research question, aims and objectives. It is important to formulate open-ended interview questions that are understandable and easy for participants to answer. Key considerations in setting up the interview will enhance the quality of the data obtained and the experience of the interview for the participant and the researcher.
Qualitative Research – a practical guide for health and social care researchers and practitioners Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Berkovic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.
5 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Undertaking Interviews
By: David Phair (PhD) and Kerryn Warren (PhD) | March 2022
Undertaking interviews is potentially the most important step in the qualitative research process. If you don’t collect useful, useable data in your interviews, you’ll struggle through the rest of your dissertation or thesis. Having helped numerous students with their research over the years, we’ve noticed some common interviewing mistakes that first-time researchers make. In this post, we’ll discuss five costly interview-related mistakes and outline useful strategies to avoid making these.
The first common mistake that we’ll look at is that of starting the interviewing process without having first come up with a clear interview strategy or plan of action. While it’s natural to be keen to get started engaging with your interviewees, a lack of planning can result in a mess of data and inconsistency between interviews.
There are several design choices to decide on and plan for before you start interviewing anyone. Some of the most important questions you need to ask yourself before conducting interviews include:
Let’s take a quick look at some of these.
The core objective of the interviewing process is to generate useful data that will help you address your overall research aims. Therefore, your interviews need to be conducted in a way that directly links to your research aims, objectives and research questions (i.e. your “golden thread”). This means that you need to carefully consider the questions you’ll ask to ensure that they align with and feed into your golden thread. If any question doesn’t align with this, you may want to consider scrapping it.
Another important design choice is whether you’ll use an unstructured, semi-structured or structured interview approach . For semi-structured interviews, you will have a list of questions that you plan to ask and these questions will be open-ended in nature. You’ll also allow the discussion to digress from the core question set if something interesting comes up. This means that the type of information generated might differ a fair amount between interviews.
Contrasted to this, a structured approach to interviews is more rigid, where a specific set of closed questions is developed and asked for each interviewee in exactly the same order. Closed questions have a limited set of answers, that are often single-word answers. Therefore, you need to think about what you’re trying to achieve with your research project (i.e. your research aims) and decided on which approach would be best suited in your case.
It is also important to plan ahead with regards to who will be interviewed and how. You need to think about how you will approach the possible interviewees to get their cooperation, who will conduct the interviews, when to conduct the interviews and how to record the interviews. For each of these decisions, it’s also essential to make sure that all ethical considerations and data protection laws are taken into account.
Finally, you should think through how you plan to analyze the data (i.e., your qualitative analysis method) generated by the interviews. Different types of analysis rely on different types of data, so you need to ensure you’re asking the right types of questions and correctly guiding your respondents.
Simply put, you need to have a plan of action regarding the specifics of your interview approach before you start collecting data. If not, you’ll end up drifting in your approach from interview to interview, which will result in inconsistent, unusable data.
While you’re generally not expected to become you to be an expert interviewer for a dissertation or thesis, it is important to practice good interview technique and develop basic interviewing skills .
Let’s go through some basics that will help the process along.
Firstly, before the interview , make sure you know your interview questions well and have a clear idea of what you want from the interview. Naturally, the specificity of your questions will depend on whether you’re taking a structured, semi-structured or unstructured approach, but you still need a consistent starting point . Ideally, you should develop an interview guide beforehand (more on this later) that details your core question and links these to the research aims, objectives and research questions.
Before you undertake any interviews, it’s a good idea to do a few mock interviews with friends or family members. This will help you get comfortable with the interviewer role, prepare for potentially unexpected answers and give you a good idea of how long the interview will take to conduct. In the interviewing process, you’re likely to encounter two kinds of challenging interviewees ; the two-word respondent and the respondent who meanders and babbles. Therefore, you should prepare yourself for both and come up with a plan to respond to each in a way that will allow the interview to continue productively.
To begin the formal interview , provide the person you are interviewing with an overview of your research. This will help to calm their nerves (and yours) and contextualize the interaction. Ultimately, you want the interviewee to feel comfortable and be willing to be open and honest with you, so it’s useful to start in a more casual, relaxed fashion and allow them to ask any questions they may have. From there, you can ease them into the rest of the questions.
As the interview progresses , avoid asking leading questions (i.e., questions that assume something about the interviewee or their response). Make sure that you speak clearly and slowly , using plain language and being ready to paraphrase questions if the person you are interviewing misunderstands. Be particularly careful with interviewing English second language speakers to ensure that you’re both on the same page.
Engage with the interviewee by listening to them carefully and acknowledging that you are listening to them by smiling or nodding. Show them that you’re interested in what they’re saying and thank them for their openness as appropriate. This will also encourage your interviewee to respond openly.
Where you conduct your interviews and the equipment you use to record them both play an important role in how the process unfolds. Therefore, you need to think carefully about each of these variables before you start interviewing.
Poor location: A bad location can result in the quality of your interviews being compromised, interrupted, or cancelled. If you are conducting physical interviews, you’ll need a location that is quiet, safe, and welcoming . It’s very important that your location of choice is not prone to interruptions (the workplace office is generally problematic, for example) and has suitable facilities (such as water, a bathroom, and snacks).
