Qualitative Research: Qualitative interviews in medical research

Types of qualitative interview

Practising clinicians routinely interview patients during their clinical work, and they may wonder whether simply talking to people constitutes a legitimate form of research. In sociology and related disciplines, however, interviewing is a well established research technique. There are three main types: structured, semistructured, and in depth interviews (box 1).

Structured interviews consist of administering structured questionnaires, and interviewers are trained to ask questions (mostly fixed choice) in a standardised manner. For example, interviewees might be asked: “Is your health: excellent, good, fair, or poor?” Though qualitative interviews are often described as being unstructured in order to contrast them with this type of formalised quantitative interview, the term “unstructured” is misleading as no interview is completely devoid of structure: if it were, there would be no guarantee that the data gathered would be appropriate to the research question.

Semistructured interviews are conducted on the basis of a loose structure consisting of open ended questions that define the area to be explored, at least initially, and from which the interviewer or interviewee may diverge in order to pursue an idea in more detail. Continuing with the same example, interviewees might initially be asked a series of …