Speaker 1: Today, we're going to talk about semi-structured interviews. I'll teach you what they are, tell you how they're different from other types of interviews, and show you the step-by-step process for how to conduct them. Let's start with the basics. When conducting semi-structured interviews, you plan a discussion guide with questions ahead of time. During the interview, you'll use these questions to guide you, but you'll also give yourself the space to probe deeper, go on tangents, or ask follow-up questions that weren't scripted. Semi-structured interviews have both structured and unstructured elements to it. It's focused enough to stay on topic with your predetermined questions, but it's also flexible enough to let your interviews go in their own directions. With semi-structured interviews, you gather insightful data, you dive into participants' thoughts and beliefs, and open yourself up to the possibility of finding new insights. Now, let's talk about how semi-structured interviews differ from purely structured or purely unstructured interviews. In structured interviews, you have a set of predetermined questions, but you stick to them. This keeps you super focused and makes the data more standardized, but it can feel restrictive since you can't dive any deeper. Think about the last time you were at a doctor's office and they asked you the same questions. What's your name? What's your date of birth? That's a lot more like what a structured interview is like. In unstructured interviews, you don't have any questions prepared. You have a topic in mind, but you just have a conversation about it and see where it takes you. This gives you the ultimate freedom to truly explore, but you might lose focus. A lot of podcasts take on a similar type of structure. They'll have a common theme, but it's really just two people having a casual conversation about it. So that's how unstructured interviews and structured interviews are different from semi-structured. Semi-structured interviews combine the best of both methods. It has the structure and focus of structured interviews with the flexibility of unstructured interviews. Ready to conduct your own semi-structured interviews? I'll walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to conduct semi-structured interviews. First, define your objective and scope. Make sure you know what you want to learn from the interview and what you want to do with the results. Next, write out your interview questions. Your questions should be simple and concise, but also leave room for exploration. Add some probing questions as well, which are optional follow-up questions to dive deeper into that topic if relevant. Then, think about who you want to recruit for your interviews. Based on your research objective, who are the best people to interview and learn from? How would you recruit them and what sort of incentives would you provide? Next, determine your interview logistics. Figure out how, when, and where you intend to conduct the interview. Are you doing them in person, over video call? Define a time frame and schedule your participants. What incentives will you provide? Are you giving them a gift card or something else? And if you're recording the interview, make sure you have the right consent forms and equipment. Finally, it's time to conduct those interviews. Introduce yourself and start with a casual chat to get comfortable with the interview participants. Let them know what to expect. If you're recording, let them know when you're starting the recording. Start interviewing them using your prepared interview questions. Stay flexible and feel free to go off script to explore their answers, but make sure to come back to your interview questions from time to time. You should start with a chat to establish trust and rapport with the respondents. When conducting face-to-face interviews, you should listen attentively to the respondents and pay attention to their nonverbal cues like gestures or changes in their voices and body language and more. When you're done your audio or video recording, transcribe it into text for analysis. We have a great blog that provides a number of different transcription options. There's a link to it in the description of this video. Once you have the transcript ready, you can now move on to analysis. A common methodology for analyzing semi-structured interviews is called qualitative coding. With coding, you look at your transcript, break it up into individual excerpts, identify patterns, and categorize the themes you find. Qualitative coding software such as Delve is very helpful in this process. If you want to learn about qualitative coding or the software, check out our Essential Guide of Qualitative Coding at delftool.com slash guide. Lastly, turn your analysis into a narrative and tell the story of your data in a research paper or a report. Now, let's dive into an example of semi-structured interview questions from a real study. We'll take a look at a study by Leung and Liuz where they explored the perspectives of nursing assistants and frail elderly residents in nursing homes. They begin every interview with open-ended questions, then had a list of probing questions to follow up on them. Here's one of their questions. How do you perceive the daily interactions between you and the nurse assistants or residents in the nursing home? Then, they followed up with probing questions to better understand the unique perspective of the participant. Here's a list of the probing questions they list out in the paper. It's important to note that while they did prepare some probing questions before the interview, they did not need to use those questions word for word. Since this is a semi-structured interview, they could just adjust their follow-ups based on how the interview was going. Now, let's talk about the advantages of semi-structured interviews. First, semi-structured interviews bring together the strengths of unstructured and unstructured approaches. This means you're tapping into the reliability of structured interviews while also harnessing the exploratory nature of unstructured ones. Next, semi-structured interviews help you stay on topic. The predetermined questions act as a guide for your interview to keep you focused. Lastly, the open-ended nature of semi-structured interviews allows your participants to give you rich, detailed responses. You can go beneath the surface and use probing questions to go deeper. You end up with more meaningful insights that way. These are the advantages of semi-structured interviews. And while semi-structured interviews may have advantages, it's important to also consider its potential disadvantages and downsides. Let's dive in. Semi-structured interviews can take a lot of time. The coordination, scheduling, and the individual face-time with participants can be demanding and time-consuming. If you're looking for a quick data collection method, you might want to consider something else, like surveys, for instance. Next, the open-ended nature of semi-structured interviews can be a double-edged sword. You might unintentionally steer the conversation with leading questions, which influences the participants' responses in ways you don't want. And it's hard not to ask probing questions without leading the interviewee a little bit. It takes some skill to conduct the interview. Lastly, while it's great to have room to explore unexpected directions, it can come at a cost. The more you drift away from the main topic, the trickier it becomes to compare responses across participants. Remember, every method has its trade-offs. It's all about finding the best fit for your research goals. To sum it up, semi-structured interviews blend structure and flexibility, providing rich insights into participants' experiences and thoughts. Whether you're a seasoned researcher or a beginner, consider adding semi-structured interviews to your qualitative toolkit. Thank you for watching our video. When you're ready to analyze your data from semi-structured interviews, start a free trial of the Delve qualitative coding software at delvetool.com slash get started. If you want to learn about other qualitative methods, check out our other videos and articles at delvetool.com slash guide.