10.2. Creating Interview Guides

As we noted, survey interviews are structured interviews. They ask the exact same questions in a precise ordering that the researchers planned out ahead of time. By contrast, most in-depth interviews are semi-structured interviews. The interviewer has a list of questions prepared in advance, but they can deviate from that list whenever they wish. That means the interviewer’s questions may not be asked in exactly the same way or in exactly the same order to each and every interviewee. More rarely, an in-depth interview can be entirely unstructured: no list of questions exists, and instead the interviewer improvises questions as they see fit regarding a particular topic they want to hear about.

For semi-structured interviews, sociologists develop an interview guide, a list of topics or questions that they can refer to during the interview (or memorize beforehand). It is called a “guide” because it is simply that: it is used to guide the interviewer, but it is not set in stone. Think of an interview guide as a to-do list—it contains all the tasks you hope to accomplish, but it probably won’t be the end of the world if you don’t check off every task or don’t do them in the exact order you have written down. New tasks may come up that require you to adjust your plans, and you may not have the time that day to get to everything on the list.

When you are preparing your interview guide, you should outline all the issues that you believe are likely to be relevant during the course of your conversation with an interviewee. However, because you will be asking interviewees to provide answers in their own words and raise any points they believe are important, each interview will flow differently. While the opening question in an in-depth interview may be the same across all interviews, from that point on, what the interviewee says will shape how the conversation proceeds. This is what makes in-depth interviewing exciting—and rather challenging. It takes a skilled interviewer to be able to pose questions and probe more deeply into a topic as needed even while listening attentively to what an interviewee is saying at any given moment. The researcher needs to be able to pick up on cues about when to follow up, when to move on, and when to simply let the participant speak without guidance or interruption.

We’ve said that interview guides can list topics or questions. A topic-based interview guide will briefly outline the subjects the researcher would like to discuss, usually using just a word or phrase to describe each one. Those keywords will give the researcher some idea about how to generate questions on the spot. Figure 10.1 provides an example of a topic-based interview guide for a study of college students learning to become entrepreneurs in university-run training programs. As you can see, researchers can order their outline according to which topics should be addressed at the beginning of the conversation and which at the end, though they may very well move back and forth between topics and otherwise deviate from that ordering over the course of the interview.

A question-based interview guide will frequently be organized by topics, too, but under each topic heading will be a number of detailed questions, written out more or less as the interviewer will say them aloud. The topics and questions will also be listed in the order that they are likely to proceed. Figure 10.2 provides an example of a more detailed interview guide with specific questions posed. This guide is for a study focused on the relationship between substance abuse and unemployment.

You may have noticed that some of the questions in the example interview guide in Figure 10.2 have additional questions listed after or below them. These follow-up questions are known as probes. Remember that one of the benefits of qualitative interviews is that you can ask participants for more information. Especially if you ask any yes/no questions or similar closed-ended questions, be sure to ask a follow-up question or two afterward to get your interviewee to expand on their previous answer. Probes are routinely improvised during the course of an interview, and we discuss simple strategies for generating probes on the spot later in the chapter. That said, it is worth your time to come up with helpful probes in advance of an interview (perhaps listing them, as in the example, as subquestions). That way, you have some probes already on tap and won’t get stumped about how to follow up if your interviewee suddenly falls silent.

Whether you use an interview guide with written-out questions or just topics is up to you. In deciding between these options, consider your style, experience, and comfort level as an interviewer as well as your familiarity with the issues being discussed. If you are new to interviewing or the topic at hand, writing out the questions in advance may work better. Another option is to write up a very detailed guide that you use to help you prepare for your interviewing, but using just an outline of topics for your actual interviews. Drafting specific questions for the interview guide will get you in the mindset of thinking creatively about the questions you can ask and will also ensure that you don’t leave out anything important. You can use the question-based guide to practice interviewing and even rely upon it for the first few interviews you conduct. However, at some point we would recommend transitioning to just using a topic-based guide. Relying on an outline will encourage you to listen to what your interviewee is telling you rather than just robotically moving to the next question on your list. An overly detailed interview guide may be difficult to navigate during an interview and could give interviewees the impression that you are more interested in your questions than in their answers.

When beginning to construct an interview guide, brainstorming is usually the first step. There are no rules at the brainstorming stage—simply list all the topics and questions that come to mind when you think about your research question. Once you’ve drafted a pretty good list, you can begin to tighten up the wording of your questions and flesh out important parts of your outline. Remember to come up with thematic headings and group together “like” questions and topics under those categories, which will make it easier to see where new questions should go as well as which redundant questions can be dropped.

