Why interview?

• Surveys tell you that something is happening — the percentage dissatisfied, the turnover rate, the mean engagement score
• Interviews are how you find out why: they capture meanings, motives, and experiences that resist reduction to numbers (Babbie calls this the territory of qualitative field research)
• The interviewer rarely arrives with precise hypotheses to test — more often the task is to make sense of an ongoing process that cannot be fully predicted in advance
• A skilled interviewer picks up nuances of attitude and behaviour that escape standardised instruments

The structure continuum

• Interviews are not one method but a continuum, defined by how much is fixed in advance
• Structured — a predetermined set of questions, delivered in a consistent order, identical for every participant
• Semi-structured — open-ended questions organised in a guide, with freedom to reorder, follow up, and probe
• Unstructured — no fixed questions; the interviewer steers a conversation shaped by the participant’s own narrative
• The further right you move, the more depth and discovery you gain — and the more comparability and speed you give up

Structured interviews

• Standardised format — every participant receives the same questions in the same order
• Closed or tightly framed responses — often limited to specific options, which makes results quantifiable and easy to code
• Highly focused — each question maps directly onto a research objective
• Advantages: speed, consistency, comparability across many respondents
• Considerations: little depth; the nuances of individual experience are easily overlooked
• Common in market research (“On a scale of 1–5, how much do you like the new store layout?”) and standardised HR assessments

Semi-structured interviews

• The workhorse of organisational research: guided flexibility
• Predetermined open questions provide a skeleton, but the interviewer may diverge, reorder, and probe as the conversation develops
• Open-ended responses let participants answer in their own words; the design adapts to each participant’s perspective and knowledge
• Yields both comparable coverage of core topics and unexpected insights
• Considerations: demands a skilled interviewer, and the resulting transcripts take real time to analyse

Unstructured interviews

• Open and exploratory: no fixed set of questions — the interviewer guides the conversation based on the participant’s responses
• The flow is directed by the participant’s narrative; each interview is distinct
• Fosters trust and openness, and permits deep exploration of complex or sensitive experience
• Classic uses: life histories, oral history, crisis and trauma research — “Tell me about your journey,” and then follow their lead
• Considerations: highly time-consuming, hard to compare across participants, and most exposed to interviewer bias

Strengths and weaknesses of interviews

From research questions to interview questions

• The single most common beginner’s error: reading the research question out loud to the participant
• “Why is turnover at Meridian rising?” is a question for you; no employee experiences their life as an answer to it
• Interview questions must translate the research question into the participant’s own world: concrete experiences, specific events, everyday language
• One research question typically generates several interview questions — and every interview question should trace back to a research question
• Clear objectives first (know what you need to learn), then questions; then pilot the guide on a colleague before using it in earnest

Anatomy of an interview guide

• A semi-structured guide has a deliberate shape, not just a list:
  • Opening question — easy, factual, unthreatening; builds rapport and gets the participant talking (“Could you start by telling me about your role and how long you’ve been here?”)
  • Key questions — the three to six open questions that carry the research; ordered from general to specific, comfortable to sensitive
  • Probes — planned follow-ups under each key question, used only if needed
  • Closing question — hands control to the participant (“Is there anything important about this that I haven’t asked?”) and winds down gently
• Logical flow matters: each question should feel like a natural next step, not an interrogation checklist

Question technique: open framing

• Open questions invite a narrative: how, what, tell me about, walk me through
• Closed questions invite a word: do you, is it, how many — useful for facts, fatal for depth
• Leading questions smuggle the answer into the question:
  • Leading: “Don’t you think the new rota system caused people to leave?”
  • Open: “How, if at all, did the new rota system feature in people’s decisions to leave?”
• Ask one question at a time — double-barrelled questions get half-answers
• Avoid jargon and your own analytical categories; use the participant’s vocabulary, not the board’s

Probes and follow-ups

• The probe is where interviews earn their keep — the difference between a spoken questionnaire and a real interview
• Silence — the simplest probe; count slowly to five before rescuing the participant, and they will usually keep going
• Echo probe — repeat their last phrase with a rising tone: “…you felt invisible?”
• Elaboration probe — “Can you say more about that?” / “What happened next?”
• Example probe — “Can you give me a specific instance?”
• Clarification probe — “When you say ‘management’, who do you mean exactly?”
• Probes must be as non-leading as the questions they follow

