What Is an Interview?

Interviews are usually used for qualitative research. It is a method that implies asking questions to a person or group of people to find out the information needed for research.

Interviews can be structured and unstructured ones. Structured interviews include questions that have been composed in advance and preliminary well ordered, while unstructured interviews use random questions depending on the situation. There are also semi-structured interviews that are something in-between.

You can use interviews in ethnographic research, social science, and marketing.

Structured Interviews

The predetermined questions used in structured interviews are closed-ended. They are mostly ‘Yes/No’ or multiple-choice questions. They can be used for quantitative research. If you have a special pattern for the type and order of questions, you can easily process and analyze the responses. This can reduce biases and increase data validity. Though, these interviews are too formal and not flexible.

Such interviews can also provide qualitative information if you ask open-ended questions. In addition, these interviews are commonly used in job searching communication or when you do research in social sciences or marketing and use the survey methodology.

The main difference between these interviews and any other type is in the predetermined nature of the topic and questions. The other types of interviews include semi-structured, unstructured, and focus group interviews.

✔️ High degrees of validity and credibility due to their predetermined nature.	❌ Flexibility is limited because the questions cannot be changed or replaced.
✔️ Low bias because if you invent questions in advance, you reduce the influence of the context.	❌ Formality that does not allow for establishing rapport between the participants and an interviews.
✔️ Efficiency and cost-effectiveness because they cover more nuances of the topic without much preparation.	❌ The scope of answers is also limited because respondents cannot provide details.

How to Write Questions for Structured Interviews

There are several tips to facilitate your question-creation process:

• ✔️ Never use terms and jargon words, sophisticated structures, and compound sentences.
• ✔️ Make sure that you know exactly what kind of information you want to find out.
• ✔️ Make your questions clear and concise so people can quickly answer them.

For example:

• Do you think SEO specialists in content writing companies should communicate directly with copywriters?
• Have you ever communicated with SEO specialists directly in your previous projects?
• Does your current content writing company ensure your direct contacts with SEO specialists?
• How often do you communicate with SEO specialists in your present-day project?
  a) never
  b) once a month
  c) once a week
  d) several times per week
  e) every day
• Do you make use of such communication?

A Step-by-Step Guide on Structured Interviews

If you choose this interview format, follow these steps:

1. Set the goals and objectives related to your research question(s).
2. Think of the questions, formulate and order them, sticking to closed-ended ones.
3. Choose a convenient sampling method to assemble the participants. Voluntary response, convenience sampling, stratified sampling, and judgment sampling are the most widely used ones.
4. Decide on the interview format - in-person or pen-and-paper, via video conferencing, over the phone, or face-to-face. Ask them for written consent before you hold an interview.
5. Conduct the interview. Ask the questions in the order assigned before it. Be careful about your body language to avoid biased responses.
6. Analyze the structured interview. Assign a number or nickname to every participant.
7. Transcribe the recordings. You may need to add the transcriptions to the Appendix of your research work.
8. Make a thematic or content analysis. This procedure may involve coding patterns, words, or themes. You have to divide them into categories. Use descriptive statistics to organize and summarize the data. Use inferential statistics to make conclusions about the validity of your hypotheses.
9. Present the results. Include your ways of collecting data in the methodology section. Includes the results from the coded categories in the discussion and results sections.

Semi-Structured Interviews

This type of interview involves the features of both structured and unstructured formats. You need to have a preliminary plan of what you need to find out, though the questions do not have a particular order.

The questions are mostly open-ended, so they allow for more flexibility and informality. Though, you need to follow a specific thematic framework to make the interview consistent. Do not allow the questions to be completely different for the different samples. Otherwise, you will not be able to receive reliable results.

If you compare this type to other interviews, you will see that, unlike in an unstructured interview, you should clearly know what you want to ask. The difference with structured interviews is that you do not need to set the order of questions and their phrasing. However, you must be well-organized and use a certain system to identify the participants' responses. However, the answers you will obtain will be less structured, so you will need to use a complex data analysis system here.

✔️ No distractions, so you can keep on track and receive data that are fully comparable and reliable.	❌ High risk of bias may be apparent.
✔️ Best of both worlds, which means the combination of advantages inherent to both structured and unstructured interviews. They are flexible and provide greatly reliable and comparable data.	❌ Difficulty in developing consistent semi-structured questions because they can be both planned and spontaneous.
✔️ More detail is available because of the open-ended nature of its questions. The follow-up questions are also possible to clarify the answers.	❌ Validity is not high because of the flexibility. You can feel difficulty in comparing the responses if you depart from the predetermined list of questions or the interview framework.

How to Make Questions for Semi-Structured Interviews?

