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• Structured Interview | Definition, Guide & Examples

Structured Interview | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on January 27, 2022 by Tegan George and Julia Merkus. Revised on June 22, 2023.

A structured interview is a data collection method that relies on asking questions in a set order to collect data on a topic. It is one of four types of interviews .

In research, structured interviews are often quantitative in nature. They can also be used in qualitative research if the questions are open-ended, but this is less common.

While structured interviews are often associated with job interviews, they are also common in marketing, social science, survey methodology, and other research fields.

• Semi-structured interviews : A few questions are predetermined, whereas the other questions aren’t planned.
• Unstructured interviews : None of the questions are predetermined.
• Focus group interviews : The questions are presented to a group instead of one individual.

Table of contents

What is a structured interview, when to use a structured interview, advantages of structured interviews, disadvantages of structured interviews, structured interview questions, how to conduct a structured interview, how to analyze a structured interview, presenting your results, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about structured interviews.

Structured interviews are the most systematized type of interview. In contrast to semi-structured or unstructured interviews, the interviewer uses predetermined questions in a set order.

Structured interviews are often closed-ended. They can be dichotomous, which means asking participants to answer “yes” or “no” to each question, or multiple-choice. While open-ended structured interviews do exist, they are less common.

Asking set questions in a set order allows you to easily compare responses between participants in a uniform context. This can help you see patterns and highlight areas for further research, and it can be a useful explanatory or exploratory research tool.

Structured interviews are best used when:

• You already have a very clear understanding of your topic, so you possess a baseline for designing strong structured questions.
• You are constrained in terms of time or resources and need to analyze your data efficiently.
• Your research question depends on strong parity between participants, with environmental conditions held constant.

A structured interview is straightforward to conduct and analyze. Asking the same set of questions mitigates potential biases and leads to fewer ambiguities in analysis. It is an undertaking you can likely handle as an individual, provided you remain organized.

Differences between different types of interviews

Make sure to choose the type of interview that suits your research best. This table shows the most important differences between the four types.

Reduced bias

Increased credibility, reliability and validity, simple, cost-effective and efficient, formal in nature, limited flexibility, limited scope.

It can be difficult to write structured interview questions that approximate exactly what you are seeking to measure. Here are a few tips for writing questions that contribute to high internal validity :

• Define exactly what you want to discover prior to drafting your questions. This will help you write questions that really zero in on participant responses.
• Avoid jargon, compound sentences, and complicated constructions.
• Be as clear and concise as possible, so that participants can answer your question immediately.
• Do you think that employers should provide free gym memberships?
• Did any of your previous employers provide free memberships?
• Does your current employer provide a free membership?
• a) 1 time; b) 2 times; c) 3 times; d) 4 or more times
• Do you enjoy going to the gym?

Structured interviews are among the most straightforward research methods to conduct and analyze. Once you’ve determined that they’re the right fit for your research topic , you can proceed with the following steps.

Step 1: Set your goals and objectives

Start with brainstorming some guiding questions to help you conceptualize your research question, such as:

• What are you trying to learn or achieve from a structured interview?
• Why are you choosing a structured interview as opposed to a different type of interview, or another research method?

If you have satisfying reasoning for proceeding with a structured interview, you can move on to designing your questions.

Step 2: Design your questions

Pay special attention to the order and wording of your structured interview questions . Remember that in a structured interview they must remain the same. Stick to closed-ended or very simple open-ended questions.

Step 3: Assemble your participants

Depending on your topic, there are a few sampling methods you can use, such as:

• Voluntary response sampling : For example, posting a flyer on campus and finding participants based on responses
• Convenience sampling of those who are most readily accessible to you, such as fellow students at your university
• Stratified sampling of a particular age, race, ethnicity, gender identity, or other characteristic of interest to you
• Judgment sampling of a specific set of participants that you already know you want to include

Step 4: Decide on your medium

Determine whether you will be conducting your interviews in person or whether your interview will take pen-and-paper format. If conducted live, you need to decide if you prefer to talk with participants in person, over the phone, or via video conferencing.

Step 5: Conduct your interviews

As you conduct your interviews, be very careful that all conditions remain as constant as possible.

• Ask your questions in the same order, and try to moderate your tone of voice and any responses to participants as much as you can.
• Pay special attention to your body language (e.g., nodding, raising eyebrows), as this can bias responses.

