If you think of types of interviews as a spectrum, with structured interviews on one end and unstructured interviews on the other, semi-structured interviews occupy the space in between. Semi-structured interviews explore areas you have already established as relevant to the research study. When planning a semi-structured interview, you can start with a general list of topics, each of which might include structured questions and open-ended questions (Avineri, 2017). It is up to you to decide how much structure is right for your study!
Semi-structured interviews are most useful when you already have an understanding of your research topic. They share the advantage of structured interviews in that you ask questions that are meaningful to your research question. They also benefit from the inclusion of open-ended questions that let the participant steer the conversation.
For Example …
Viktoriya Sereda wanted to understand the “sense of belonging” of internally displaced persons in Ukraine. She combined semi-structured interviews with a survey to gather more nuanced and multifaceted data about perceptions of the conflict beginning in 2014 in eastern Ukraine. Semi-structured interviews allowed Sereda to “give voice” to as many sides of the story as possible while highlighting many groups with different experiences. As she describes, “the methodology of semi-structured interviews was chosen to make interviews more flexible and to allow respondents to include experiences that they thought were significant. Such flexibility was especially important during our first project, because resettlement had started just a few months before the beginning of our fieldwork and was understudied. For this purpose, a very open semi-structured method of interviewing was chosen and preserved during the later projects” (Sereda, 2020, p.8).
The pros and cons of semi-structured interviews are laid out in the chart below:
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Participants can provide more depth in their answers, which is particularly effective when research focuses on a newly formed or under-researched group | Can be time consuming, so consider sample size |
| Flexibility to use follow-up questions | More time and effort needed in analysis |
| Predetermined questions provide reliability | Interviewer should be skilled and feel comfortable going “off script” |
| Data is more easily comparable than data from unstructured interviews | |
| Participants may guide the conversation to a certain extent |
Researchers can also dig deeper into participants’ responses using follow-up questions. These are called “probing questions” which you can learn more about in the planning section. While you might think of probes on the fly, you can also prepare them going into the interview.
The video below provides more detail about semi-structured interview methodology.