qualitative research interview guide template

Qualitative Research 101: Interviewing

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.

Overview: 5 Interviewing Mistakes

• Not having a clear interview strategy /plan
• Not having good interview techniques /skills
• Not securing a suitable location and equipment
• Not having a basic risk management plan
• Not keeping your “ golden thread ” front of mind

1. Not having a clear interview strategy

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:

• What are the guiding research aims and research questions of my study?
• Will I use a structured, semi-structured or unstructured interview approach?
• How will I record the interviews (audio or video)?
• Who will be interviewed and by whom ?
• What ethics and data law considerations do I need to adhere to?
• How will I analyze my data? 

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.

2. Not having good interview technique

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.

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3. Not securing a suitable location and quality equipment

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.

4. Not having a basic risk management plan

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.

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 . 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 .

Recap: Qualitative Interview Mistakes

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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How to conduct qualitative interviews (tips and best practices)

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.

• What is a qualitative interview?

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.

• How to conduct interviews in qualitative research

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:

1. Before the interview

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.

2. During the interview

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.

3. After the interview

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.

• What kinds of questions should you ask in a qualitative interview?

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. 

• How to determine the right qualitative interview participants

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.

• How to make qualitative interview subjects comfortable

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:

Explain the purpose of the study

Start the interview by explaining the research topic and its importance. The goal is to give participants a sense of what to expect.

Create a comfortable environment

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.

Build rapport

Greet the participant warmly and introduce yourself. Show interest in their responses and thank them for their time.

Use open-ended questions

Ask questions that encourage participants to elaborate on their thoughts and experiences.

Listen attentively

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.

Avoid judgment

Show respect and don't judge the participant's views or experiences. Allow the participant to speak freely without feeling judged or ridiculed.

Offer breaks

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.

• How to analyze a qualitative interview

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:

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.

2. Data reduction

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.

4. Categorization

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.

5. Interpretation

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 .

6. Comparison

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.

7. Triangulation

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.

8. Synthesis

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.

• Tips for transcribing a qualitative interview

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:

Use transcription software

Transcription software can save time and increase accuracy by automatically transcribing audio or video recordings.

Listen carefully

When manually transcribing, listen carefully to the recording to ensure clarity. Pause and rewind the recording as necessary.

Use appropriate formatting

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 for clarity

Edit the transcription to ensure clarity and readability. Use standard grammar and punctuation, correct misspellings, and remove filler words like "um" and "ah."

Proofread and edit

Verify the accuracy of the transcription by listening to the recording again and reviewing the notes taken during the interview.

Use timestamps

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.

• Why are interview techniques in qualitative research effective?

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.

• What are the weaknesses of qualitative interviews?

Qualitative interviews are an excellent research approach when used properly, but they have their drawbacks. 

The weaknesses of qualitative interviews include the following:

Subjectivity and personal biases

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.

Small sample size

The sample size in qualitative interviews is often small, which can limit the generalizability of the results to the larger population.

Data quality

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.

Socially desirable responses

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.

Time-consuming

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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9.2 Qualitative interviews

Learning objectives.

• Define interviews from the social scientific perspective
• Identify when it is appropriate to employ interviews as a data-collection strategy
• Identify the primary aim of in-depth interviews
• Describe what makes qualitative interview techniques unique
• Define the term interview guide and describe how to construct an interview guide
• Outline the guidelines for constructing good qualitative interview questions
• Describe how writing field notes and journaling function in qualitative research
• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of interviews

Knowing how to create and conduct a good interview is an essential skill. Interviews are used by market researchers to learn how to sell their products, and journalists use interviews to get information from a whole host of people from VIPs to random people on the street. Police use interviews to investigate crimes.

In social science,  interviews are a method of data collection that involves two or more people exchanging information through a series of questions and answers. The questions are designed by the researcher to elicit information from interview participants on a specific topic or set of topics. These topics are informed by the research questions. Typically, interviews involve an in-person meeting between two people—an interviewer and an interviewee — but interviews need not be limited to two people, nor must they occur in-person.

The question of when to conduct an interview might be on your mind. Interviews are an excellent way to gather detailed information. They also have an advantage over surveys—they can change as you learn more information. In a survey, you cannot change what questions you ask if a participant’s response sparks some follow-up question in your mind. All participants must get the same questions. The questions you decided to put on your survey during the design stage determine what data you get. In an interview, however, you can follow up on new and unexpected topics that emerge during the conversation. Trusting in emergence and learning from participants are hallmarks of qualitative research. In this way, interviews are a useful method to use when you want to know the story behind the responses you might receive in a written survey.

