Structured Interview

When to use a semi-structured interview

Semi-structured interviews are best used when:

• 
  You have prior interview experience. Spontaneous questions are deceptively challenging, and it’s easy to accidentally ask a leading question or make a participant uneasy.
  
• 
  Your research question is exploratory in nature. Participant answers can guide future research questions and help you develop a more robust knowledge base for future research.
  

Just like in structured interviews, it is critical that you remain organized and develop a system for keeping track of participant responses. However, since the questions are less set than in a structured interview, the data collection and analysis become a bit more complex.

Differences between different types of interviews

Make sure to choose the type of interview that suits your research best. This table shows the most important differences between the four types.

Advantages of semi-structured interviews

Semi-structured interviews come with many advantages.

• Best of both worlds

Semi-structured interviews are often considered “the best of both worlds.” Combining elements of structured and unstructured interviews gives semi-structured interviews the advantages of both: comparable, reliable data, and the flexibility to ask follow-up questions.

• No distractions

The ability to design a thematic framework beforehand keeps both the interviewer and the participant on task, avoiding distractions while encouraging two-way communication.

• Detail and richness

While similar methods-wise to structured interviews, questionnaires, and surveys, semi-structured interviews introduce more detail and richness due to their more open-ended nature. Participants can be asked to clarify, elaborate, or rephrase their answers if need be.