After you’re finished conducting your interviews, it’s time to analyze your results.

• Assign each of your participants a number or pseudonym for organizational purposes.
• Transcribe the recordings manually or with the help of transcription software.
• Conduct a content or thematic analysis to look for categories or patterns of responses. In most cases, it’s also possible to conduct a statistical analysis to test your hypotheses .

Transcribing interviews

If you have audio-recorded your interviews, you will likely have to transcribe them prior to conducting your analysis. In some cases, your supervisor might ask you to add the transcriptions in the appendix of your paper.

First, you will have to decide whether to conduct verbatim transcription or intelligent verbatim transcription. Do pauses, laughter, or filler words like “umm” or “like” affect your analysis and research conclusions?

• If so, conduct verbatim transcription and include them.
• If not, conduct intelligent verbatim transcription, which excludes fillers and fixes any grammar issues, and is often easier to analyze.

The transcription process is a great opportunity for you to cleanse your data as well, spotting and resolving any inconsistencies or errors that come up as you listen.

Coding and analyzing structured interviews

After transcribing, it’s time to conduct your thematic or content analysis . This often involves “coding” words, patterns, or themes, separating them into categories for more robust analysis.

Due to the closed-ended nature of many structured interviews, you will most likely be conducting content analysis, rather than thematic analysis.

• You quantify the categories you chose in the coding stage by counting the occurrence of the words, phrases, subjects or concepts you selected.
• After coding, you can organize and summarize the data using descriptive statistics .
• Next, inferential statistics allows you to come to conclusions about your hypotheses and make predictions for future research. 

When conducting content analysis, you can take an inductive or a deductive approach. With an inductive approach, you allow the data to determine your themes. A deductive approach is the opposite, and involves investigating whether your data confirm preconceived themes or ideas.

Content analysis has a systematic procedure that can easily be replicated , yielding high reliability to your results. However, keep in mind that while this approach reduces bias, it doesn’t eliminate it. Be vigilant about remaining objective here, even if your analysis does not confirm your hypotheses .

After your data analysis, the next step is to combine your findings into a research paper .

• Your methodology section describes how you collected the data (in this case, describing your structured interview process) and explains how you justify or conceptualize your analysis.
• Your discussion and results sections usually address each of your coded categories, describing each in turn, as well as how often they occurred.

If you conducted inferential statistics in addition to descriptive statistics, you would generally report the test statistic , p -value , and effect size in your results section. These values explain whether your results justify rejecting your null hypothesis and whether the result is practically significant .

You can then conclude with the main takeaways and avenues for further research.

Example of interview methodology for a research paper

Let’s say you are interested in healthcare on your campus. You attend a large public institution with a lot of international students, and you think there may be a difference in perceptions based on country of origin.

Specifically, you hypothesize that students coming from countries with single-payer or socialized healthcare will find US options less satisfying.

There is a large body of research available on this topic, so you decide to conduct structured interviews of your peers to see if there’s a difference between international students and local students.

You are a member of a large campus club that brings together international students and local students, and you send a message to the club to ask for volunteers.

Here are some questions you could ask:

• Do you find healthcare options on campus to be: excellent; good; fair; average; poor?
• Does your home country have socialized healthcare? Yes/No
• Are you on the campus healthcare plan? Yes/No
• Have you ever worried about your health insurance? Yes/No
• Have you ever had a serious health condition that insurance did not cover? Yes/No
• Have you ever been surprised or shocked by a medical bill? Yes/No

After conducting your interviews and transcribing your data, you can then conduct content analysis, coding responses into different categories. Since you began your research with the theory that international students may find US healthcare lacking, you would use the deductive approach to see if your hypotheses seem to hold true.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Student’s  t -distribution
• Normal distribution
• Null and Alternative Hypotheses
• Chi square tests
• Confidence interval
• Quartiles & Quantiles
• Cluster sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Data cleansing
• Reproducibility vs Replicability
• Peer review
• Prospective cohort study

Research bias

• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Placebo effect
• Hawthorne effect
• Hindsight bias
• Affect heuristic
• Social desirability bias

A structured interview is a data collection method that relies on asking questions in a set order to collect data on a topic. They are often quantitative in nature. Structured interviews are best used when: 

• You already have a very clear understanding of your topic. Perhaps significant research has already been conducted, or you have done some prior research yourself, but you already possess a baseline for designing strong structured questions.
• You are constrained in terms of time or resources and need to analyze your data quickly and efficiently.