Interviews are also useful when the topic you are studying is rather complex, requires lengthy explanation, or needs a dialogue between two people to thoroughly investigate. Also, if people will describe the process by which a phenomenon occurs, like how a person makes a decision, then interviews may be the best method for you. For example, you could use interviews to gather data about how people reach the decision not to have children and how others in their lives have responded to that decision. To understand these “how’s” you would need to have some back-and-forth dialogue with respondents. When they begin to tell you their story, inevitably new questions that hadn’t occurred to you from prior interviews would come up because each person’s story is unique. Also, because the process of choosing not to have children is complex for many people, describing that process by responding to closed-ended questions on a survey wouldn’t work particularly well.

Interview research is especially useful when:

• You wish to gather very detailed information
• You anticipate wanting to ask respondents follow-up questions based on their responses
• You plan to ask questions that require lengthy explanation
• You are studying a complex or potentially confusing topic to respondents
• You are studying processes, such as how people make decisions

Qualitative interviews are sometimes called intensive or in-depth interviews. These interviews are semi-structured ; the researcher has a particular topic about which she would like to hear from the respondent, but questions are open-ended and may not be asked in exactly the same way or in exactly the same order to each and every respondent. For in-depth interviews , the primary aim is to hear from respondents about what they think is important about the topic at hand and to hear it in their own words. In this section, we’ll take a look at how to conduct qualitative interviews, analyze interview data, and identify some of the strengths and weaknesses of this method.

Constructing an interview guide

Qualitative interviews might feel more like a conversation than an interview to respondents, but the researcher is in fact usually guiding the conversation with the goal in mind of gathering specific information from a respondent. Qualitative interviews use open-ended questions, which are questions that a researcher poses but does not provide answer options for. Open-ended questions are more demanding of participants than closed-ended questions because they require participants to come up with their own words, phrases, or sentences to respond.

In a qualitative interview, the researcher usually develops an interview guide in advance to refer to during the interview (or memorizes in advance of the interview). An interview guide is a list of questions or topics that the interviewer hopes to cover during the course of an interview. It is called a guide because it is simply that—it is used to guide the interviewer, but it is not set in stone. Think of an interview guide like an agenda for the day or a to-do list—both probably contain all the items you hope to check off or accomplish, though it probably won’t be the end of the world if you don’t accomplish everything on the list or if you don’t accomplish it in the exact order that you have it written down. Perhaps new events will come up that cause you to rearrange your schedule just a bit, or perhaps you simply won’t get to everything on the list.

Interview guides should outline issues that a researcher feels are likely to be important. Because participants are asked to provide answers in their own words and to raise points they believe are important, each interview is likely to flow a little differently. While the opening question in an in-depth interview may be the same across all interviews, from that point on, what the participant says will shape how the interview proceeds. Sometimes participants answer a question on the interview guide before it is asked. When the interviewer comes to that question later on in the interview, it’s a good idea to acknowledge that they already addressed part of this question and ask them if they have anything to add to their response.  All of this uncertainty can make in-depth interviewing exciting and rather challenging. It takes a skilled interviewer to be able to ask questions; listen to respondents; and pick up on cues about when to follow up, when to move on, and when to simply let the participant speak without guidance or interruption.

As we’ve discussed, interview guides can list topics or questions. The specific format of an interview guide might depend on your style, experience, and comfort level as an interviewer or with your topic. Figure 9.1 provides an example of an interview guide for a study of how young people experience workplace sexual harassment. The guide is topic-based, rather than a list of specific questions. The ordering of the topics is important, though how each comes up during the interview may vary.

For interview guides that use questions, there can also be specific words or phrases for follow-up in case the participant does not mention those topics in their responses. These probes , as well as the questions are written out in the interview guide, but may not always be used. Figure 9.2 provides an example of an interview guide that uses 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. As you can see in both of the preceding guides, the topics and questions have been organized thematically and in the order in which they are likely to proceed (though keep in mind that the flow of a qualitative interview is in part determined by what a respondent has to say). Sometimes qualitative interviewers may create two versions of the interview guide: one version contains a very brief outline of the interview, perhaps with just topic headings, and another version contains detailed questions underneath each topic heading. In this case, the researcher might use the very detailed guide to prepare and practice in advance of actually conducting interviews and then just bring the brief outline to the interview. Bringing an outline, as opposed to a very long list of detailed questions, to an interview encourages the researcher to actually listen to what a participant is saying. An overly detailed interview guide can be difficult to navigate during an interview and could give respondents the mis-impression the interviewer is more interested in the questions than in the participant’s answers.

Constructing an interview guide often begins with brainstorming. There are no rules at the brainstorming stage—simply list all the topics and questions that come to mind when you think about your research question. Once you’ve got a pretty good list, you can begin to pare it down by cutting questions and topics that seem redundant and group similar questions and topics together. If you haven’t done so yet, you may also want to come up with question and topic headings for your grouped categories. You should also consult the scholarly literature to find out what kinds of questions other interviewers have asked in studies of similar topics and what theory indicates might be important. As with quantitative survey research, it is best not to place very sensitive or potentially controversial questions at the very beginning of your qualitative interview guide. You need to give participants the opportunity to warm up to the interview and to feel comfortable talking with you. Finally, get some feedback on your interview guide. Ask your friends, other researchers, and your professors for some guidance and suggestions once you’ve come up with what you think is a strong guide. Chances are they’ll catch a few things you hadn’t noticed. Once you begin your interviews, your participants may also suggest revisions or improvements.