Active listening

• Interviewing is mostly listening — a good ratio is the participant talking for 80% of the time
• Active listening means signalling attention (nods, minimal encouragers) without signalling approval or disapproval of the content
• Resist the urge to fill silence, finish sentences, or share your own view — every word you speak is a word they do not
• Track what has been said: the best follow-ups pick up something from ten minutes earlier, showing you truly heard it
• Hold the guide lightly: if the participant answers question four while answering question one, do not ask it again — tick it and move on

Practicalities: recording, transcription, setting

• Record — with consent: ask explicitly, before you start, and explain how the recording will be stored and used; recording frees you to listen instead of scribbling
• No recorder captures everything — take brief notes as well, on what you “know” happened and what you “think” it meant
• Transcription: budget roughly 4–6 hours per hour of audio; automated transcription helps, but must be checked and corrected
• Location: private, quiet, neutral — a booked meeting room, not the manager’s office and not the open-plan floor
• Duration: 45–60 minutes is the sweet spot; tell participants the expected length in advance and honour it
• Prepare participants: they should know the purpose, duration, and format before agreeing

Interviewer effects

• The interviewer is a research instrument — and an imperfect one: your presence shapes what people say
• Social desirability — participants edit answers to look reasonable, loyal, or employable
• Visible characteristics (age, gender, dress, apparent status) and invisible ones (your reactions, your organisational role) all colour responses
• You cannot eliminate interviewer effects; you can reduce and report them: neutral wording, neutral reactions, consistent technique, and honesty in the write-up about who interviewed whom
• This is one reason field measurements score high on validity but lower on reliability — a different interviewer would get a somewhat different conversation

Interviewing up and down the hierarchy

• Organisational interviewing is rarely between equals — and the power gap works in both directions
• Interviewing up (executives, senior managers): expect polished, rehearsed “official” answers; well-prepared specifics and gentle persistence get behind them
• Interviewing down (your own subordinates or junior staff): the real consent problem — can a subordinate genuinely say no to their manager’s “voluntary” interview?
• Interviewing your own colleagues: prior relationships contaminate both what is said and how you hear it; confidentiality promises are harder to keep credible when you share a corridor
• Recall session 4: consent must be free as well as informed; where the hierarchy makes freedom doubtful, use an external interviewer or independent researcher

What is a focus group?

• A focus group brings together typically five to fifteen people in a private, comfortable environment for a guided discussion of a topic (Babbie)
• Widely used by market researchers evaluating products and campaigns, and by organisations exploring how a change will be understood
• Participants do not statistically represent any meaningful population — the purpose is to explore, not to describe or explain definitively
• For that reason studies typically convene more than one group: a single group of five to fifteen may simply be unusual
• The output is not a set of individual opinions but a conversation — and that is the point

When group interaction is the point

• The defining asset of the focus group is interaction: participants react to, build on, and challenge each other’s views
• You watch opinions being formed, defended, and revised in real time — something no one-to-one interview can show
• Group talk surfaces the shared vocabulary and social norms of a workplace: what can be said openly, what is joked about, what falls silent
• Efficient too: perspectives from six to eight people in a single session
• Choose a focus group when the research question concerns collective sense-making; choose interviews when it concerns individual experience, sensitive matters, or anything people will not say in front of peers

Composition and size

• Size: six to eight participants is the practical optimum — large enough for diversity, small enough that everyone speaks
• Homogeneity within, variety between: people talk more freely among peers, so group by role or level — and never mix managers with their own subordinates
• Across the study, achieve diversity by running several differently composed groups (e.g. store staff; supervisors; e-commerce team), not by forcing it into one room
• Strangers usually talk more honestly than close colleagues, though in organisational research some acquaintance is often unavoidable
• Plan for 60–90 minutes and over-recruit slightly — someone always fails to appear

