Planning and conducting qualitative interviews

Explore the three most common interview types—structured, semi-structured, and unstructured—and how narrative, factual, and cognitive interviews fit within this classification.

Explore semi-structured interviews guided by an interview guide or protocol, staying focused yet flexible to elicit in-depth responses and simplify data analysis.

Explore structured interviews, a formal, highly protocol-driven method using close-ended questions to yield quick, replicable and quantifiable data, with easy analysis and reduced bias, yet limited detail.

Develop your interview guide by mapping questions to your research questions and adding probing questions for depth, ensuring a natural, chronological conversation.

Plan and conduct qualitative interviews by using creative tools and resources, such as scenarios, photos, videos, and cognitive interview techniques, to elicit memories and responses while staying flexible and original.

Prioritize interviewee well-being, build rapport, and actively listen, letting them speak and handle off-topic moments to elicit richer data. Record early, stay flexible, and use member checking to enhance validity.

Explore how to approach transcription in qualitative interviews, weigh detail levels and inclusion criteria, and justify your method with literature on reliability, validity, paradigms, and ontology.

Choose who transcribes your data—yourself or a professional service like GoTranscript—and if you do it yourself, use Express Scribe to slow audio.

Choose a transcription approach that complements your analysis level and research question, and justify it transparently. Acknowledge its selective, nonobjective nature, and tailor detail (turns, pauses, length) to your study.

Familiarize yourself with interview data, make initial notes, and develop working hypotheses. Build a coding framework and thematic model, then use software to analyze within-case and cross-case patterns.

Learn how to ensure validity in qualitative interview data by minimizing respondent, researcher, and reactivity biases through thoughtful questioning, transcription, member checking, audit trails, transparent analysis, and negative case analysis.

Learn to plan and conduct qualitative interviews with brain injury participants, addressing recall challenges, stimuli intolerance, and emotion expression through thorough preparation, careful questioning, and debriefing.

You have completed the course and can ask questions anytime, as instruction and the literature spark deeper interest in qualitative interviews, and the bonus section offers discounts on other courses.