In terms of the specific questions you include in your guide, there are a few guidelines worth noting. First, avoid questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no. Try to rephrase your questions in a way that invites longer responses from your interviewees. If you choose to include yes or no questions, be sure to include follow-up questions. Remember, one of the benefits of qualitative interviews is that you can ask participants for more information—be sure to do so. While it is a good idea to ask follow-up questions, try to avoid asking “why” as your follow-up question, as this particular question can come off as confrontational, even if that is not your intent. Often people won’t know how to respond to “why,” perhaps because they don’t even know why themselves. Instead of asking “why,” you say something like, “Could you tell me a little more about that?” This allows participants to explain themselves further without feeling that they’re being doubted or questioned in a hostile way.

Also, try to avoid phrasing your questions in a leading way. For example, rather than asking, “Don’t you think most people who don’t want to have children are selfish?” you could ask, “What comes to mind for you when you hear someone doesn’t want to have children?” Finally, remember to keep most, if not all, of your questions open-ended. The key to a successful qualitative interview is giving participants the opportunity to share information in their own words and in their own way. Documenting the decisions made along the way regarding which questions are used, thrown out, or revised can help a researcher remember the thought process behind the interview guide when she is analyzing the data. Additionally, it promotes the rigor of the qualitative project as a whole, ensuring the researcher is proceeding in a reflective and deliberate manner that can be checked by others reviewing her study.

Recording qualitative data

Even after the interview guide is constructed, the interviewer is not yet ready to begin conducting interviews. The researcher has to decide how to collect and maintain the information that is provided by participants. Researchers keep field notes or written recordings produced by the researcher during the data collection process.  Field notes can be taken before, during, or after interviews. Field notes help researchers document what they observe, and in so doing, they form the first step of data analysis. Field notes may contain many things—observations of body language or environment, reflections on whether interview questions are working well, and connections between ideas that participants share.

Unfortunately, even the most diligent researcher cannot write down everything that is seen or heard during an interview. In particular, it is difficult for a researcher to be truly present and observant if she is also writing down everything the participant is saying. For this reason, it is quite common for interviewers to create audio recordings of the interviews they conduct. Recording interviews allows the researcher to focus on the interaction with the interview participant.

Of course, not all participants will feel comfortable being recorded and sometimes even the interviewer may feel that the subject is so sensitive that recording would be inappropriate. If this is the case, it is up to the researcher to balance excellent note-taking with exceptional question-asking and even better listening.

Whether you will be recording your interviews or not (and especially if not), practicing the interview in advance is crucial. Ideally, you’ll find a friend or two willing to participate in a couple of trial runs with you. Even better, find a friend or two who are similar in at least some ways to your sample. They can give you the best feedback on your questions and your interview demeanor.

Another issue interviewers face is documenting the decisions made during the data collection process. Qualitative research is open to new ideas that emerge through the data collection process. For example, a participant might suggest a new concept you hadn’t thought of before or define a concept in a new way. This may lead you to create new questions or ask questions in a different way to future participants. These processes should be documented in a process called journaling or memoing. Journal entries are notes to yourself about reflections or methodological decisions that emerge during the data collection process. Documenting these are important, as you’d be surprised how quickly you can forget what happened. Journaling makes sure that when it comes time to analyze your data, you remember how, when, and why certain changes were made. The discipline of journaling in qualitative research helps to ensure the rigor of the research process—that is its trustworthiness and authenticity which we will discuss later in this chapter.

Strengths and weaknesses of qualitative interviews

As we’ve mentioned in this section, qualitative interviews are an excellent way to gather detailed information. Any topic can be explored in much more depth with interviews than with almost any other method. Not only are participants given the opportunity to elaborate in a way that is not possible with other methods such as survey research, but they also are able share information with researchers in their own words and from their own perspectives. Whereas, quantitative research asks participants to fit their perspectives into the limited response options provided by the researcher. And because qualitative interviews are designed to elicit detailed information, they are especially useful when a researcher’s aim is to study social processes or the “how” of various phenomena. Yet another, and sometimes overlooked, benefit of in-person qualitative interviews is that researchers can make observations beyond those that a respondent is orally reporting. A respondent’s body language, and even their choice of time and location for the interview, might provide a researcher with useful data.

