Structured Interview

Step 4: Decide on your medium

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

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  Pen-and-paper may be easier for you to organize and analyze, but you will receive more prepared answers, which may affect the reliability of your data.
  
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  In-person interviews can lead to nervousness or interviewer effects, where the respondent feels pressured to respond in a manner they believe will please you or incentivize you to like them.
  
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  Videoconferencing can feel awkward or stilted, which could affect your results.
  
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NoteBe sure that you receive informed consent from each of your participants prior to beginning the interview. Here, your participants consent to video or audio recording and sign a confidentiality agreement and an agreement to anonymize or pseudonymize data.
Informed consent should always be given in a written format, not orally.

Step 5: Conduct your interviews

As you conduct your interviews, keep environmental conditions as constant as you can to avoid bias. Pay attention to your body language (e.g., nodding, raising eyebrows), and moderate your tone of voice.
Relatedly, one of the biggest challenges with semi-structured interviews is ensuring that your questions remain unbiased. This can be especially challenging with any spontaneous questions or unscripted follow-ups that you ask your participants.
TipRemember to refer to your guide and keep your research question front-of-mind when asking unplanned questions, and strive to always keep them relevant to the topic.

How to analyze a semi-structured interview

After you’re finished conducting your interviews, it’s time to analyze your results. First, assign each of your participants a number or pseudonym for organizational purposes.
The next step in your analysis is to transcribe the audio or video recordings. You can then conduct a content or thematic analysis to determine your categories, looking for patterns of responses that stand out to you and test your hypotheses.