An unstructured interview is an information-gathering approach that entails asking questions from the participants to gather data on a specific issue. Unstructured interviews, often called non-directive interviewing, have no predetermined structure and questions are not pre-arranged.

Unstructured interviews are often largely qualitative, and they may be highly useful for social science or humanities study that relies on personal experiences.

An unstructured interview is an excellent method for doing exploratory research. They’re known for being incredibly informal and adaptable, and they may elicit enthralling responses from your audience.

Unstructured interviews vary from other forms of interviews in that the topics and sequence of the questions are not predefined. The following are the other three most prevalent forms of interviews:

Structured interviews: Both the subject and the sequence of the questions are predefined.

Semi-structured interviews: Some questions are planned ahead of time, while some aren’t.

Focus group interviews: Instead of being presented to a single person, the questions are posed to a group of individuals.

Unstructured interview

Unstructured interviews are the most adaptable, with plenty of potential for improvisation. In addition, the questions and the sequence in which they are given are not predetermined, unlike in a structured interview. Instead, the interview moves forward based on the participant’s past responses.

Unstructured interviews are unplanned and unscripted. The absence of structure can aid you in gathering precise information on your subject while allowing you to spot trends during the analysis stage.

Unstructured interviews: Uses

Choosing which form of interview is most appropriate for your topic might be challenging. Unstructured interviews might be difficult to conduct and aren’t always the ideal option for answering your research question. Whenever unstructured interviews are conducted, keep the following in mind:

• You’re a seasoned interviewer with a solid understanding of your study topic.
• Exploratory nature of the study question. While you may have created theories, you are ready to learn new information or modify your perspective.
• You’re looking for descriptive information and are prepared to ask questions that will help you clarify and contextualize your first ideas and assumptions.
• Forming relationships with your subjects and providing a safe environment to express deeper feelings, thoughts, or life experiences is critical to your study.

It’s much more important to stay organized and build a method for keeping track of participant replies than it is in the case of structured or semi-structured interviews. In addition, data collection and assessment become much more difficult as the questions aren’t predetermined.

The different types of interviews

Be cautious when selecting the sort of interview that is most appropriate for your study. The most significant distinctions between the four categories are depicted in this table.

Unstructured interview: Advantages

Compared to other forms of interviews, unstructured interviews offer a few advantages.

✔ Very adaptable
Unstructured interviews are extremely adaptable and structured as a regular discussion. Moreover, it promotes an inclusive environment where new concepts and themes can flourish.

✔ Respondents appear to be more relaxed.
Unstructured interviews have a smoother flow, which might make your responder feel more comfortable. In addition, improved familiarity can help offset the power imbalance between the interviewer and the interviewee.

✔ Bias is less likely.
Similarly, more powerful subjects may be less inclined to skew their responses in favour of what they consider to be socially acceptable. As a result, unstructured interviews are frequently used in delicate or traumatic themes studies.

✔ More subtlety and depth
While comparable in terms of procedures to other forms of interviews, surveys, and polls, unstructured interviews provide more information. You may make as many follow-up questions as you want, and there’s a good chance you’ll get some ideas you hadn’t considered before.

Unstructured interview: Drawbacks

☓ Low generalizability and trustworthiness
Unstructured interviews’ versatility can facilitate the free flow of concepts, reducing their validity and generalizability. However, when respondents are not asked the same questions, it might be tough to evaluate replies, rendering the analysis step problematic. In addition, unstructured interviews may have limited sample sizes due to their duration.

☓ Possibility of leading questions
Because of the open-ended approach of unstructured interviews, it’s easy to fall into the trap of asking leading questions, which can prejudice your replies. In addition, it may be harder for the interviewer to maintain their responses or genuine thoughts oneself in this conversational context.

☓ It takes a long time.
Unstructured interviews can take a long time to conduct, both in the interview and the assessment. Supporting long, comprehensive replies can enrich the data. Still, it also means more time spent transcribing and evaluating the responses and the danger of essential information getting lost in the flow.

☓ Internal validity is at risk.
Similarly, keeping unstructured interviews “on course” can be difficult, with the potential of digressions and side inquiries derailing your research goals. Again, your research’s internal consistency may suffer due to this.

Unstructured interview questions

Asking unstructured interview questions that provide you with the information you need without biasing your replies. Again, you’ll have to depend on the conversation’s pace and the clues you get from your audience.

Here are some pointers:

• Because you won’t be drafting prepared questions in advance, you’ll need to be confident enough with your topic to come up with questions on the spur of the moment.
• Make a note of your subject and what you want to learn or understand from your interviews in a handbook that you may refer to later.
• Pose questions that urge your subjects to give a detailed response. Closed-ended inquiries that can only be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” should be avoided.
• To help put your respondents at ease and eliminate any emotions of dismissiveness or nervousness, concentrate on “how” inquiries rather than “why” queries.
• Consider starting the interview with an opener or a “giveaway” question to get things off to a good start before moving on to more sensitive themes.