Of course, all these benefits come with some drawbacks. As with quantitative survey research, qualitative interviews rely on respondents’ ability to accurately and honestly recall specific details about their lives, circumstances, thoughts, opinions, or behaviors. Further, as you may have already guessed, qualitative interviewing is time-intensive and can be quite expensive. Creating an interview guide, identifying a sample, and conducting interviews are just the beginning. Writing out what was said in interviews and analyzing the qualitative interview data are time consuming processes. Keep in mind you are also asking for more of participants’ time than if you’d simply mailed them a questionnaire containing closed-ended questions. Conducting qualitative interviews is not only labor-intensive but can also be emotionally taxing. Seeing and hearing the impact that social problems have on respondents is difficult. Researchers embarking on a qualitative interview project should keep in mind their own abilities to receive stories that may be difficult to hear.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding how to design and conduct interview research is a useful skill to have.
• In a social scientific interview, two or more people exchange information through a series of questions and answers.
• Interview research is often used when detailed information is required and when a researcher wishes to examine processes.
• In-depth interviews are semi-structured interviews where the researcher has topics and questions in mind to ask, but questions are open-ended and flow according to how the participant responds to each.
• Interview guides can vary in format but should contain some outline of the topics you hope to cover during the course of an interview.
• Qualitative interviews allow respondents to share information in their own words and are useful for gathering detailed information and understanding social processes.
• Field notes and journaling are ways to document thoughts and decisions about the research process
• Drawbacks of qualitative interviews include reliance on respondents’ accuracy and their intensity in terms of time, expense, and possible emotional strain.
• Field notes- written notes produced by the researcher during the data collection process
• In-depth interviews- interviews in which researchers hear from respondents about what they think is important about the topic at hand in the respondent’s own words
• Interviews- a method of data collection that involves two or more people exchanging information through a series of questions and answers
• Interview guide- a list of questions or topics that the interviewer hopes to cover during the course of an interview
• Journaling- making notes of emerging issues and changes during the research process
• Semi-structured interviews- questions are open ended and may not be asked in exactly the same way or in exactly the same order to each and every respondent

Image attributions

interview restaurant a pair by alda2 CC-0

questions by geralt CC-0

Figure 9.1 is copied from Blackstone, A. (2012) Principles of sociological inquiry: Qualitative and quantitative methods. Saylor Foundation. Retrieved from: https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_principles-of-sociological-inquiry-qualitative-and-quantitative-methods/ Shared under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 License

writing by StockSnap CC-0

Foundations of Social Work Research Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca L. Mauldin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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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?

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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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Introduction to Research Methods

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.

6.1 Interviews

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.

6.2 Asking good Questions

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.

6.3 Analyzing Interview Data

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.

6.4 Using interview data

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.

6.5 Ensuring Anonymity

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.

6.6 Why not both?

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.

6.7 Summary

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

• Development

Interview Guide For Qualitative Research

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Here are some of the advantages of qualitative research.

• It can identify the changing attitude within a group.
• It records and analyzes the behaviors and feelings of the respondents.
• It is a more flexible approach and can be modified and adapt to changes at any stage.
• It is useful in the early stages of the research when the writer is unsure what to study.
• It does not require a strict design that allows the work to unfold naturally.
• It helps to get detailed data in the form of written descriptions and strong evidence.
• It focuses on the real context of the literature.
• It allows people to expand their choices and opinions on a topic.
• It strengthens the idea of teamwork and collaboration among the respondents.
• The pattern of interviews and discussion helps in bringing together the respondents.
• The information can also be taken non verbally by participant observation.

How To Create An Interview Guide

If your research involves gathering data by interviewing people, you will probably need to create an interview guide. An interview guide contains a list of questions you want to cover during your interview. It is meant to keep you on track and ensures that you cover all the topics needed to answer your research question.

Interview guides are very common in semi-structured interviews. They need to be designed in a way that gives your interviewees enough space to tell their stories and provide you with meaningful data. Therefore, you should include open-ended questions that allow for your conversation to flow freely. Free flowing conversation can help you uncover topics you were not aware of previously . An interview guide acts as an unobtrusive road map you can turn to during the interview to yourself back on course. A good interview guide provides you with prompts and a general direction.

As your research progresses, you can update your interview guide to include new questions. Often, an initial interview guide can be used for the first few interviews, after which a few tweaks can be made to allow you to dive deeper into the topic by using a revised guide. A revised guide should not be perceived as a stumbling block. On the contrary, creating a revised interview guide can be a sign of a good research process it shows you are letting the research material guide you .

Here are some useful strategies when you create an interview guide:

Structure of an Interview Guide

Qualitative Research Interview Guide Template

Qualitative Research Interview Guide Template . An interview is a qualitative research method that relies on asking questions in order to collect data. Types of interviews in research | guide & examples.

Interviews in qualitative research generally follow three primary formats: Pilot interviews of the kind used in survey interviewing can be useful here. The data will be analyzed using quantitative and qualitative research design.

The data will be analyzed using quantitative and qualitative research design. Think of pattons 6 types of questions related to:

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Not Securing A Suitable Location And Quality Equipment

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, youll need a location that is quiet, safe, and welcoming . Its very important that your location of choice is not prone to interruptions and has suitable facilities .

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 its accessible . Its also good to have alternatives in place 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.