More flexible interview options include semi-structured interviews , unstructured interviews , and focus groups .

The four most common types of interviews are:

• Structured interviews : The questions are predetermined in both topic and order. 
• Semi-structured interviews : A few questions are predetermined, but other questions aren’t planned.

The interviewer effect is a type of bias that emerges when a characteristic of an interviewer (race, age, gender identity, etc.) influences the responses given by the interviewee.

There is a risk of an interviewer effect in all types of interviews , but it can be mitigated by writing really high-quality interview questions.

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Structured vs. unstructured interviews: A complete guide

Last updated

7 March 2023

Reviewed by

Miroslav Damyanov

Interviews can help you understand the context of a subject, eyewitness accounts of an event, people's perceptions of a product, and more.

In some instances, semi-structured or unstructured interviews can be more helpful; in others, structured interviews are the right choice to obtain the information you seek.

In some cases, structured interviews can save time, making your research more efficient. Let’s dive into everything you need to know about structured interviews.

Analyze all kinds of interviews

Bring all your interviews into one place to analyze and understand

• What are structured interviews?

Structured interviews are also known as standardized interviews, patterned interviews, or planned interviews. They’re a research instrument that uses a standard sequence of questions to collect information about the research subject. 

Often, you’ll use structured interviews when you need data that’s easy to categorize and quantify for a statistical analysis of responses.

Structured interviews are incredibly effective at helping researchers identify patterns and trends in response data. They’re great at minimizing the time and resources necessary for data collection and analysis.

What types of questions suit structured interviews?

Often, researchers use structured interviews for quantitative research . In these cases, they usually employ close-ended questions. 

Close-ended questions have a fixed set of responses from which the interviewer can choose. Because of the limited response selection set, response data from close-ended questions is easy to aggregate and analyze.

Researchers often employ multiple-choice or dichotomous close-ended questions in interviews. 

For multiple-choice questions, interviewees may choose between three or more possible answers. The interviewer will often restrict the response to four or five possible options. An interviewee will likely need help recalling more, which can slow down and complicate the interview process. 

For dichotomous questions, the interviewee may choose between two possible options. Yes or no and true or false questions are examples of dichotomous questions.

Open-ended questions are common in structured interviews. However, researchers use them when conducting qualitative research and looking for in-depth information about the interviewee's perceptions or experiences. 

These questions take longer for the interviewee to answer, and the answers take longer for the researcher to analyze. There's also a higher possibility of the researcher collecting irrelevant data. However, open-ended questions are more effective than close-ended questions in gathering in-depth information.

Sometimes, researchers use structured interviews in qualitative research. In this case, the research instrument contains open-ended questions in the same sequence. This usage is less common because it can be hard to compare feedback, especially with large sample sizes.

• What types of structured interviews are there?

Researchers conduct structured interviews face-to-face, via telephone or videoconference, or through a survey instrument. 

Face-to-face interviews help researchers collect data and gather more detailed information. They can collect and analyze facial expressions, body language, tone, and inflection easier than they might through other interview methods . 

However, face-to-face interviews are the most resource-intensive to arrange. You'll likely need to assume travel and other related logistical costs for a face-to-face interview. 

These interviews also take more time and are more vulnerable to bias than some other formats. For these reasons, face-to-face interviews are best with a small sample size.

You can conduct interviews via an audio or video call. They are less resource-intensive than face-to-face interviews and can use a larger sample size. 

However, it can be difficult for the interviewer to engage effectively with the interviewee within this format, which can inject bias or ambiguity into the responses. This is particularly true for audio calls, especially if the interviewer and interviewee have not met before the interview. 

A video call can help the interviewer capture some data from body language and facial expressions, but less so than in a face-to-face interview. Technical issues are another thing to consider. If you’re studying a group of people that live in an area with limited Internet connectivity, this can make a video call challenging.

Survey questionnaires mirror the essential elements of structured interviews by containing a consistent sequence of standard questions. Surveys in quantitative research usually include close-ended questions. This data collection method can be beneficial if you need feedback from a large sample size.

Surveys are resource-efficient from a data administration standpoint but are more limited in the data they can gather. Further, if a survey question is ambiguous, you can’t clear up the ambiguity before someone responds. 