The moderator’s craft

• The moderator’s job is to keep the discussion on topic without leading it — guiding the process, never the content
• Dominators: break eye contact, thank and redirect — “That’s clear; I’d like to hear how others see it”
• Silent participants: invite by name, gently, and use round-robin openers so everyone speaks early — whoever speaks first sets the norm
• Groupthink: the group converges on a comfortable consensus; probe for difference — “Has anyone had a different experience?” — and legitimise dissent
• Stay neutral in word and face: a nodding moderator is a leading question in human form
• A second researcher taking notes on who says what, and how the group reacts, is worth a great deal at analysis time

Organising a focus group

• A structured discussion guide — a short list of topics and open questions, fewer than for an interview: five or six is plenty for ninety minutes
• Comfortable, neutral environment — a quiet private room, refreshments, seating in a circle or around a table so everyone can see everyone
• Recording with consent from every participant — plus a ground rule the group agrees to: what is said in the room stays in the room
• Confidentiality is weaker than in interviews — the researcher can promise their own discretion, but not that of seven other participants; say so honestly when recruiting
• Ethical basics carry over from session 4: informed consent, no deception about purpose, and feedback of findings where appropriate

Strengths and weaknesses of focus groups

Watching as well as asking

• Interviews and focus groups share a limit: they capture what people say — and what people say and what they do are not the same
• Observational research: the researcher observes and records behaviour and interactions in natural (or controlled) settings, without manipulating the environment or the people
• Key characteristics: natural settings (workplaces, stores, meetings), a non-interventionist stance, and data that can be qualitative or quantitative
• In both observation and interviewing, full and accurate notes are vital — recording both what you “know” happened and what you “think” it means
• Well suited to studying processes as they unfold, rather than reconstructions after the fact

Participant and non-participant observation

• Participant observation — the researcher joins the group and takes part in its activities
  • Insider’s understanding, trust, rich contextual data — at the price of long-term commitment, possible over-identification, and behaviour changed by the researcher’s presence
• Non-participant observation — the researcher watches from a distance, as unobtrusively as possible
  • More detached and arguably more objective — at the price of limited insight into what the behaviour means to those observed
• Either can be structured (specific behaviours systematically recorded) or unstructured (open-ended, exploratory)
• Common tools: field notes, checklists and coding schemes, audio/video where consented, documents and artefacts

Structured observation in organisations

• In organisational settings, observation is often structured: a checklist or coding scheme records defined behaviours systematically
• Classic application: service interactions — greeting within X seconds, product suggestion made, complaint handled by script or judgement, queue length at till
• Produces countable, comparable data from real behaviour, complementing what interviews and surveys report
• Reactivity remains the core threat: people who know they are watched behave better — schedule multiple visits and let novelty wear off
• Ethics still apply: staff should know observation occurs and how the data will be used, even if exact times are not announced

Covert observation

• Covert observation — observing people who do not know they are being studied (including “mystery shopper” designs)
• The methodological appeal is obvious: behaviour that is completely unaffected by being watched
• The ethical cost is equally obvious: no informed consent, deception about the researcher’s identity, and intrusion on privacy
• Session 4’s framework applies with full force: covert designs need exceptional justification, minimal intrusion, strong anonymisation — and independent ethical review, not a manager’s sign-off
• In workplaces the danger doubles: covert research by an employer on its own staff slides quickly from research into surveillance
• Default position: if the study cannot be done openly, ask hard questions before concluding it should be done at all

Conclusion

• Interviews sit on a continuum from structured to unstructured; the semi-structured guide — opening, key questions, planned probes, close — is the organisational workhorse

• Technique is learnable: open framing, non-leading wording, silence, probes, active listening — and the practicalities of consent, recording, and setting are part of the method, not admin

• The interviewer is an instrument: who asks whom, especially up and down a hierarchy, shapes what can be said — design for it

• Focus groups trade individual depth for the sight of opinions forming through interaction; the moderator’s craft decides whether that trade pays off

• Observation adds what talk cannot: what people actually do — with covert designs flagged as ethically fraught

• Next steps: in the exercise you will build a guide and interview each other; in session 14 we ask what to do with the transcripts you will have created

• Questions and discussion are welcome

Exercise

Study guide