Qualitative Research And Interviews

So weve 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 , 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 .

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Keep A Mixture Of Behavioral & Attitudinal Questions

People frequently have beliefs that contradict the way they behave. Combining attitudinal and behavioral questions will help you learn what a person does and their thoughts on their actions.

To better grasp their beliefs and motives, ask them attitude-based questions. Behavioral questions are used to learn more about a participants behavior.

Attitudinal: How often do you go shopping?

Behavioral: How many times did you go shopping last week?

What Is A Semi

Semi-structured interviews are a blend of structured and unstructured interviews. While the interviewer has a general plan for what they want to ask, the questions do not have to follow a particular phrasing or order.

Semi-structured interviews are often open-ended, allowing for flexibility, but follow a predetermined thematic framework, giving a sense of order. For this reason, they are often considered the best of both worlds.

However, if the questions differ substantially between participants, it can be challenging to look for patterns, lessening the generalizability and validity of your results.

• You have prior interview experience. Its easier than you think to accidentally ask a leading question when coming up with questions on the fly. Overall, spontaneous questions are much more difficult than they may seem.
• Your research question is exploratory in nature. The answers you receive can help guide your future research.

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What Is A Structured Interview

Structured interviews have predetermined questions in a set order. They are often closed-ended, featuring dichotomous or multiple-choice questions. While open-ended structured interviews exist, they are much less common. The types of questions asked make structured interviews a predominantly quantitative tool.

Asking set questions in a set order can help you see patterns among responses, and it allows you to easily compare responses between participants while keeping other factors constant. This can mitigate research biases and lead to higher reliability and validity. However, structured interviews can be overly formal, as well as limited in scope and flexibility.

• You feel very comfortable with your topic. This will help you formulate your questions most effectively.
• You have limited time or resources. Structured interviews are a bit more straightforward to analyze because of their closed-ended nature, and can be a doable undertaking for an individual.
• Your research question depends on holding environmental conditions between participants constant.

Planning And Developing The Semi

To plan and develop a semi-structured interview, follow these steps:

Determine the goals or research focus of your semi-structured interview. Why are you doing this study? General goals of semi-structured interviews can include the following:

Exploring a particular topic, problem, or issue

Understanding how a process or function works

Understanding how particular groups in an organization work together

Determining what is efficient and inefficient about particular workflows

Gathering background material for creating personas, task models, or other artifacts

Testing ideas or hypotheses from other sources

Confirming results from other methods.

Develop your interview guide with the general questions and basic script for the interview . Table 2.2 is an outline of a sample interview guide. Following are some basic guidelines for developing questions for the interview guide:

Avoid the tendency to add interesting questions that do not relate to a research goal. Ensure that each question is relevant to the goals or hypotheses of your project. It should be possible to connect each question to a clear business or research goal. If you cant connect a question to a clear goal, then delete it.

Use language that is appropriate for your participants.

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Characteristics Of Qualitative Research

The following are the main characteristics of qualitative research.

• The real-world setting is the first important characteristic. It involves various qualitative research methods to study the behavior of participants.
• Researchers play an essential role in choosing a method and making a plan for conducting research.
• All qualitative methods have their significance and are used for different scenarios.
• Qualitative research questions are beneficial for complex reasoning to get the right results.
• It is also used to explain the outcome of quantitative research methods.
• The role of participants is essential as it brings meaning to the study.
• Qualitative research is flexible and can be changed at any stage of the research work.
• It also describes the research problem by developing a complex cause and effect relationship between the variables.
• Data analysis is an ongoing process in qualitative research methods.
• Participants are selected from a particular and relevant group.

What Is A Focus Group

A focus group brings together a group of participants to answer questions on a topic of interest in a moderated setting. Focus groups are qualitative in nature and often study the groups dynamic and body language in addition to their answers. Responses can guide future research on consumer products and services, human behavior, or controversial topics.

Focus groups can provide more nuanced and unfiltered feedback than individual interviews and are easier to organize than experiments or large surveys . However, their small size leads to low external validity and the temptation as a researcher to cherry-pick responses that fit your hypotheses.

• Your research focuses on the dynamics of group discussion or real-time responses to your topic.
• Your questions are complex and rooted in feelings, opinions, and perceptions that cannot be answered with a yes or no.
• Your topic is exploratory in nature, and you are seeking information that will help you uncover new questions or future research ideas.

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Get Reliable Transcription Services For Qualitative Research Interviews

As mentioned, you should transcribe qualitative research interviews as soon as possible. There are several reasons for this.

• You can gain insights that help you shape your interview guide. You might identify questions to add or questions to clarify.
• Your interview participants may not be appropriate for this type of qualitative research. Finding more targeted interview subjects may be better.
• Answers may evolve the qualitative research goal and/or data analysis.

At Rev, we understand the need for fast transcription for accurate market research. We provide a turnaround time of as few as 12 hours, no matter how big your project is. We guarantee 99%+ accuracy. Learn about Revs . We can help make your qualitative research project a success.