Eventually, you will want to figure out a logical ordering to your topics and questions. That way, the conversation flows smoothly from one theme to another, and both the interviewer and interviewee have some sense of what you have already covered and where you are headed. The ordering you choose for your interview guide may in part be chronological—for instance, you could start by talking about an interviewee’s relevant personal background, and then move to what is going on now. Other than that, though, you just want a sensible sequence to the conversation, without jarring transitions—for instance, moving directly from asking about their relationship to their parents to asking about their sex life. Indeed, if you need to pose sensitive or potentially controversial questions, try your best to find a natural segue into these topics, and do not raise them at the very beginning of your interview. You need to give participants the opportunity to warm up to the interview and feel comfortable talking with you.

What sorts of questions should go into your interview guide? First, as we’ve emphasized, qualitative interviews focus on open-ended questions, questions that a researcher poses but does not provide answer options for. Open-ended questions are more demanding than closed-ended questions are. They require participants to put their thoughts and feelings into their own words. They are the sorts of questions that play to the strength of in-depth interviewing—specifically, its ability to generate rich qualitative data and obtain a nuanced understanding of the issue at hand. To this end, try to phrase your questions in a way that invites longer responses from your interviewees. Minimize the number of questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no; if you do use such questions, try to pair them with probes that are open-ended.

That said, you do want to include questions that ask about demographic and other important background characteristics—for instance, your interviewee’s age, gender, racial and ethnic background, marital status, and political affiliation. These can become the basis for generating interesting theories. For instance, you may find that people from more privileged class backgrounds tend to have stronger opinions about a particular issue, or men are less willing to broach a sensitive topic.

Some qualitative interviewers create a brief survey form that interviewees can fill out with their answers to these background questions. That way, the interviewee can take care of these questions before or after the interview, and the two of them do not have to go over them during the interview itself. This approach of using a supplemental questionnaire may be especially helpful if you are asking interviewees to divulge private details or recall specific details. For instance, interviewees may be more willing to disclose information about their sexual history, such as the number of sexual partners they have had, on a survey form rather than saying it aloud. Likewise, they may not remember precise figures such as household income or expenses on the spot, but they could provide accurate information at a later opportunity when they can refer to their records (do be aware, though, that you may need to pester them later about turning in the form!). Figure 10.3 illustrates what such a supplementary questionnaire looks like.

Devising Effective Questions for In-Depth Interviews

You want to pose questions in an in-depth interview that answer your research question and cover all the relevant aspects of the phenomenon you’re studying. When you are brainstorming, think of questions that touch upon the various concepts and theoretical relationships that your research question mentions or implies. Consult the scholarly literature to find out what questions other interviewers have asked in studies of similar topics. To make sure your interview guide is getting at the full range of issues your study seeks to illuminate, you may even want to create an annotated version of your guide for planning purposes that explicitly states what the point of each question is—what theories or concepts it addresses, what variation in a variable it is measuring, and so on.

We have three recommendations for generating theoretically informed questions that are likely to produce useful data. The first is to simplify your language. Think about the theories and concepts you are interested in and how you might break down these abstract ideas into scenarios or statements that are clear, concrete, and vivid to your interviewee. Avoid jargon like the plague. Academic lingo will utterly confuse many of your interviewees—and if it doesn’t, it will likely signal to them that you have a particular take on the topic, encouraging them to answer accordingly.

Another suggestion is to think backwards about each question you plan to pose. How do you imagine people will answer this question? How would you answer it? If the answers you expect to receive won’t produce the sorts of data that are helpful in answering your research question, then you should rephrase it or ask additional questions that will get you the data you need. For instance, if you are interested in what sorts of conditions lead to sexual harassment in a workplace, you may find yourself tempted to just ask that question directly of people you’re interviewing who have themselves experienced sexual harassment. The question might generate some interesting responses, but it only gives you their take on the issue. You will also want to ask separately about the wide range of conditions that might have possibly contributed to the sexual harassment they experienced, to see which conditions seem decisive across the experiences of all the interviewees you speak to—whether or not they themselves brought them up as being important.

You also want a useful degree of variation in how people answer your questions. Ideally, the interview conversation will cover all the relevant aspects of the phenomenon you’re studying, which means your questions as a whole will provoke a wide range of answers. That variation will allow you to see patterns in how people answer questions. As we noted earlier, this is where your demographic and other more closed-ended questions become useful: you may find that people with different backgrounds or beliefs answer a key question in different ways, which becomes the basis for generating a theory. Therefore, when you think backwards about the answers you expect from a particular question, consider whether it gives you the variation you want. If you imagine everyone will answer one question in the same way (e.g., “Do you like puppies?”), is their unanimity of opinion important for you to flag? If not, maybe you want to ask a question that is less obviously answered. At the very least, you will want to ask probes to get at the reasoning behind their answer (“So why do you like puppies?”) or unearth other considerations where you can observe real variation.