By contrast, in a face-to-face or tele-interview, an interviewee may ask clarifying questions or exhibit confusion when asked an unclear question, allowing the interviewer to clarify.

• What are some common examples of structured interviews?

Structured interviews are relevant in many fields. You can find structured interviews in human resources, marketing, political science, psychology, and more. 

Academic and applied researchers commonly use them to verify insights from analyzing academic literature or responses from other interview types.

However, one of the most common structured interview applications lies outside the research realm: Human resource professionals and hiring managers commonly use these interviews to hire employees.

A hiring manager can easily compare responses and whittle down the applicant pool by posing a standard set of closed-ended interview questions to multiple applicants. 

Further, standard close-ended or open-ended questions can reduce bias and add objectivity and credibility to the hiring process.

Structured interviews are common in political polling. Candidates and political parties may conduct structured interviews with relatively small voter groups to obtain feedback. They ask questions about issues, messaging, and voting intentions to craft policies and campaigns.

• What do you need to conduct a structured interview?

The tools you need to conduct a structured interview vary by format. But fundamentally, you will need: 

A participant

An interviewer

A pen and pad (or other note-taking tools)

A recording device

A consent form

A list of interview questions

While some interviewees may express qualms about you recording the interview, it’s challenging to conduct quality interviews while taking detailed notes. Even if you have a note-taker in the room, note-taking may introduce bias and can’t capture body language or facial expressions. 

Depending on the nature of your study, others may wish to review your sources. If they call your conclusions into question, audio recordings are additional evidence in your favor.

To record, you should ask the interviewee to sign a consent form. Check with your employer's legal counsel or institutional review board at your academic institution for guidance about obtaining consent legally in your state. 

If you're conducting a face-to-face interview, a camcorder, digital camera, or even some smartphones are sufficient for recording.

For a tele-interview, you'll find that today's leading video conferencing software applications feature a convenient recording function for data collection.

If a survey is your method of choice, you'll need the survey and a distribution and collection method. Online survey software applications allow you to create surveys by inputting the questions and distributing your survey via text or email. 

In some cases, survey companies even offer packages in which they will call those who do not respond via email or text and conduct the survey over the phone.

• How to conduct a structured interview

If you're planning a face-to-face interview, you'll need to take a few steps to do it efficiently. 

First, prepare your questions and double-check that the structured interview format is best for your study. Make sure that they are neutral, unbiased, and close-ended. Ask a friend or colleague to test your questions pre-interview to ensure they are clear and straightforward.

Choose the setting for your interviews. Ideally, you'll select a location that is easy to get to. If you live in a city, consider addresses accessible via public transportation. 

The room where your interview takes place should be comfortable, without distraction, and quiet, so your recording device clearly captures your interviewee's audio.

If you're looking to interview people with specific characteristics, you'll need to recruit them. Some companies specialize in interview recruitment. You provide the attributes you need, and they identify a pool of candidates for a fee. Alternatively, you can advertise to participants on social media and other relevant avenues. 

If you're looking for college students in a specific region, look at student newspaper ads or affiliated social media pages. 

You'll also want to incentivize participation, as recruiting interview respondents without compensation is exceedingly difficult. It’s best to include a line or two about requiring written consent for participation and how you’ll use the interview audio.

When you have an interview participant, discuss the intent of your research and acquire their consent. Ensure your recording tools are working well, and begin your interview. 

Don't rely on the recordings alone: Note the most significant insights from your participant, as you could easily forget them when it's time to analyze your data.

You'll want to transcribe your audio at the data analysis stage. Some recording applications use AI to generate transcripts. Remove filler words and other sounds to generate a clear transcript for the best results. 

A written transcript will help you analyze data and pull quotes from your audio to include in your final research paper.

• What are other common types of interviews?

Typically, you'll find researchers using at least one of these other common interview types:

Semi-structured interviews

As the name suggests, semi-structured interviews include some elements of a structured interview. You’ll include preplanned questions, but you can deviate from those questions to explore the interviewee's answers in greater depth.

Typically, a researcher will conduct a semi-structured interview with preplanned questions and an interview guide. The guide will include topics and potential questions to ask. Sometimes, the guide may also include areas or questions to avoid asking.

Unstructured interviews

In an unstructured interview , the researchers approach the interview subjects without predetermined questions. Researchers often use this qualitative instrument to probe into personal experiences and testimony, typically toward the beginning of a research study. 