If you are conducting online interviews , you need to consider a few other factors. Importantly, you need to make sure that both you and your respondent have access to a good, stable internet connection and electricity. Always check before the time that both of you know how to use the relevant software and it’s accessible (sometimes meeting platforms are blocked by workplace policies or firewalls). It’s also good to have alternatives in place (such as WhatsApp, Zoom, or Teams) to cater for these types of issues.
Poor equipment: Using poor-quality recording equipment or using equipment incorrectly means that you will have trouble transcribing, coding, and analyzing your interviews. This can be a major issue , as some of your interview data may go completely to waste if not recorded well. So, make sure that you use good-quality recording equipment and that you know how to use it correctly.
To avoid issues, you should always conduct test recordings before every interview to ensure that you can use the relevant equipment properly. It’s also a good idea to spot check each recording afterwards, just to make sure it was recorded as planned. If your equipment uses batteries, be sure to always carry a spare set.
Many possible issues can arise during the interview process. Not planning for these issues can mean that you are left with compromised data that might not be useful to you. Therefore, it’s important to map out some sort of risk management plan ahead of time, considering the potential risks, how you’ll minimize their probability and how you’ll manage them if they materialize.
Common potential issues related to the actual interview include cancellations (people pulling out), delays (such as getting stuck in traffic), language and accent differences (especially in the case of poor internet connections), issues with internet connections and power supply. Other issues can also occur in the interview itself. For example, the interviewee could drift off-topic, or you might encounter an interviewee who does not say much at all.
You can prepare for these potential issues by considering possible worst-case scenarios and preparing a response for each scenario. For instance, it is important to plan a backup date just in case your interviewee cannot make it to the first meeting you scheduled with them. It’s also a good idea to factor in a 30-minute gap between your interviews for the instances where someone might be late, or an interview runs overtime for other reasons. Make sure that you also plan backup questions that could be used to bring a respondent back on topic if they start rambling, or questions to encourage those who are saying too little.
In general, it’s best practice to plan to conduct more interviews than you think you need (this is called oversampling ). Doing so will allow you some room for error if there are interviews that don’t go as planned, or if some interviewees withdraw. If you need 10 interviews, it is a good idea to plan for 15. Likely, a few will cancel , delay, or not produce useful data.
We touched on this a little earlier, but it is a key point that should be central to your entire research process. You don’t want to end up with pages and pages of data after conducting your interviews and realize that it is not useful to your research aims . Your research aims, objectives and research questions – i.e., your golden thread – should influence every design decision and should guide the interview process at all times.
A useful way to avoid this mistake is by developing an interview guide before you begin interviewing your respondents. An interview guide is a document that contains all of your questions with notes on how each of the interview questions is linked to the research question(s) of your study. You can also include your research aims and objectives here for a more comprehensive linkage.
You can easily create an interview guide by drawing up a table with one column containing your core interview questions . Then add another column with your research questions , another with expectations that you may have in light of the relevant literature and another with backup or follow-up questions . As mentioned, you can also bring in your research aims and objectives to help you connect them all together. If you’d like, you can download a copy of our free interview guide here .
In this post, we’ve discussed 5 common costly mistakes that are easy to make in the process of planning and conducting qualitative interviews.
To recap, these include:
If you have any questions about these interviewing mistakes, drop a comment below. Alternatively, if you’re interested in getting 1-on-1 help with your thesis or dissertation , check out our dissertation coaching service or book a free initial consultation with one of our friendly Grad Coaches.
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6 qualitative research and interviews.
So we’ve described doing a survey and collecting quantitative data. But not all questions can best be answered by a survey. A survey is great for understanding what people think (for example), but not why they think what they do. If your research is intending to understand the underlying motivations or reasons behind peoples actions, or to build a deeper understanding on the background of a subject, an interview may be the more appropriate data collection method.
Interviews are a method of data collection that consist of two or more people exchanging information through a structured process of questions and answers. Questions are designed by the researcher to thoughtfully collect in-depth information on a topic or set of topics as related to the central research question. Interviews typically occur in-person, although good interviews can also be conducted remotely via the phone or video conferencing. Unlike surveys, interviews give the opportunity to ask follow-up questions and thoughtfully engage with participants on the spot (rather than the anonymous and impartial format of survey research).
And surveys can be used in qualitative or quantitative research – though they’re more typically a qualitative technique. In-depth interviews , containing open-ended questions and structured by an interview guide . One can also do a standardized interview with closed-ended questions (i.e. answer options) that are structured by an interview schedule as part of quantitative research. While these are called interviews they’re far closer to surveys, so we wont cover them again in this chapter. The terms used for in-depth interviews we’ll cover in the next section.
In-depth interviews allow participants to describe experiences in their own words (a primary strength of the interview format). Strong in-depth interviews will include many open-ended questions that allow participants to respond in their own words, share new ideas, and lead the conversation in different directions. The purpose of open-ended questions and in-depth interviews is to hear as much as possible in the person’s own voice, to collect new information and ideas, and to achieve a level of depth not possible in surveys or most other forms of data collection.
Typically, an interview guide is used to create a soft structure for the conversation and is an important preparation tool for the researcher. You can not go into an interview unprepared and just “wing it”; what the interview guide allows you to do is map out a framework, order of topics, and may include specific questions to use during the interview. Generally, the interview guide is thought of as just that — a guide to use in order to keep the interview focused. It is not set in stone and a skilled researcher can change the order of questions or topics in an interviews based on the organic conversation flow.
