Structured Interview

How to conduct a semi-structured interview

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

Step 1: Set your goals and objectives

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

• 
  What are you trying to learn or achieve from a semi-structured interview?
  
• 
  Why are you choosing a semi-structured interview as opposed to a different type of interview, or another research method?
  
• 
  What questions or topics do you anticipate you’ll have follow-up questions about?
  
  • 
    

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

Step 2: Design your questions

Try to stay simple and concise, and phrase your questions clearly. If your topic is sensitive or could cause an emotional response, be mindful of your word choices.
One of the most challenging parts of a semi-structured interview is knowing when to ask follow-up or spontaneous related questions. For this reason, having a guide to refer back to is critical. Hypothesizing what other questions could arise from your participants’ answers may also be helpful.

Step 3: Assemble your participants

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

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

NoteRegardless of which method you choose, be careful of sampling bias, which occurs when some members of a population are more likely to be included in your study than others.