Often, you’ll validate the insights you gather during unstructured and semi-structured interviews with structured interviews, surveys, and similar quantitative research tools.

Focus group interviews

Focus group interviews differ from the other three types of interviews as you pose the questions to a small group. Focus groups are typically either structured or semi-structured. When researchers employ structured interview questions, they are typically confident in the areas they wish to explore. 

Semi-structured interviews are perfect for a researcher seeking to explore broad issues. However, you must be careful that unplanned questions are unambiguous and neutral. Otherwise, you could wind up with biased results.

What is a structured vs. an unstructured interview?

A structured interview consists of standard preplanned questions for data collection. These questions may be close-ended, open-ended, or a combination. 

By contrast, an unstructured interview includes unplanned questions. In these interviews, you’ll usually equip facilitators with an interview guide. This includes guidelines for asking questions and samples that can help them ask relevant questions.

What are the advantages of a structured interview?

Relative to other interview formats, a structured interview is usually more time-efficient. With a preplanned set of questions, your interview is less likely to go into tangents, especially if you use close-ended questions. 

The more structure you provide to the interview, the more likely you are to generate responses that are easy to analyze. By contrast, an unstructured interview may involve a freewheeling conversation with off-topic and irrelevant feedback that lasts a long time.

What is an example of a structured question?

A structured question is any question you ask in an interview that you’ve preplanned and standardized.

For example, if you conduct five interviews and the first question you ask each one is, "Do you believe the world is round, yes or no?" you have asked them a structured question. This is also a close-ended dichotomous question.

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Structured Interviews: Guide to Standardized Questions

Introduction

Types of interviews in qualitative research, what are structured interviews good for, structured interview process.

Qualitative researchers are used to dealing with unstructured data in social settings that are often dynamic and unpredictable. That said, there are research methods that can provide some more control over this unpredictable data while collecting insightful data .

The structured interview is one such method. Researchers can conduct a structured interview when they want to standardize the research process to give all respondents the same questions and analyze differences between answers.

In this article, we'll look at structured interviews, when they are ideal for your research, and how to conduct them.

Interviews are intentionally crafted sources of data in social science research. There are three types of interviews in research that balance research rigor and rich data collection .

To better understand structured interviews, it's important to contrast them with the other types of interviews that also serve useful purposes in research. As always, the best tool for data collection depends on your research inquiry.

Structured interviews

The structured interview format is the most rigid of the three types of interviews conceptualized in qualitative research. Imagine policy makers want to understand the perceptions of dozens or even hundreds of individuals. In this case, it may make it easier to streamline the interview process by simply asking the same questions of all respondents.

The same structured interview questions are posed to each and every respondent, akin to how hiring managers ask the same questions to all applicants during the hiring process. The intention behind this approach is to ensure that the interview is the same no matter who the respondent is, leaving only the differences in responses to be analyzed .

Moreover, the standardized interview format typically involves respondents being asked the same set of questions in the same order. A uniform sequence of questions ensures for an easy analysis when you can line up answers across respondents.

Unstructured interviews

An unstructured interview is the exact opposite of a structured interview, as unstructured interviews have no predetermined set of questions. Instead of a standardized interview, a researcher may opt for a study that remains open to exploring any issues or topics that a participant brings up in their interview. While this can generate unexpected insights, it can also be time-consuming and may not always yield answers that are directly related to the original research question guiding the study.

However, this doesn't make a study that employs unstructured interviews less rigorous . In fact, unstructured interviews are a great tool for inductive inquiry . One typical use for unstructured interviews is to probe not only for answers but for the salient points of a topic to begin with.

When a researcher uses an unstructured interview, they usually have a topic in mind but not a predetermined set of data points to analyze at the outset. This format allows respondents to speak at length on their perspectives and offer the researcher insights that can later form a theoretical framework for future research that could benefit from a structured interview format.

Moreover, this format provides the researcher with the greatest degree of freedom in determining questions depending on how they interact with their respondents. A respondent's body language, for example, may signal discomfort with a particularly controversial question. The interviewer can thus decide to adjust or reword their questions to create a more comfortable environment for the respondent.