Depending on the experience and skill level of the researcher, an interview guide can be as simple as a list of topics to cover. However, for consistency and quality of research, the interviewer may want to take the time to at least practice writing out questions in advance to ensure that phrasing and word choices are as clear, objective, and focused as possible. It’s worth remembering that working out the wording of questions in advance allows researchers to ensure more consistency across interview. The interview guide below, taken from the wonderful and free textbook Principles of Sociological Inquiry , shows an interview guide that just has topics.
Alternatively, you can use a more detailed guide that lists out possible questions, as shown below. A more detailed guide is probably better for an interviewer that has less experience, or is just beginning to work on a given topic.
The purpose of an interview guide is to help ask effective questions and to support the process of acquiring the best possible data for your research. Topics and questions should be organized thematically, and in a natural progression that will allow the conversation to flow and deepen throughout the course of the interview. Often, researchers will attempt to memorize or partially memorize the interview guide, in order to be more fully present with the participant during the conversation.
Remember, the purposes of interviews is to go more in-depth with an individual than is possible with a generalized survey. For this reason, it is important to use the guide as a starting point but not to be overly tethered to it during the actual interview process. You may get stuck when respondents give you shorter answers than you expect, or don’t provide the type of depth that you need for your research. Often, you may want to probe for more specifics. Think about using follow up questions like “How does/did that affect you?” or “How does X make you feel?” and “Tell me about a time where X…”
For example, if I was researching the relationship between pets and mental health, some strong open-ended questions might be: * How does your pet typically make you feel when you wake up in the morning? * How does your pet generally affect your mood when you arrive home in the evening? * Tell me about a time when your pet had a significant impact on your emotional state.
Questions framed in this manner leave plenty of room for the respondent to answer in their own words, as opposed to leading and/or truncated questions, such as: * Does being with your pet make you happy? * After a bad day, how much does seeing your pet improve your mood? * Tell me about how important your pet is to your mental health.
These questions assume outcomes and will not result in high quality research. Researchers should always avoid asking leading questions that give away an expected answer or suggest particular responses. For instance, if I ask “we need to spend more on public schools, don’t you think?” the respondent is more likely to agree regardless of their own thoughts. Some wont, but humans generally have a strong natural desire to be agreeable. That’s why leaving your questions neutral and open so that respondents can speak to their experiences and views is critical.
Writing good questions and interviewing respondents are just the first steps of the interview process. After these stages, the researcher still has a lot of work to do to collect usable data from the interview. The researcher must spend time coding and analyzing the interview to retrieve this data. Just doing an interview wont produce data. Think about how many conversations you have everyday, and none of those are leaving you swimming in data.
Hopefully you can record your interviews. Recording your interviews will allow you the opportunity to transcribe them word for word later. If you can’t record the interview you’ll need to take detailed notes so that you can reconstruct what you heard later. Do not trust yourself to “just remember” the conversation. You’re collecting data, precious data that you’re spending time and energy to collect. Treat it as important and valuable. Remember our description of the methodology section from Chapter 2, you need to maintain a chain of custody on your data. If you just remembered the interview, you could be accused of making up the results. Your interview notes and the recording become part of that chain of custody to prove to others that your interviews were real and that your results are accurate.
Assuming you recorded your interview, the first step in the analysis process is transcribing the interview. A transcription is a written record of every word in an interview. Transcriptions can either be completed by the researcher or by a hired worker, though it is good practice for the researcher to transcribe the interview him or herself. Researchers should keep the following points in mind regarding transcriptions: * The interview should take place in a quiet location with minimal background noise to produce a clear recording; * Transcribing interviews is a time-consuming process and may take two to three times longer than the actual interview; * Transcriptions provide a more precise record of the interview than hand written notes and allow the interviewer to focus during the interview.
After transcribing the interview, the next step is to analyze the responses. Coding is the main form of analysis used for interviews and involves studying a transcription to identify important themes. These themes are categorized into codes, which are words or phrases that denote an idea.
You’ll typically being with several codes in mind that are generated by key ideas you week seeking in the questions, but you can also being by using open coding to understand the results. An open coding process involves reading through the transcript multiple times and paying close attention to each line of the text to discover noteworthy concepts. During the open coding process, the researcher keeps an open mind to find any codes that may be relevant to the research topic.
After the open coding process is complete, focused coding can begin. Focused coding takes a closer look at the notes compiled during the open coding stage to merge common codes and define what the codes mean in the context of the research project.
Imagine a researcher is conducting interviews to learn about various people’s experiences of childhood in New Orleans. The following example shows several codes that this researcher extrapolated from an interview with one of their subjects.
The next chapter will address ways to identify people to interview, but most of the remainder of the book will address how to analyze quantitative data. That shouldn’t be taken as a sign that quantitative data is better, or that it’s easier to use interview data. Because in an interview the researcher must interpret the words of others it is often more challenging to identify your findings and clearly answer your research question. However, quantitative data is more common, and there are more different things you can do with it, so we spend a lot of the textbook focusing on it.