Though the questions here are open-ended, they should not provide biased answers. Look at the tips on how to avoid that:

• ✔️ Think beforehand about what areas you are going to focus on in your interview.
• ✔️ Write the framework of questions that can consider only the information you are looking for.
• ✔️ Create a guide for yourself on how you should behave during the interview to remain focused.
• ✔️ Start with simpler questions and then move on to more complicated ones after setting up a convenient rapport with a respondent.
• ✔️ Try to be straightforward, clear, and concise. Never use terms, jargons, or compound sentences.

For example:

• How often do you have lunch in a fast-food restaurant when at work?
  a) never
  b) once a week
  c) twice a week
  d) very often
  e) every day
• Do you like having lunch in these restaurants?
  If ‘Yes’: What do you feel when your lunch is over?
  If ‘No’: Where would you prefer to have your lunch instead?
• Have you ever worked for the company that provided you with lunch facilities?
  If ‘Yes’: How did they do it? Where did they do it? Did you have to pay extra for lunch?
• Do you believe that employers should provide their workers with lunch facilities? Why?

A Step-by-Step Guide on Semi-Structured Interviews

If you have chosen this format of the interview, follow these steps:

1. Think about the goals and objectives of this interview. Think about what you want to find out and what follow-up questions you are likely to ask.
2. Make up the questions. Compose them clearly and straightforwardly, remain concise, and be attentive to the word choice if the topic is sensitive. Think beforehand about when you will be able to ask your spontaneous or follow-up questions.
3. Collect your participants by using the same sampling methods that you may use for structured interviews - voluntary response, convenience, and stratified sampling.
4. Pick out the format of the interview. Choose between live and pen-and-paper. Consider video conferencing, phone calls, or in-person interviews.
5. Hold the interview. Be careful about your body language, tone of voice, and environment to avoid unnecessary biased responses.
6. Give each participant a nickname or number to facilitate the analysis.
7. Transcribe the recordings made in video or audio formats. Choose verbatim or intelligent verbatim transcriptions. The verbatim transcription is used when there are a lot of fillers and additional sounds like laughing, coughing, etc. If not, intelligent verbatim transcription is applicable. It fixes all the grammar issues and makes further analysis easier. You may have to add transcriptions to the appendix of your research work.
8. Code the answers dividing them into categories or labels. Use thematic analysis rather than content one. Identify common points of view and patterns. Give them a code. Organize the codes into themes.
9. Analyze the interviews using either an inductive or deductive approach. Be careful about the thematic analysis you make. It can lead to biased and unreliable results.
10. Present the results and report your findings in your paper in the methodology section, where you explain how you have collected the data and conceptualized the analysis. Use the discussion and results sections to explain each of the coded categories. Make the conclusion based on this analysis.

Unstructured Interviews

Unstructured interviews are immensely flexible. You do not have to set the order of the questions to ask. The interviews will go on spontaneously, and further questions will result from the previous answers. These interviews are open-ended. You can collect more detailed information on the topic of interest. However, be sure that you are not asking leading questions because you may get highly biased responses. So, your research will be invalidated.

You can do such interviews if the background of your research topic is solid enough and you have conducted such interviews before. Your research is exploratory, and you need descriptive data for it. So, you may want to establish deeper connections with participants to understand the basic patterns within the group.

You do not make questions and arrange them in a certain order in advance. These interviews are qualitative, and they are used in humanities and social science. You can collect truly interesting and unique responses from the participants. However, such interviewing may not fit your research format if you need more exact answers and statistical data. Moreover, you should remain extremely organized because you will deal with respondents’ feelings and emotions, so you should keep track of all responses.

✔️ Flexibility that reminds everyday conversations and creates an open environment with new ideas and topics to emerge.	❌ Reliability and possibilities of generalizing information are lower because it is challenging to compare the responses of all participants if the asked questions are different.
✔️ Such a chill atmosphere helps establish an increased positive rapport between an interviewer and interviewee.	❌ Lengthy interviews allow for smaller sizes of samples.
✔️ The risk of bias reduces because when the emotional bonds are established, the respondents do not feel that they should give expected, predetermined, or socially desirable answers. This is especially important when you speak about traumatic experiences or sensitive subjects.	❌ Appearance of leading questions that may bias responses.
✔️ More details come from the follow-up questions, so you will be able to learn a lot of nuances.	❌ Time consumption at both interviewing and analyzing stages may take a lot of time.
❌ Low internal validity because it is difficult to keep such interviews on track, and many side questions that do not relate to the topic may emerge.

How to Make Questions for Unstructured Interviews?

The questions should be composed in a way to prevent biased responses. They depend on the flow of the conversation and the spontaneous cues in answers.