Not Having A Clear Interview Strategy

The first common mistake that well look at is that of starting the interviewing process without having first come up with a clear interview strategy or plan of action. While its 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:

• What are the guiding research aims and research questions of my study?
• Will I use a structured, semi-structured or unstructured interview approach?
• How will I record the interviews ?
• Who will be interviewed and by whom ?
• What ethics and data law considerations do I need to adhere to?
• How will I analyze my data?

Lets 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 . This means that you need to carefully consider the questions youll ask to ensure that they align with and feed into your golden thread. If any question doesnt align with this, you may want to consider scrapping it.

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Constructing An Interview Guide

Qualitative interviews might feel more like a conversation than an interview to respondents, but the researcher is in fact usually guiding the conversation with the goal in mind of gathering specific information from a respondent. Qualitative interviews use open-ended questions, which are questions that a researcher poses but does not provide answer options for. Open-ended questions are more demanding of participants than closed-ended questions because they require participants to come up with their own words, phrases, or sentences to respond.

In a qualitative interview, the researcher usually develops an interview guide in advance to refer to during the interview . An interview guide is a list of questions or topics that the interviewer hopes to cover during the course of an interview. It is called a guide because it is simply thatit is used to guide the interviewer, but it is not set in stone. Think of an interview guide like an agenda for the day or a to-do listboth probably contain all the items you hope to check off or accomplish, though it probably wont be the end of the world if you dont accomplish everything on the list or if you dont accomplish it in the exact order that you have it written down. Perhaps new events will come up that cause you to rearrange your schedule just a bit, or perhaps you simply wont get to everything on the list.

Examples Of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research helps researchers understand the social reality of individuals, groups and cultures. Qualitative research for businesses involves understanding consumer behavior. It can involve ethnographic techniques, including participant observation and field research. It also includes phenomenology, understanding life experiences using written or recorded narratives. Qualitative research also includes in-depth interviews.

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Conducting Rapid Qualitative Interview Research During The Covid

• 1Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
• 2Department of Family Medicine and Population Health, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
• 3National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance, Oxford, United Kingdom

Qualitative Interview: Everything You Need To Know

Beth Worthy

Whether youre conducting product, consumer, or general market research, you probably rely on interviews a lot to get as much information as possible. Well, a qualitative interview is one of the most useful tools at your disposal in a typical market study. However, interviewing is as much an art as it is a science, and its important that you manage both aspects effectively to get the best-desired outcome.

A qualitative interview enables you to get the most out of your respondent if you structure it properly and know how to analyze the responses you receive. According to The Hartford , qualitative research offers anecdotal insight into your company. This is an important type of data, and hence, you should know how to make the best use of it.

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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

What are you trying to understand? The answer to this is critical in guiding your qualitative research process.

Some common examples:

• Test the usability of a website or digital service
• Emotional reactions to packaging design and marketing assets

2. Understand Your Audience

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:

• If you want to understand how existing customers perceive the quality of your products, you need a sample of existing customers.
• If you want to understand why consumers choose competitor products over yours, you need a sample of non-customers who buy products from your primary competitor.
• If you want to understand how the average person perceives your brand, you need a combination of existing customers, non-customers with awareness of your brand, and unaware non-customers.

3. Design Appropriate Questions

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:

4. Organize and Prepare for the Interview

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How to Write a Research Methodology for a Research Paper

There are various methods for conducting scientific research. The two broad approaches to data collection include qualitative and quantitative research methods. 

However, it is not easy to decide which one to choose while writing a research paper .

If you know the basic difference between both methods, you will produce a well-written and structured paper. 

In this blog, we have explored what is qualitative research, its nature, purpose, and methods of data collection. By reading this, students can gain a good understanding of qualitative research, enhancing their ability to conduct in-depth studies. 

So keep reading!

• 1. What is Qualitative Research - Definition
• 2. Qualitative Research Methods
• 3. Types of Qualitative Research
• 4. Steps in Conducting Qualitative Research
• 5. Qualitative Research vs Quantitative Research
• 6. Qualitative Research Topics
• 7. Qualitative Research Examples

What is Qualitative Research - Definition

Qualitative research is a research methodology that aims to explore and understand the complexities of human behavior, emotions, and experiences through non-numerical data.

Unlike quantitative research, which deals in numbers and statistics, qualitative research is all about revealing the stories, and perspectives that make us uniquely human.

Let's dive deeper and discover why it's a powerful tool in the researcher's arsenal.

Purpose of Qualitative Research Design

Qualitative research simplifies the understanding of complex human behavior and experiences. Its purpose is to:

• Explore Complex Phenomena: Qualitative research allows us to delve deep into intricate human experiences and behaviors.
• Understand Motivations: It helps uncover the 'whys' behind actions, shedding light on underlying motivations.
• Capture Richness: By collecting narratives and stories, qualitative research captures the richness of human life.
• Generate Hypotheses: It often serves as a foundation for hypothesis generation in further quantitative studies.
• Inform Decision-Making: Qualitative findings guide decisions in fields like psychology, sociology, and market research.
• Contextualize Quantitative Data: It provides context to quantitative data, explaining the 'how' and 'why' behind the numbers.