I’ll work through one more example of using interview data though. It takes a lot of practice to be a good and skilled interviewer. What I show below is a brief excerpt of an interview I did, and how that data was used in a resulting paper I wrote. These aren’t the only way you can use interview data, but it’s an example of what the intermediary and final product might look like.
The overall project these are drawn from was concerned with minor league baseball stadiums, but the specific part I’m pulling from here was studying the decline and rejuvenation of downtown around those stadiums in several cities. You’ll see that I’m using the words of the respondent fairly directly, because that’s my data. But I’m not just relying on one respondent and trusting them, I did a few dozen interviews in order to understand the commonalities in people’s perspectives to build a narrative around my research question.
Excerpt from Notes
Excerpt from Resulting Paper
How many interviews are necessary? It actually doesn’t take many. What you want to observe in your interviews is theoretical saturation , where the codes you use in the transcript begin to appear across conversations and groups. If different people disagree that’s fine, but what you want to understand is the commonalities across peoples perspectives. Most research on the subject says that with 8 interviews you’ll typically start to see a decline in new information gathered. That doesn’t mean you won’t get new words , but you’ll stop hearing completely unique perspectives or gain novel insights. At that point, where you’ve ‘heard it all before’ you can stop, because you’ve probably identified the answer to the questions you were trying to research.
One significant ethical concern with interviews, that also applies to surveys, is making sure that respondents maintain anonymity. In either form of data collection you may be asking respondents deeply personal questions, that if exposed may cause legal, personal, or professional harm. Notice that in the excerpt of the paper above the respondents are only identified by an id I assigned (Louisville D) and their career, rather than their name. I can only include the excerpt of the interview notes above because there are no details that might lead to them being identified.
You may want to report details about a person to contextualize the data you gathered, but you should always ensure that no one can be identified from your research. For instance, if you were doing research on racism at large companies, you may want to preface people’s comments by their race, as there is a good chance that white and minority employees would feel differently about the issues. However, if you preface someones comments by saying they’re a minority manager, that may violate their anonymity. Even if you don’t state what company you did interviews with, that may be enough detail for their co-workers to identify them if there are few minority managers at the company. As such, always think long and hard about whether there is any way that the participation of respondents may be exposed.
We’ve discussed surveys and interviews as different methods the last two chapters, but they can also complement each other.
For instance, let’s say you’re curious to study people who change opinions on abortion, either going from support to opposition or vice versa. You could use a survey to understand the prevalence of changing opinions, i.e. what percentage of people in your city have changed their views. That would help to establish whether this is a prominent issue, or whether it’s a rare phenomenon. But it would be difficult to understand from the survey what makes people change their views. You could add an open ended question for anyone that said they changed their opinion, but many people won’t respond and few will provide the level of detail necessary to understand their motivations. Interviews with people that have changed their opinions would give you an opportunity to explore how their experiences and beliefs have changed in combination with their views towards abortion.
In the last two chapters we’ve discussed the two most prominent methods of data collection in the social sciences: surveys and interviews. What we haven’t discussed though is how to identify the people you’ll collect data from; that’s called a sampling strategy. In the next chapter
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Key Takeaways:
Qualitative research uses in-depth interviews to gain rich non-numerical data from individuals. This data helps researchers understand concepts, opinions, and personal experiences. Interviews are an excellent method to discover the “why” behind people’s preferences or behaviors, but they require a thoughtful approach.
Continue reading as we explore use cases and define the steps to follow for a successful qualitative interview.
In this Article:
When Should I Use Qualitative Interviews? Conducting a Successful Qualitative Interview – Step by Step Guide
1. Determine Your Objective 2. Understand Your Audience 3. Design Appropriate Questions 4. Organize and Prepare for the Interview 5. Conduct the Interview 6. Transcribe and Analyze Responses 7. Learn, Adapt, and Evolve Your Interviews
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Qualitative research is used to obtain context and describe underlying factors. It describes “how” and “why.”
Perhaps a business wants to understand what product features are most or least important to each target segment. They could ask:
“Between product A and product B, how would the features in each product influence your buying decision?”
This creates an opportunity for the respondent to reveal what features are personally important and unimportant for them. In an interview setting, researchers can go deeper into why these features are important, and how important each feature is in comparison to others.
Qualitative interviews are best when:
Knowing when to use a qualitative interview is a great first step, but now you need to understand how best to conduct one. Our experts share a range of steps to follow as you embark on a qualitative interview and best practices for each.
What are you trying to understand? The answer to this is critical in guiding your qualitative research process.
Some common examples:
Who is your target audience for this project? Have a clear understanding of who you need to hear from to meet your research objective.
Here are some examples of objectives, and the sample that is most suited to each:
The questions you ask must align with the objectives of your research without being leading or introducing bias.
Here are some best practices when designing research questions:
Relationships are essential to the interview process. Preparation beforehand helps build the respondent-researcher relationship. This relationship creates trust and elicits more honest and in-depth answers from participants. Here are some ways to prepare for an interview:
With a structure in place, researchers have a clear plan of action throughout the interview.
During the interview, stay attuned to emotional reactions and body language with the following techniques:
Convert recorded audio responses to text. Decide early which tool or solution will work best for your needs.
Similarly, researchers may need to annotate video responses to describe behaviors and surrounding context before analysis; e.g., this person gritted their teeth during that response, that person’s vocal tone was anxious and uncertain, etc.