Semi-structured interviews

A semi-structured interview lies in the middle ground between the structured and unstructured interview. This type of interview still relies on predetermined questions as a structured interview does. However, unlike structured interviews, a semi-structured interview also allows for follow-up questions to respondents when their answers warrant further probing. The predetermined questions thus serve as a guide for the interviewer, but the wording and ordering of questions can be adjusted, and additional questions can be asked during the course of the interview.

A researcher may conduct semi-structured interviews when they need flexibility in asking questions but can still benefit from advance preparation of key questions. In this case, much of the advice in this article about structured interviews still applies in terms of ensuring some degree of standardization when conducting research.

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Consider that more free-flowing interview formats in qualitative research allow for the interviewer to more freely probe a respondent for deeper, more insightful answers on the topic of inquiry. This approach to research is useful when the researcher needs to develop theoretical coherence surrounding a new topic or research context in which it would be difficult to predict beforehand which questions are worth asking.

In this sense, structured interviews make more sense for research inquiries with a well-defined theoretical framework that guides the data collection and data analysis process . With such a framework in mind, researchers can devise questions that are grounded in existing research so that new insights further develop that scholarship.

Advantages of structured interviews

Formal, structured interviews are ideal for keeping interviewers and interview respondents focused on the topic at hand. A conversation might take unanticipated turns without a set goal or predetermined objective in mind; a structured interview helps keep the dialogue from going down any irrelevant tangents and minimize potentially unnecessary, extended monologues.

Another key advantage of structured interviews is that it makes comparisons across participants easier. Since each person was asked the same questions, the data is produced in a consistent format. Researchers can then focus on analyzing answers to a particular question, and there is minimal data organization work that needs to be done to facilitate the analysis.

There are also benefits in terms of the logistics of conducting structured interviews. Interviewers concerned with time constraints will find this format beneficial to their data collection .

Moreover, ensuring that respondents are asked the same questions in the same order limits the need for training interviewers to conduct interviews in a consistent manner. Unstructured and semi-structured interviews rely on the ability to ask follow-up questions in moments when the responses provide opportunities for deeper elaboration.

Those who conduct a structured interview, on the other hand, need only read from an interview guide with a list of questions to pose to respondents. This allows the researcher more freedom to rely on assistants to conduct interviews with minimal training and resources.

Disadvantages of structured interviews

In structured interviews, there is little room for asking probing questions of respondents, particularly if the researcher believes that follow-up questions might adversely influence how the respondent answers subsequent core questions. Restricting the interview to a predetermined set of questions may mitigate this effect, but it may also prevent a sufficiently clear understanding of respondents' perspectives established from the use of follow-up questions.

Forcing the interviewer to ask the same order of questions in an interview can also have a consequential effect on the data collection . Because every respondent is different, the interview questions may resonate with each person in different ways. A skillful interviewer conducting unstructured or semi-structured interviews has the freedom to make choices about what questions to ask in order to gather the most insightful data.

Ultimately, the biggest disadvantage of structured interviews comes from their biggest advantage: using predetermined questions can be a double-edged sword, providing consistency and systematic organization but also limiting the research to the questions that were decided before conducting the interviews. This makes it crucial that researchers have a clear understanding of which questions they want to ask and why. It can also be helpful to conduct pilot tests of the interview, to test out the structured questions with a handful of people and assess if any changes to the questions need to be made.

Why not just do surveys?

You might think that a structured interview is no different from a survey with open-ended questions. After all, the questions are determined ahead of time and won't change over the course of data collection . In many ways, there are many similarities in both methods.

There are, of course, benefits to either approach. Surveys permit data collection from much larger numbers of respondents than may be feasible for an interview study. Structured interviews, however, allow the interviewer some degree of flexibility, particularly when the respondent has trouble understanding the question or needs further prompting to provide a sufficient response.

Moreover, the interpersonal interaction between the interviewer and respondent offers potential for richer data collection because of the degree of rapport established through face-to-face communication. Where written questions may seem static and impersonal, an in-person interview (or at least one conducted in real time) might make the respondent more comfortable in answering questions.

Individual interviews are also more likely to generate detailed responses to questions in comparison to surveys. Interviews are also well suited for research topics that bear some personal significance for participants, providing ample space for them to express themselves.

When you conduct a structured interview, you are designing a study that is as standardized as possible to mitigate context effects and ensure the ease of data collection and analysis . As with all interviews conducted in qualitative research , there is an intentional process to planning for structured interviews with considerations that researchers should keep in mind.