Third, avoid pushing your interviewees to answer in certain ways. Don’t phrase your questions in a leading way, which will introduce bias into your research by making it more likely that you get the results you’re looking for. For example, a question like “Don’t you think people who don’t want kids are selfish?” clearly implies that the appropriate answer is “Yes.” Asking “Do you think people who don’t want kids are selfish?” is better, though you are still putting the idea in the interviewee’s head that not choosing to have children is a selfish act—which may or may not be a major problem, depending on the focus of your study. A more neutral question would be something like, “What comes to mind for you when you hear someone doesn’t want kids?” That allows the interviewee to bring up selfishness if they really believe it is a problem, or not mention it at all—a sign it isn’t an important issue to them. (You can always ask a follow-up question about selfishness if the person didn’t mention it and you want to get their take on that specific topic.) Note that even bringing up a topic earlier in your interview can prime people to think in those terms later on. For instance, if you talk about a person’s attitudes about gender inequality earlier in the interview, and then ask people about issues in their workplace, they might be more likely to make a connection between those issues and gender dynamics at work.

Whenever you ask about behaviors that are stigmatized—anything from using illicit drugs to watching trash TV—people will naturally be inclined not to answer candidly because of social desirability bias. As we’ve discussed, this is an inherent weakness of in-depth interviewing as a method, but you can try to minimize it by asking questions in ways that make it more likely that an interviewee will actually offer the answer that doesn’t make them look so favorably. For instance, when asking about his interviewees’ mental health for a study he did on long-term unemployment, Victor would preface his question with a statement like this:

Being unemployed is often a tough experience for people to go through. How is your mental or emotional health these days? Is it poor, fair, good, or excellent?

The introductory statement, “Being unemployed is often a tough experience for people to go through,” normalizes what might be seen as embarrassing or stigmatized—having poor mental health. Knowing that it’s common to feel anxious or depressed, the interviewee will hopefully be more open to divulging any mental health problems if they do indeed feel that way, Also note that there is a follow-up question—only asked after the primary question about mental and emotional health—to characterize their mental health as “poor, fair, good, or excellent”; the idea here is that they might brush aside the primary question with a few words, or not provide much information about how good or poor their mental health actually is, so it’s important to get them to be more specific. One would want to follow up by also posing a probe after this closed-ended question, perhaps to ask the interviewee why they chose that response.

When prefacing your question with a statement, you might want to use an “either/or” structure that validates multiple possible responses. For instance, to get at people’s feelings about the shame of not having a job, Victor would pose the following question:

Some people say they feel a sense of shame because they’re unemployed. Other people say, no, it’s not my fault so I have nothing to be ashamed of. What’s your view?

By implying that the interviewee is not alone in thinking one way or the other, the question makes them more comfortable in providing a potentially stigmatizing answer.

To wrap up our advice on posing interview questions, we suggest that you make it a habit to end your interviews with two questions:

1. Is there anything I missed that you think would be important or useful for me to know?
2. Is there anyone else you think I should talk to?

You can reword these questions as you see fit, but you will probably find one or both of them helpful, regardless of your specific study. The point of the first question is to ensure that your take on the phenomenon you’re discussing hasn’t left out important aspects or details that your interviewee might not have brought up explicitly during the interview—perhaps because they wanted to defer to your expert perspective on the topic. The second question helps you generate leads for more people to interview, which is typically something you want to do in an interview-based study (even if you do not plan to rely heavily on snowball sampling, as we will discuss later).

After you draft your interview guide, look it over. Cut any questions and topics that seem redundant or unnecessary. Consolidate similar questions. Convert questions that ask for specific or narrow details into probes or subquestions listed underneath questions that cover that topic more broadly. All these strategies will tighten up your interview guide, making it more manageable to employ and making your questions easier to remember and elaborate on during the interview itself. You might also want to flag certain questions as priority questions—perhaps with an asterisk in the interview guide—so that if you are pressed for time, you know which questions you definitely need to ask.

When your interview guide is ready, get some feedback on it from your peers and other researchers. Chances are they’ll catch a few things you hadn’t noticed. Practicing the interview in advance is helpful, too. Ideally, you’ll find a friend or two willing to participate in a couple of trial runs with you. Better yet, you may think of a friend or two who are similar in at least some ways to the people in your target population. Your mock interviewees may suggest specific ways you can improve your interview guide or your interviewing style, but even if they don’t, you’ll find that just practicing the interview with a real person on the other end of the conversation makes a huge difference. You’ll get familiar with what questions you should be asking next at every point in the interview, and you’ll start thinking up good probes, which will mean you’re less likely to be speechless after an interviewee has just said something. Going back to our earlier recommendation regarding thinking backwards about questions, we advise that you pay particular attention to how your mock interviewees answered any interview questions closely related to your overarching research question. What sorts of data were you hoping to get from those questions, and what sorts of data did they actually give you? If there’s a mismatch there, consider whether another line of questioning would be more effective.