Transcribe responses into a format ready for analysis upon ingestion into your business intelligence tools.
Each interview is an opportunity to improve the process. Take time after a project to evaluate how it went.
What did you learn about the process? Was it easy or confusing? Was the respondent comfortable or on edge? Did you get the responses you needed?
Scrutinize your interview approach. Look for ways to improve and innovate the process for better outcomes next time.
Now, you should have a good idea of when to use and how to approach qualitative interviews.
Sago has decades of experience across both quantitative and qualitative research. Our experts find interviews ideal for in-depth qualitative insights that guide new product and service development or improve market positioning for existing offerings. We offer both in-person facilities and online spaces to conduct qualitative interviews.
If you still have questions, get in touch with Sago for help with your next research project.
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Last updated
18 May 2023
Reviewed by
Miroslav Damyanov
However, conducting qualitative interviews can be challenging, even for seasoned researchers. Poorly conducted interviews can lead to inaccurate or incomplete data, significantly compromising the validity and reliability of your research findings.
When planning to conduct qualitative interviews, you must adequately prepare yourself to get the most out of your data. Fortunately, there are specific tips and best practices that can help you conduct qualitative interviews effectively.
A qualitative interview is a research technique used to gather in-depth information about people's experiences, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions. Unlike a structured questionnaire or survey, a qualitative interview is a flexible, conversational approach that allows the interviewer to delve into the interviewee's responses and explore their insights and experiences.
In a qualitative interview, the researcher typically develops a set of open-ended questions that provide a framework for the conversation. However, the interviewer can also adapt to the interviewee's responses and ask follow-up questions to understand their experiences and views better.
Conducting interviews involves a well-planned and deliberate process to collect accurate and valid data.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to conduct interviews in qualitative research, broken down into three stages:
The first step in conducting a qualitative interview is determining your research question . This will help you identify the type of participants you need to recruit . Once you have your research question, you can start recruiting participants by identifying potential candidates and contacting them to gauge their interest in participating in the study.
After that, it's time to develop your interview questions. These should be open-ended questions that will elicit detailed responses from participants. You'll also need to get consent from the participants, ideally in writing, to ensure that they understand the purpose of the study and their rights as participants. Finally, choose a comfortable and private location to conduct the interview and prepare the interview guide.
Start by introducing yourself and explaining the purpose of the study. Establish a rapport by putting the participants at ease and making them feel comfortable. Use the interview guide to ask the questions, but be flexible and ask follow-up questions to gain more insight into the participants' responses.
Take notes during the interview, and ask permission to record the interview for transcription purposes. Be mindful of the time, and cover all the questions in the interview guide.
Once the interview is over, transcribe the interview if you recorded it. If you took notes, review and organize them to make sure you capture all the important information. Then, analyze the data you collected by identifying common themes and patterns. Use the findings to answer your research question.
Finally, debrief with the participants to thank them for their time, provide feedback on the study, and answer any questions they may have.
Make sense of your research by automatically summarizing key takeaways through our free content analysis tool.
Qualitative interviews involve asking questions that encourage participants to share their experiences, opinions, and perspectives on a particular topic. These questions are designed to elicit detailed and nuanced responses rather than simple yes or no answers.
Effective questions in a qualitative interview are generally open-ended and non-leading. They avoid presuppositions or assumptions about the participant's experience and allow them to share their views in their own words.
In customer research , you might ask questions such as:
What motivated you to choose our product/service over our competitors?
How did you first learn about our product/service?
Can you walk me through your experience with our product/service?
What improvements or changes would you suggest for our product/service?
Have you recommended our product/service to others, and if so, why?
The key is to ask questions relevant to the research topic and allow participants to share their experiences meaningfully and informally.
Choosing the right participants for a qualitative interview is a crucial step in ensuring the success and validity of the research . You need to consider several factors to determine the right participants for a qualitative interview. These may include:
Relevant experiences : Participants should have experiences related to the research topic that can provide valuable insights.
Diversity : Aim to include diverse participants to ensure the study's findings are representative and inclusive.
Access : Identify participants who are accessible and willing to participate in the study.
Informed consent : Participants should be fully informed about the study's purpose, methods, and potential risks and benefits and be allowed to provide informed consent.
You can use various recruitment methods, such as posting ads in relevant forums, contacting community organizations or social media groups, or using purposive sampling to identify participants who meet specific criteria.
Making participants comfortable during a qualitative interview is essential to obtain rich, detailed data. Participants are more likely to share their experiences openly when they feel at ease and not judged.
Here are some ways to make interview subjects comfortable:
Start the interview by explaining the research topic and its importance. The goal is to give participants a sense of what to expect.
Conduct the interview in a quiet, private space where the participant feels comfortable. Turn off any unnecessary electronics that can create distractions. Ensure your equipment works well ahead of time. Arrive at the interview on time. If you conduct a remote interview, turn on your camera and mute all notetakers and observers.
Greet the participant warmly and introduce yourself. Show interest in their responses and thank them for their time.
Ask questions that encourage participants to elaborate on their thoughts and experiences.
Resist the urge to multitask . Pay attention to the participant's responses, nod your head, or make supportive comments to show you’re interested in their answers. Avoid interrupting them.
