2.2 Creating interview materials
Before you begin your interviews, you need to create the materials for them. These materials will depend on your research, but at a minimum should include a topic guide, a distress protocol and a debrief sheet.
Topic guide
Semi-structured qualitative interviews don’t have a set list of questions that have to be worked through in order, but they do usually have a topic guide. This is a list of areas that you want to find out about that helps you structure the interview.
To begin creating a topic guide, make a list of the areas you’d like to cover. When your list is complete, think about what order would mimic a natural conversation and create the best flow. You may find it helpful to carry out a pilot interview to determine this. Interviews with different people will take different courses, so you may find you don’t stick to the order in your topic guide, but if an interview does jump around, having the guide will help you make sure you haven’t missed an important area.
Lastly, under each area, include two or three different questions that you might ask to find out about this area. Try to phrase these as open questions and avoid closed questions which can produce ‘yes’/‘no’ responses:
- Open questions start with ‘why’/‘when’/‘where’/‘how’
- Closed questions start with ‘do’/‘did’/‘don’t’
You shouldn’t expect to stick to these exact questions in the interview, but it can be helpful to have some ideas about what you could ask in case you get stuck during the interview. Please click here [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] for an example topic guide from the Bodylore Project.
Distress protocol and debrief sheet
Sometimes interviewees become upset during an interview. We will discuss what to do if this happens in more detail in Section 3, but it is useful to think about this possibility and decide what you will do as you prepare for interviews. Creating a step-by-step process of what you would do is called a distress protocol.
If someone becomes very upset, or if their distress stays with them after the end of the interview, you might want to have a list of organisations who could listen to or help the interviewee. These organisations should be ones that interviewees can contact directly for free. A debrief sheet includes details and a bit of information about these organisations. Please click here for an example.
Reading through the materials just before the interview will provide a refresher and help you to feel more prepared. Reminding yourself of the interview questions will help you to guide the discussion in a more natural way and will help you to get the interview back on track if it strays a little too far off. Interviews can sometimes go off topic, so being able to bring it back to the main questions is an important part of a researcher’s role.