You can make use of these tips to design this interview in a more consistent way:

• ✔️ Be sure you know all the details of your topic to ask questions spontaneously.
• ✔️ Make up a guide before the interview to focus on the questions you would like to ask and the information you need to obtain.
• ✔️ Do not ask closed-ended questions because you need to obtain the information in detail.
• ✔️ Give preference to ‘how’ questions instead of ‘why’ ones to allow your respondents to answer them easily.
• ✔️ Start your interview with icebreakers to create a relaxed and encouraging atmosphere.

For example:

Suppose you are studying the influence of healthy diets on the mental well-being of your respondents. Therefore, you have to ask them pretty challenging questions.

• Interviewer Do you prefer healthy food to fast food?
• Respondent: Not always. I try to eat healthy food, but I work hard and do not have time for cooking, so I have my meals at fast food restaurants close to my workplace.
• Interviewer: What do you feel when you need to break your rules and eat fast food?
• Respondent: I feel guilty because I cannot keep to my principles and ideas of what is right and what is wrong for me.

Here, the participant means that eating a healthy diet is important for their mental well-being, so you can proceed with the questions like:

• You say that you feel guilty. Can you explain it?
• If you have to eat lunch at a fast-food restaurant, what excuses do you make for yourself?
• Is there anything else that makes you feel the same way?

A Step-by-Step Guide on Unstructured Interviews

If you decide that an unstructured interview will work well for your research, you need to know how to do it step-by-step:

1. Define your goals and theoretical basis for hypotheses and research questions.
2. Use voluntary response, stratified, or convenience sampling to pick out the participants.
3. Think about the setting - opt for video conferencing, phone calls, or in-person interviews.
4. Conduct the interviews in a comfortable environment. Think about your tone of voice and body language to exclude biased responses.
5. Start the response analysis by assigning nicknames or numbers to every participant.
6. Transcribe the responses with verbatim or intelligent verbatim transcription methods depending on the fillers and additional noises in the recording.
7. Code the transcriptions for either thematic or content analysis. Give each of them labels or categories for thematic analysis.
8. Use either an inductive or deductive approach to the analysis.
9. Present the results in your research paper's methodology, discussion and results sections.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are formed to answer the interview questions about the topic of interest in a highly moderated setting. You can study the conversation dynamics and body language alongside the obtained information. The responses can be used for researching human behaviors and reactions, attitudes to consumer products and services, or rather controversial topics.

Focus groups can give detailed feedback, and they are much easier to set up than experiments or big surveys. Though, the external validity is lower because of the small size of such groups. There is always a risk of picking out only responses that fit your hypotheses.

How to Deal with the Focus Group Research?

Focus groups are a confirmatory research technique. They work well for explanatory research when the available information is limited. You can choose this technique if you want to receive unfiltered responses during the discussion of controversial topics. That is why you should follow the predetermined strategy to make the interview a success. This strategy may involve the following steps:

1. Choose the topic properly. It should be related to beliefs, thoughts, and feelings.
2. Make sure you have preliminarily defined the hypotheses you need to test and the scope of your research.
3. Develop the questions. They should be open-ended, clear, and unbiased.
4. Choose a moderator or co-moderator. It is better if there are several moderators in the room where the discussion is taking place.
5. Pick out the participants using voluntary response, stratified, judgment, or convenience sampling. The number of participants in the focus group should not exceed 6-10 people to get more reliable responses.
6. Organize your focus group. Confirm the date, time and format of the discussion (in-person or online). Consider their consent and ethical considerations. Ask the future participant to learn something additional about the topic of discussion.
7. Welcome the focus group and host the people. Check the environment and technical factors before the participants arrive. Introduce yourself, the topic, and co-moderators. Explain the rules of discussion. Start with an icebreaker. Keep the response time convenient for answering your questions. Remain neutral and avoid leading questions. Offer monetary incentives if possible.
8. Analyze the data and report the results. Debrief the results with your co-moderator after the discussion. Transcribe and clean the data. Conduct the content analysis by categories assigned to each participant. Explain the method and feature the results in your research paper.

✔️ Focus groups are easy to organize.	❌ Truly representative samples are difficult to collect, so focus groups are not externally valid.
✔️ The results can have established face validity.	❌ The sample size is small, so you cannot guarantee anonymity to its participants, which may influence the answers.
✔️ The technique is mostly inexpensive.	❌ It is difficult to obtain completely honest responses to controversial questions.
✔️ It is less time-consuming than experiments or surveys.	❌ You can make mistakes in data analysis because of picking out only favorable responses.
✔️ The results are easier to comprehend and analyze.

Final Thoughts

Now, you know how to conduct structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews and organize focus groups. You need to think carefully about the suitability of each method to your research aims and objectives.

Consider all the pros and cons of every technique and compose the questions appropriate for the layout of every type of interview. Be careful about analyzing the results to avoid bias.

You can come back to this article if you need useful tips and prompts within the research process, and you will always be on the safe side.