Show respect and don't judge the participant's views or experiences. Allow the participant to speak freely without feeling judged or ridiculed.
If needed, offer breaks during the interview, especially if the topic is sensitive or emotional.
Creating a comfortable environment and establishing rapport with the participant fosters an atmosphere of trust and encourages open communication. This helps participants feel at ease and willing to share their experiences.
Analyzing a qualitative interview involves a systematic process of examining the data collected to identify patterns, themes, and meanings that emerge from the responses.
Here are some steps on how to analyze a qualitative interview:
The first step is transcribing the interview into text format to have a written record of the conversation. This step is essential to ensure that you can refer back to the interview data and identify the important aspects of the interview.
Once you’ve transcribed the interview, read through it to identify key themes, patterns, and phrases emerging from the data. This process involves reducing the data into more manageable pieces you can easily analyze.
The next step is to code the data by labeling sections of the text with descriptive words or phrases that reflect the data's content. Coding helps identify key themes and patterns from the interview data.
After coding, you should group the codes into categories based on their similarities. This process helps to identify overarching themes or sub-themes that emerge from the data.
You should then interpret the themes and sub-themes by identifying relationships, contradictions, and meanings that emerge from the data. Interpretation involves analyzing the themes in the context of the research question .
The next step is comparing the data across participants or groups to identify similarities and differences. This step helps to ensure that the findings aren’t just specific to one participant but can be generalized to the wider population.
To ensure the findings are valid and reliable, you should use triangulation by comparing the findings with other sources, such as observations or interview data.
The final step is synthesizing the findings by summarizing the key themes and presenting them clearly and concisely. This step involves writing a report that presents the findings in a way that is easy to understand, using quotes and examples from the interview data to illustrate the themes.
Transcribing a qualitative interview is a crucial step in the research process. It involves converting the audio or video recording of the interview into written text.
Here are some tips for transcribing a qualitative interview:
Transcription software can save time and increase accuracy by automatically transcribing audio or video recordings.
When manually transcribing, listen carefully to the recording to ensure clarity. Pause and rewind the recording as necessary.
Use a consistent format for transcribing, such as marking pauses, overlaps, and interruptions. Indicate non-verbal cues such as laughter, sighs, or changes in tone.
Edit the transcription to ensure clarity and readability. Use standard grammar and punctuation, correct misspellings, and remove filler words like "um" and "ah."
Verify the accuracy of the transcription by listening to the recording again and reviewing the notes taken during the interview.
Add timestamps to the transcription to reference specific interview sections.
Transcribing a qualitative interview can be time-consuming, but it’s essential to ensure the accuracy of the data collected. Following these tips can produce high-quality transcriptions useful for analysis and reporting.
Unlike quantitative research methods, which rely on numerical data, qualitative research seeks to understand the richness and complexity of human experiences and perspectives.
Interview techniques involve asking open-ended questions that allow participants to express their views and share their stories in their own words. This approach can help researchers to uncover unexpected or surprising insights that may not have been discovered through other research methods.
Interview techniques also allow researchers to establish rapport with participants, creating a comfortable and safe space for them to share their experiences. This can lead to a deeper level of trust and candor, leading to more honest and authentic responses.
Qualitative interviews are an excellent research approach when used properly, but they have their drawbacks.
The weaknesses of qualitative interviews include the following:
Qualitative interviews rely on the researcher's interpretation of the interviewee's responses. The researcher's biases or preconceptions can affect how the questions are framed and how the responses are interpreted, which can influence results.
The sample size in qualitative interviews is often small, which can limit the generalizability of the results to the larger population.
The quality of data collected during interviews can be affected by various factors, such as the interviewee's mood, the setting of the interview, and the interviewer's skills and experience.
Interviewees may provide responses that they believe are socially acceptable rather than truthful or genuine.
Conducting qualitative interviews can be expensive, especially if the researcher must travel to different locations to conduct the interviews.
The data analysis process can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, as researchers need to transcribe and analyze the data manually.
Despite these weaknesses, qualitative interviews remain a valuable research tool . You can take steps to mitigate the impact of these weaknesses by incorporating the perspectives of other researchers or participants in the analysis process, using multiple data sources , and critically analyzing your biases and assumptions.
Mastering the art of qualitative interviews is an essential skill for businesses looking to gain deep insights into their customers' needs , preferences, and behaviors. By following the tips and best practices outlined in this article, you can conduct interviews that provide you with rich data that you can use to make informed decisions about your products, services, and marketing strategies.
Remember that effective communication, active listening, and proper analysis are critical components of successful qualitative interviews. By incorporating these practices into your customer research, you can gain a competitive edge and build stronger customer relationships.
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How to carry out great interviews in qualitative research.
11 min read An interview is one of the most versatile methods used in qualitative research. Here’s what you need to know about conducting great qualitative interviews.
Qualitative research interviews are a mainstay among q ualitative research techniques, and have been in use for decades either as a primary data collection method or as an adjunct to a wider research process. A qualitative research interview is a one-to-one data collection session between a researcher and a participant. Interviews may be carried out face-to-face, over the phone or via video call using a service like Skype or Zoom.
There are three main types of qualitative research interview – structured, unstructured or semi-structured.