Characteristics of Qualitative Research

The following are the main characteristics of qualitative research.

• The real-world setting is the first important characteristic. It involves various qualitative research methods to study the behavior of participants.
• Researchers play an essential role in choosing a method and making a plan for conducting research.
• All qualitative approaches have their significance and are used for different scenarios.
• Qualitative research questions are beneficial for complex reasoning to get the right results.
• It is also used to explain the outcome of quantitative research methods.
• The role of participants is essential as it brings meaning to the study.
• Qualitative research is flexible and can be changed at any stage of the research work.
• It also describes the research problem by developing a complex cause-and-effect relationship between the variables. 
• Data analysis in qualitative research is an ongoing process.
• Conclusions can be drawn based on the outcomes of the research process.
• Participants are selected from a particular and relevant group.

Qualitative Research Methods

A detailed description of the major qualitative approaches to collecting data is given below.

In-depth Interview

In-depth interviews involve one-on-one conversations to gather detailed information about a specific topic. This method allows researchers to explore participants' motivations, inspirations, and body language.

Interviews can be conducted face-to-face, via email, or over the phone for flexibility.

Focus Groups

Focus groups consist of small group discussions (5-15 participants) on specific topics, ideal for 'what,' 'why,' and 'how' questions about society and the environment. They can be conducted in-person or online, offering versatility in data collection.

Direct Observation

Direct observation collects subjective data through the five senses without interference. It focuses on characteristics, not measurements, often in public settings where privacy isn't a concern.

Open-Ended Surveys

Open-ended surveys use structured or unstructured questions to collect information on respondents' opinions and beliefs, providing insights into their perspectives.

Participant Observation

Participant observation involves researchers actively participating in events while observing people in natural settings, offering firsthand experience and insights.

Literature Review

The literature review method interprets words and images from published works to analyze social life. It examines word usage in context to draw inferences and identify meanings.

Types of Qualitative Research

The following is a comprehensive overview of the types of qualitative research methods.

The case study research method has now become the most valuable method of conducting research. It has evolved in recent years and is used to explain an entity in detail.

Moreover, it also involves a thorough understanding of different types of data sources. These include interviews, documents, reports, and observations.  Mainly, this research type is used in different areas like education, social sciences, etc.

Ethnographic Research

The ethnographic research method is the most familiar and in-depth observational method. It focuses on people and their behaviors in the natural environment.

Here, a researcher needs to adapt to the environment and society of the target audience to conduct better research. It helps to get a first-hand experience of the natural setting, including the customs, traditions, and culture of the subjects.

This type of research is a challenging and time-consuming process as it can last from days to years. However, geographical constraints can be an issue while collecting data.

Grounded Theory

While other methods discuss and focus on an event or activity. The grounded theory method deeply looks into the explanation and the main theory behind the event.

It requires the researcher to observe the interviews and documents to build a theory. Moreover, it usually starts with a question or collection of data.  However, the sample sizes in this method are usually larger than in other methods. 

Phenomenological Method

This type is used in the description of an event, phenomenon, and activity. Here, methods like interviews, reading documents, visiting places, and watching videos are used.

This will help to add new insights to the existing data analysis by checking its reliability and validity.

Check out the video to learn more about the phenomenological method of qualitative research!

Narrative Method 

The narrative method is used to gather data from subjects through interviews or documents. Later, the gathered information is used to derive answers and suggestions for future research. 

Historical Method

The historical method involves the examination of past events to draw conclusions and predictions about the future. The steps included in the method are formulating a plan, gathering data, and analyzing the sources. 

Steps in Conducting Qualitative Research

Conducting qualitative research is a systematic process that involves several key steps to ensure the collection of meaningful data.

Here's a chronological guide to conducting qualitative research:

Step 1: Define Research Objectives

Begin by clearly defining the research objectives and questions. What do you want to learn, explore, or understand through your qualitative research? This step sets the direction for your study.

Step 2: Select a Research Design

Choose an appropriate research design based on your objectives. Common designs include case studies, ethnography, grounded theory, or phenomenology. The design informs your data collection and analysis methods.

Step 3: Sampling Methods

Decide on your sampling strategy. Will you use purposive sampling to select specific participants who are most relevant to your research question? Or will you employ snowball sampling to find participants through referrals?

Step 4: Data Collection Techniques

Determine the data collection techniques that align with your research design. Depending on your approach, this may involve conducting in-depth interviews, facilitating focus groups, observing participants, or analyzing existing documents and content.

Step 5: Plan Interviews and Questions

If conducting interviews, create interview guides with open-ended questions. These questions should allow participants to share their thoughts, experiences, and perspectives freely. Ensure that questions are related to your research objectives.