Example
You’re researching the impact of hitting the gym on mental and physical well-being perceptions. You decide to do unstructured interviews to elicit more candid, uncensored responses, presenting your subjects with progressively tricky questions based on their past responses.
Here are a few options on how you may go with your conversation:

Conversation A

• Interviewer: Are you a member of a gym? How many times do you go?
• Subject: I visit the gym at least three times a week.
• Interviewer: How do you feel after going to the gym?
• Subject: I feel fresh and energized.

If the participant mentioned that coming to the gym is beneficial to their mental health, ask questions along those lines, like:

• You mentioned being fresh and energized. Please discuss.
• How would that make you feel if you missed a day at the gym?
• Do you get the same feeling after doing something else?

Conversation B

• Interviewer: Are you a member of a gym? How many times do you go?
• Subject: I do not like going to the gym.

You can delve deeper because the participant appears to have strong sentiments against the gym.

• Why do you not like going to the gym?
• Is there anything else that you like to do?
• Do you not like going to the gym or working out in general?

Conducting unstructured interview

After you’ve decided that an unstructured interview is the best method for your study, you may proceed to the next phase.

Establish your objectives and grounds
Try opening with some leading questions as you formulate your research question, like:

• What exactly are you hoping to gain or understand from an unstructured interview?
• Why is an unstructured interview the greatest match for your project, rather than another form of interview or another research approach?
• What is your research’s guiding principle? What will be the starting point for your impromptu and follow-up questions?

Although you don’t need to prepare your questions in advance for an unstructured interview, it doesn’t imply you shouldn’t. On the contrary, to guarantee that the interview stage is productive, unstructured interviews need substantial preparation.

• Perhaps you’ve been researching it for a long time or have done comparable research before.
• Perhaps you want more information or nuance to corroborate or refute previous findings or go deeper into a specific topic that arose from a previous study.

You may begin considering the types of questions to pose once you have a firm grasp of your research subject. Start with broad, encompassing topics and discuss possible avenues for the dialogue.

Find the subjects
You may use a variety of sampling strategies to find interview subjects, including:

• Voluntary response sampling: Placing posters in the food court, for instance, observing who responds.
• Stratified sampling of people of a certain age, ethnicity, or gender expression who are relevant to your study.
• Convenient sampling of other individuals at your campus, coworkers, or acquaintances.

Stay wary of sampling bias, which arises when specific individuals of a population are consistently more likely than others to be picked for your research.

Choose a setting
You must determine if your interview will occur face-to-face, on-call, or via video calls ahead of time.

Face to face, phone, and video meetings all offer their own set of benefits and drawbacks.

• In general, live interviews might cause uneasiness or interviewer effects, in which the responder feels compelled to answer in a way that pleases you.
• Videoconferencing, in particular, might seem unpleasant or stiff, affecting your outcomes. On the other hand, your participant may feel more at ease in their own house.
• When respondents are not face-to-face with you, you may get more honest replies like in a phone interview. However, external factors or diversions on the part of the participants may influence their replies.

Before beginning the interview, make sure you have formal informed permission from your subjects. It includes the following:

• Consent to be recorded
• The signing of a secrecy agreement
• The signing of a contract to anonymize data.

Carry out the interviews
Pay close heed to any ambient factors that can influence your replies while you do your interviews. For example, sounds, climate, and environment are all factors in your body posture. To avoid interviewer biases, keep your tone and any comments neutral.

One of the most difficult aspects of unstructured interviews is keeping your questions balanced and impartial. Aim for an open-ended language, and let your subjects establish the tone by offering follow-up questions that organically lead from their previous response.

When asking impromptu questions, ensure to take reference from your guide and keep your research question in mind. Steer a participant around to the actual topic if necessary.

Analyzing an unstructured interview

After you’ve completed your interviews, you’ll go to the evaluation stage. To ensure that you remain organized, designate each respondent an alias (like a numeral or alphabet).

To begin, transcribe your taped interviews. Next, you may develop your groups using content or theme analysis, looking for trends that stand out among your responses and validating your theories.

Interview transcriptions
Because of their more thorough nature, the transcribing process for unstructured interviews can be rather lengthy. Therefore, you may save a lot of time by deciding whether you’ll do verbatim transcription or intelligent verbatim transcription beforehand.

• If you think laughing, pauses or fillers like “errrrrr” impact your analysis or study results; you should do the verbatim transcription and incorporate them.
• On the other hand, intelligent verbatim transcription can help you eliminate fillers and correct grammatical errors in your transcription. In addition, this process can be sped up using intelligent verbatim transcribing.