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As a qualitative research method interviewing is hard to beat, with applications in social research, market research, and even basic and clinical pharmacy. But like any aspect of the research process, it’s not without its limitations. Before choosing qualitative interviewing as your research method, it’s worth weighing up the pros and cons.
Pros of qualitative interviews:
Cons of qualitative interviews:
Semi-structured interviews are based on a qualitative interview guide, which acts as a road map for the researcher. While conducting interviews, the researcher can use the interview guide to help them stay focused on their research questions and make sure they cover all the topics they intend to.
An interview guide may include a list of questions written out in full, or it may be a set of bullet points grouped around particular topics. It can prompt the interviewer to dig deeper and ask probing questions during the interview if appropriate.
Consider writing out the project’s research question at the top of your interview guide, ahead of the interview questions. This may help you steer the interview in the right direction if it threatens to head off on a tangent.
According to Duke University , bias can create significant problems in your qualitative interview.
The interview questions you ask need to be carefully considered both before and during the data collection process. As well as considering the topics you’ll cover, you will need to think carefully about the way you ask questions.
Open-ended interview questions – which cannot be answered with a ‘yes’ ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ – are recommended by many researchers as a way to pursue in depth information.
An example of an open-ended question is “What made you want to move to the East Coast?” This will prompt the participant to consider different factors and select at least one. Having thought about it carefully, they may give you more detailed information about their reasoning.
A closed-ended question , such as “Would you recommend your neighborhood to a friend?” can be answered without too much deliberation, and without giving much information about personal thoughts, opinions and feelings.
Follow-up questions can be used to delve deeper into the research topic and to get more detail from open-ended questions. Examples of follow-up questions include:
As well as avoiding closed-ended questions, be wary of leading questions. As with other qualitative research techniques such as surveys or focus groups, these can introduce bias in your data. Leading questions presume a certain point of view shared by the interviewer and participant, and may even suggest a foregone conclusion.
An example of a leading question might be: “You moved to New York in 1990, didn’t you?” In answering the question, the participant is much more likely to agree than disagree. This may be down to acquiescence bias or a belief that the interviewer has checked the information and already knows the correct answer.
Other leading questions involve adjectival phrases or other wording that introduces negative or positive connotations about a particular topic. An example of this kind of leading question is: “Many employees dislike wearing masks to work. How do you feel about this?” It presumes a positive opinion and the participant may be swayed by it, or not want to contradict the interviewer.
Harvard University’s guidelines for qualitative interview research add that you shouldn’t be afraid to ask embarrassing questions – “if you don’t ask, they won’t tell.” Bear in mind though that too much probing around sensitive topics may cause the interview participant to withdraw. The Harvard guidelines recommend leaving sensitive questions til the later stages of the interview when a rapport has been established.
Observing a participant’s body language can give you important data about their thoughts and feelings. It can also help you decide when to broach a topic, and whether to use a follow-up question or return to the subject later in the interview.
Be conscious that the participant may regard you as the expert, not themselves. In order to make sure they express their opinions openly, use active listening skills like verbal encouragement and paraphrasing and clarifying their meaning to show how much you value what they are saying.
Remember that part of the goal is to leave the interview participant feeling good about volunteering their time and their thought process to your research. Aim to make them feel empowered , respected and heard.
Unstructured interviews can demand a lot of a researcher, both cognitively and emotionally. Be sure to leave time in between in-depth interviews when scheduling your data collection to make sure you maintain the quality of your data, as well as your own well-being .
Historically, recording qualitative research interviews and then transcribing the conversation manually would have represented a significant part of the cost and time involved in research projects that collect qualitative data.
Fortunately, researchers now have access to digital recording tools, and even speech-to-text technology that can automatically transcribe interview data using AI and machine learning. This type of tool can also be used to capture qualitative data from qualitative research (focus groups,ect.) making this kind of social research or market research much less time consuming.
Qualitative interview data is unstructured, rich in content and difficult to analyze without the appropriate tools. Fortunately, machine learning and AI can once again make things faster and easier when you use qualitative methods like the research interview.
Text analysis tools and natural language processing software can ‘read’ your transcripts and voice data and identify patterns and trends across large volumes of text or speech. They can also perform khttps://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/research/sentiment-analysis/
which assesses overall trends in opinion and provides an unbiased overall summary of how participants are feeling.
Another feature of text analysis tools is their ability to categorize information by topic, sorting it into groupings that help you organize your data according to the topic discussed.
All in all, interviews are a valuable technique for qualitative research in business, yielding rich and detailed unstructured data. Historically, they have only been limited by the human capacity to interpret and communicate results and conclusions, which demands considerable time and skill.
When you combine this data with AI tools that can interpret it quickly and automatically, it becomes easy to analyze and structure, dovetailing perfectly with your other business data. An additional benefit of natural language analysis tools is that they are free of subjective biases, and can replicate the same approach across as much data as you choose. By combining human research skills with machine analysis, qualitative research methods such as interviews are more valuable than ever to your business.
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But what exactly do semi structured interviews mean? What exactly counts as in-depth? How structured are semi-structured interviews?
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?
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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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Example of the semi-‐structured interview guide. Viral Hepatitis: Semi-structured interview. M / F Provider / community member / both Age Region. 1. Qualitative interview introduction. Length: 45-60 minutes. Primary goal: To see things the way you see them... more like a conversation with a focus on your experience, your opinions and what you ...
