Semi-structured Interview
An interview guided by prepared questions or topics but flexible enough to probe, reorder, and follow up on what participants say.
A semi-structured interview uses an interview guide listing core questions or topics, but the interviewer adapts in the moment: probing interesting answers, changing question order, and letting participants raise issues the guide did not anticipate. This balance of consistency and flexibility makes it the most widely used interview format in qualitative research. All participants address the same central territory, which supports comparison across cases, while the open structure produces the rich, contextual detail that thematic and other qualitative analyses require.
For a thesis, semi-structured interviews suit questions about experiences, meanings, and processes. Put the interview guide in an appendix, explain how it links to your research questions, and describe how it evolved across interviews if it did. Reporting your probing practice and recording arrangements shows examiners that flexibility was disciplined, not casual.
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