In 2015, Kallio, Pietilä, and Johnson, conducted a literature analysis and from their research outlined essential steps to prepare for semi-structured interviews with the goal of gaining objective and trustworthy qualitative data. We’ve outlined their points below and you can read their entire paper here.

What are semi-structured interviews?

Semi-structured interviews are a formal way to collect qualitative data that try to mimic natural conversation. Instead of a strict list of questions that interviewer plows through, a semi-structured interview creates space to follow the many lines of inquiry that may unfold during a conversation. However, that doesn’t mean you can go into an interview of this type without having a plan. In fact, a semi-structured interview can take more time to plan than a structured interview.

Identifying the prerequisites for using semi-structured interviews

The first step to preparing for a semi-structured interview is to determine if this is the correct format to use to collect data. Most often, we use semi-structured interviews to deeply understand and empathize with someone’s challenges or successes. At Leanlab, we do this every year in interviews with teachers, administrators, students, and parents within our school network. Our goal is to better understand the realities of the classroom, what gives those within our community pause about the future of education and what keeps them engaged and excited. Within the Codesign Framework, we recommend conducting semi-structured interviews when you are developing a problem statement.

Retrieving and using previous knowledge

After you’ve decided that semi-structured interviews are the correct tool to use, you want to do as much work as possible to understand the context of who you will be interviewing. Of course, the entire goal of these interviews is to better understand their context, but any research or consultation that you do beforehand can allow you to respond better during the interview and follow novel lines of inquiry more naturally.

Formulating the preliminary semi-structured interview guide

Once you’ve gathered that background information, you can start to create a list of questions; an interview guide. The guide should consist of two types of questions: main prompts and follow-ups. The main prompts should follow a logical order and be answered by all interviewees. The purpose of the main prompts is to establish trust and familiarity with the participants and give them broad areas to explore.

The aim of follow-up questions is to make the main prompts easier to understand, create a naturalistic feel to the interview, and illicit more information.

Perhaps the biggest danger in creating an interview guide is to include too many main prompts. It’s important that the questions and interviews are as consistent as possible between participants and they are all given the same main prompts. If you only have 30 minutes for the interview, this might include four or five main prompts.

There is, however, no danger in preparing more follow-up questions as necessary. Each main theme should have at least five follow-ups and none or all of them can be asked during the interview.

Another benefit of organizing your interview guide around a limited number of main prompts is that it can make coding and analyzing the responses simpler when the interviews are completed.

When crafting your questions you, ideally, want them to be participant-oriented, open-ended, not leading, and clearly worded. The goal is to illicit answers that are descriptive, spontaneous, in-depth, and personal.

Pilot testing of the interview guide

Finally, before you implement the interview, it’s good practice to pilot test it. This could be an internal interview with a peer on your team, with and external expert, or with a potential participant. The goal here is to understand how the interview felt, whether the questions betray any kind of bias on behalf of the interviewer, and if the questions are intelligible.

With that feedback, you can revise the interview guide and start your semi-structured interviews.