Teleconference no.: +33 75 34 29 417. [email protected] or [email protected] yo. This information sheet is for you to keep. Appendix 3: Participant consent form. ea. cher: Linda Nyanchoka Please initial box1. I confirm that I have re. ve understood the info. mation sheetdated[] for the above study.
Vancouver, Canada. Abstract. Interviews are one of the most promising ways of collecting qualitative data throug h establishment of a. communication between r esearcher and the interviewee. Re ...
The interview guide serves many purposes. Most important, it is a memory aid to ensure that the interviewer covers every topic and obtains the necessary detail about the topic. For this reason, the interview guide should contain all the interview items in the order that you have decided. The exact wording of the items should be given, although ...
3. People's espoused theories differ from their theories-in-practice. Get them to tell a story. Ask "how" questions not "do". Use "tell me about" and "tell me more about that". Use open-ended questions. Approach your topic sideways. Don't take the first answer as a final answer. Ask for elaboration.
Types of Interviews in Research | Guide & Examples. Published on March 10, 2022 by Tegan George. Revised on June 22, 2023. An interview is a qualitative research method that relies on asking questions in order to collect data. Interviews involve two or more people, one of whom is the interviewer asking the questions.
In-depth interviewing is a qualitative research technique that involves conducting intensive individual interviews with a small number of respondents to explore their perspectives on a particular idea, program, or situation. For example, we might ask participants, staff, and others associated with a program about their experiences and ...
Example: Interview Guide. In this example, follow-up prompts are italicized. Note the sequence of questions. ... "Qualitative Interviews in Medical Research." BMJ: British Medical Journal 31(6999):251-253. A good basic overview of interviewing particularly useful for students of public health and medical research generally.
TIPSHEET QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWINGTIP. HEET - QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWINGQualitative interviewing provides a method for collecting rich and detailed information about how individuals experience, understand. nd explain events in their lives. This tipsheet offers an introduction to the topic and some advice on. arrying out eff.
Figure 9.2 provides an example of an interview guide that uses questions rather than topics. Figure 9.2 Interview guide displaying questions rather than topics. As you might have guessed, interview guides do not appear out of thin air. They are the result of thoughtful and careful work on the part of a researcher.
What are interviews? An interviewing method is the most commonly used data collection technique in qualitative research. 1 The purpose of an interview is to explore the experiences, understandings, opinions and motivations of research participants. 2 Interviews are conducted one-on-one with the researcher and the participant. Interviews are most appropriate when seeking to understand a ...
5. Not keeping your golden thread front of mind. We touched on this a little earlier, but it is a key point that should be central to your entire research process. You don't want to end up with pages and pages of data after conducting your interviews and realize that it is not useful to your research aims.
The Qualitative Report 2020 Volume 25, Number 9, How To Article 1, 3185-3203. Qualitative Interview Questions: Guidance for Novice Researchers. Rosanne E. Roberts. Capella University, Minneapolis ...
qualitative interviews for novice investigators by employing a step-by-step process for implementation. Key Words: Informal Conversational Interview, General Interview Guide, and Open-Ended Interviews. Qualitative research design can be complicated depending upon the level of experience a researcher may have with a particular type of methodology.
6. Qualitative Research and Interviews. So we've described doing a survey and collecting quantitative data. But not all questions can best be answered by a survey. A survey is great for understanding what people think (for example), but not why they think what they do. If your research is intending to understand the underlying motivations or ...
Conducting a Successful Qualitative Interview - Step by Step Guide. Knowing when to use a qualitative interview is a great first step, but now you need to understand how best to conduct one. Our experts share a range of steps to follow as you embark on a qualitative interview and best practices for each. 1. Determine Your Objective
It is the most widely used method in qualitative research. It is flexible, inexpensive, and does not inter-fere with the researcher's life the way that ethnography does. This chapter looks at qualitative interviewing and how it compares to other types of collect-ing evidence in research, particularly structured interviewing and ethnography.
Learni. g Objectives Qualitative InterviewsHello! I want to welcome everyone to th. presentation on qualitative interviewing. In this presentation, I will introduce you to qualitat. ve interviews as a data generation method. Interviewing is one of the most common methods of generating qualitativ. d outside scholarship.Learning Objective.
Introduction. In medical education research, the qualitative research interview is a viable and highly utilized data-collection tool (DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree Citation 2006; Jamshed Citation 2014).There are a range of interview formats, conducted with both individuals and groups, where semi-structured interviews are becoming increasingly prevalent in medical education research.
Here are some steps on how to analyze a qualitative interview: 1. Transcription. The first step is transcribing the interview into text format to have a written record of the conversation. This step is essential to ensure that you can refer back to the interview data and identify the important aspects of the interview.
InterViews by Steinar Kvale Interviewing is an essential tool in qualitative research and this introduction to interviewing outlines both the theoretical underpinnings and the practical aspects of the process. After examining the role of the interview in the research process, Steinar Kvale considers some of the key philosophical issues relating ...
A qualitative research interview is a one-to-one data collection session between a researcher and a participant. Interviews may be carried out face-to-face, over the phone or via video call using a service like Skype or Zoom. There are three main types of qualitative research interview - structured, unstructured or semi-structured.
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.