Transcribing does have the extra advantage of providing an excellent chance for data purification. You can jot down any questions or contradictions that arise while you listen.

Remember that your supervisor may require you to provide the completed transcriptions in the appendix section of your report in some conditions.

Coding of unstructured interviews
You can start your theme or content analysis when you’ve done transcribing. Here, you name or categorize phrases, trends, or repeated replies that strikeout to you for subsequent examination. It is referred to as “coding.”

Given the open-ended style of unstructured interviews, theme analysis will most likely be used rather than content analysis. By discovering common themes, concepts, or trends in your participants’ comments, you might draw early inferences about them.

• After you’ve gotten to know your replies well enough, you may categorize them into distinct codes or categories.
• On the other hand, codes might be too precise or specialized for a thorough investigation. You may continue by categorizing related codes into larger categories.
• After identifying your themes, double-check your answers to make sure they’re accurate representations of your data.

If you’re having trouble with the themes you’ve chosen, consider dividing them up, merging them, or deleting them altogether if they don’t seem to suit. Of course, your topics must be as useful and precise as possible during the process.

Analysis of unstructured interviews

You can use either an inductive or a deductive strategy in your analysis if you’re satisfied with your basic views.

• Inductive methods are more open-ended, enabling your facts to choose your topics.
• A deductive strategy is the polar opposite, and it entails seeing if your evidence supports predetermined themes or concepts.

Thematic analysis is very subjective, which might cause problems with the consistency of your findings. Because this interview style is unstructured, you’ll have to rely more on your judgement and interpretations. Keep your focus on the task at hand.

Presenting results
After you’ve completed your data analysis, you’re prepared to put your results together into a research report.

• The methodology section demonstrates how you reasoned and conceived your analysis by outlining your data gathering approach (in this example, detailing your unstructured interview technique).
• The discussion and results portions should typically detail each of your classified categories and allow you to present your case.
• Then you may sum up your key points and suggest some areas for additional research.
• You can provide ideas for future study in the comment area because unstructured interviews are mostly exploratory in design.

Example
Assume you’re a history student who is especially intrigued about the town’s history in which you live. The town has a long history stretching back to the early 16th century, but many long-time inhabitants have been leaving in recent years according to local census statistics.

You come up with a few possible explanations for this shift:

• First, people are leaving since the nearest large city offers more prospects.
• The institution has been buying land aggressively to create more student housing.
• The university has traditionally been the town’s primary source of employment, and budget reductions to education have resulted in a hiring freeze.
• The cost of living in the neighbourhood has risen dramatically in past years, and long-time homeowners cannot maintain their homes due to higher property taxes.

Based on anecdotal evidence, you speculate that the rising expense of life is the primary cause driving long-term residents away. Nevertheless, other possibilities, such as a lack of work opportunities combined with the university’s expansionist goals, cannot be ruled out.

You are quite acquainted with this subject and with historical accounts in general. You decide to undertake unstructured interviews with long-term inhabitants of your town because it is exploratory, but it has the possibility of becoming sensitive or emotional. Multigenerational residents are of great importance.

You advertise on the town’s Facebook group and the forum to obtain the correct mix of people. You may also distribute flyers at neighbourhood coffee houses and mailboxes.

It’s time to start conducting interviews when you’ve gathered your participants. Consider beginning with an icebreaker like:

• What is your favourite aspect of this city?
• Share a particularly memorable recollection you have of the place

You may then continue the interview by examining your participants’ family background, relationships with the town, or any anecdotes they share–whether hilarious, moving, or sentimental–by asking follow-up questions pertinent to their comments.

As the interview progresses, building rapport with your subjects will help you dive into the reasons behind their decision to stay or go and any opposing ideas and sentiments they may have. Ensure to frame it like a discussion to help them feel more at ease while discussing emotionally intense themes.

Use caution while asking leading questions. Here’s an illustration:

☓ Has the rising cost of living prompted you to contemplate leaving the area? The way you phrase it suggests that you believe this is the case. It might sway your responders’ responses, encouraging them to reply actively.

✔ Are there any elements that make you think about leaving the area? Again, this approach assures that the participant is expressing their thoughts, and it may even result in some unexpected comments that add to your analysis.

After completing your questions and transcribing your data, you can next do theme analysis, categorizing replies into various categories. Again, you’d choose the inductive technique because you started your investigation with various credible explanations regarding why residents could be departing.

You can make deductions and conclusions when you’ve identified the key themes in your data. In most cases, your findings section will go through each theme or pattern you discovered, detailing them individually and how frequently they appeared in your research.

Maybe one explanation, in particular, stood out among the comments, or perhaps it was a mixed bag. Describe why you believe this is the case, and don’t be afraid to include several (well anonymized) instances from the data to back up your claims when conducting an unstructured interview.

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