Step 6: Conducting Data Collection

Collect data according to your chosen methods. For interviews, arrange and conduct interviews with participants, ensuring a comfortable and open environment. If using other techniques, follow the procedures outlined in your research design.

Step 7: Data Recording and Management

Record data meticulously. This may involve audio or video recordings, note-taking, or transcribing interviews. Organize and store data securely to maintain confidentiality.

Step 8: Data Analysis

Qualitative data can be in the form of interviews, transcripts, surveys, videos, audio, etc. The steps involved in qualitative data analysis are given below.   

• Organize the Data: This can be done by transcribing interviews or making detailed notes.
• Review the Data: Examine the data, ideas, and patterns.
• Establish a Data Coding System: Generate a set of codes that you can apply to classify your data.
• Assign Codes to the Data: For qualitative survey analysis, create codes, and add them to your system.
• Identify Themes: Link the codes together into cohesive themes.

Similarly, the following are different approaches to analyzing qualitative data. 

• Content Analysis – It is used to categorize common words and ideas.
• Thematic Analysis – thematic analysis in qualitative research is used to identify and interpret different themes and patterns.
• Textual Analysis – This type of analysis is used to examine the structure, content, and design of text.
• Discourse Analysis – It is used to study how a language is used to achieve specific results.

Step 9: Validity and Reliability

Ensure the validity and reliability of your findings. Consistently apply your chosen analysis methods and cross-check interpretations with colleagues or participants to validate your results.

Step 10: Ethical Considerations

Throughout the research process, uphold ethical principles. Protect the privacy and anonymity of participants, obtain informed consent, and address any ethical concerns that may arise.

Qualitative Research vs Quantitative Research

Qualitative and quantitative research are two distinct approaches to conducting research. Here are the main differences between qualitative vs. quantitative research.

Looking for a more detailed comparison between these 2 types of research? Check out our qualitative vs. quantitative research blog.

Qualitative Research Topics

To write an amazing qualitative research paper, here are some interesting topics for you.

• The Impact of Parental Involvement on Children's Education
• Social Isolation and Loneliness Among the Elderly
• Factors Influencing Consumer Choices in Sustainable Fashion
• Coping Mechanisms for Stress Among College Students
• Experiences of Immigrant Workers in Low-Wage Jobs
• The Role of Music in Expressing Emotions and Well-being
• Perceptions of Mental Health Stigma in Ethnic Communities
• Exploring the Transition to Parenthood: Challenges and Joys
• How Cultural Differences Influence Conflict Resolution Styles
• The Influence of Family Dynamics on Eating Habits and Nutrition in Children

We have also compiled a list of research paper topics in case you need more unique ideas.

Qualitative Research Examples

Check out the examples of qualitative research to get a better idea of writing a qualitative research study.

Qualitative Research Example

Qualitative Research Paper Sample

Qualitative Research Limitations

The following discussed are the qualitative research limitations. 

• The qualitative research data involve fewer expenses and time. 
• It does not have large-scale data.
• It requires a lot of time to manage, gather, and analyze data.
• It is not possible to verify the results as it is open-ended research. 
• It is difficult to analyze the credibility and validity of data because of its subjective nature.
• Expert knowledge of the area is necessary to understand the collected information.

In Conclusion, the qualitative research method shows the idea and perception of your targeted audience. However, not every student is able to choose the right approach while writing a research paper. It requires a thorough understanding of both qualitative research and quantitative research methods.

This is where the professional help from  MyPerfectWords.com comes in. We offer custom essay writing help with your academic assignments. 

Contact our customer support and place " write my research paper " order today!

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the two methods in research study.

There are two types of studies that involve observing people during a study, participant observation and non-participant observation. 

Why is qualitative research better?

Because qualitative research includes the ability to gain unique insights through deep exploration. Survey respondents are able to disclose their experiences, thoughts, and feelings without constraint or influence from an outside source. 

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Free 6+ qualitative research templates in pdf | ms word, 1. qualitative research template, 2. qualitative research methods, 3. qualitative research journal, 4. qualitative research analysis, 5. qualitative research methods in pdf, 6. qualitative research in business, 7. qualitative research example, what is the purpose of holding a qualitative research, what are the clusters of doing a qualitative research, what are the reasons for conducting qualitative research, what are the techniques taken for conducting qualitative research, research templates.

Qualitative research depends on finding an answer to a specific issue one can distinguish. There are different strategies for detailing an examination structure for the investigation. Two expansive methodologies of information assortment and understanding in inquiring about are subjective and quantitative research. The rudimentary technique for leading exploration was quantitative, however, as of late, subjective strategy for investigating has likewise picked up force among analysts.

Subjective Analysis

Direct perception, open-finished studies, center gathering, top to bottom meetings, oral history, member perception, ethnographic perception, content evaluation, more in research templates.

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