Research design

As mentioned above, research inquiries with clearly defined theoretical frameworks tend to benefit from structured interviews. Researchers can create a list of questions from such frameworks so that answers speak directly to, affirm, or challenge the existing scholarship surrounding the topic of interest.

A researcher should conduct a literature review to determine the extent of theoretical coherence in the topic they are researching. Are there aspects of a topic or phenomenon that scholars have identified that can serve as key data points around which questions can be crafted? Conversely, is it a topic or phenomenon that lacks sufficient conceptualization?

If your literature review does not allow you to create or use a robust theoretical framework for data collection, consider other types of interviews that allow you to inductively generate that framework in data analysis .

You should also make decisions about the conditions under which you conduct interviews. Some studies go as far as making sure that the interview environment is a uniform context across respondents. Are interviews in a quiet, comfortable environment? What time of day are interviews conducted?

The degree to which you ensure uniform conditions across interviews is up to you. Whatever you decide, however, creating an environment where respondents feel free to volunteer answers will facilitate rich data collection that will make data analysis more meaningful.

Structured interview questions

An interview guide is an essential tool for structured interviews. This guide is little more than a list of required questions to ask, but this list ensures consistency across the interviews in your study.

When you write questions for a structured interview, rely on your literature review to identify salient points around which you can design questions. This approach ensures that you are grounding your data collection in the established research.

When crafting your guide, think about the time constraints and the likely length of answers that your respondents may give. Structured interviews can involve five or 25 questions, but if you are limited to 30-45 minutes per respondent, you will need to consider whether you can ask the required questions and collect sufficient responses within your timeframe.

As a result, it's important to pilot your questions with preliminary respondents or other researchers. A pilot interview allows you to test your interview protocol and make tweaks to your question guide before conducting your study in earnest.

Collecting data from structured interviews

Data collection refers to conducting the interviews , recording what you and your respondents say, and transcribing those recordings for data analysis . While this is a simple enough task, it is important to consider the equipment you use to collect data.

If the verbal utterances of your respondents are your sole concern, then an audio recorder should be sufficient for capturing your respondents' answers. Your choice of equipment can be as simple as a smartphone audio recorder application. Alternatively, you can consider professional equipment to make sure you collect as much audio detail as possible from your interviews.

Communication studies, for example, may be more concerned about the interviewer effect (e.g., studies that ask controversial questions to evoke particular responses) or the context effects (i.e., the effect of the surrounding environment on respondents) in interviews . In such cases, interviewers may capture data with video recordings to analyze body language or facial expressions to certain interview questions. Responses caught on video can be analyzed for any patterns across respondents.

Analyzing structured interviews

Once you have transcribed your interviews, you can analyze your data. One of the more common means for analyzing qualitative data is thematic analysis , which relies on the identification of commonly recurring themes throughout your research. What codes occur the most often? Are there commonalities across responses that are worth pointing out to your research audience?

It's a good idea to code each response by the question they address. The set order of questions in a structured interview study makes it easy to identify the answers given by each respondent. By coding each answer by the question they respond to and the themes apparent in the response, you will be able to analyze what themes and patterns occur in each set of answers.

You can also analyze differences between respondents. In ATLAS.ti, you can place interview transcripts into document groups to organize and divide your data along salient categories such as gender, age group, socioeconomic status, and other identifiers you may find useful. In doing so, you will be able to restrict your data analysis to a specific group of interview respondents to see how their answers differ from other groups.

Presenting interview findings

Disseminating qualitative research is often a matter of summarizing the salient points of your data analysis so that it is easy to understand, insightful, and useful to your research audience. For research collecting data from interviews , two of the more common approaches to presenting findings include visualizations and excerpts.

Visualizations are ideal for representing the salient ideas arising from large sets of otherwise unstructured data . Meaningful illustrations such as frequency charts, word clouds, and Sankey diagrams can prove more persuasive than an extended narrative in a research paper or presentation.

Consider the word cloud in the screenshot of ATLAS.ti below. This word cloud was generated from the transcripts of a set of interviews to illustrate what concepts appear the most often in the selected data. Concepts mentioned more often appear closer to the center of the cloud, showing which keywords appear most frequently in the data. Such a visualization can provide a quick illustration to show to your research audience what topics emerged in the data analysis.

You can also effectively represent each of your themes with an example or two from the responses in your data . Data exemplars are representations that the researcher deems are typical of or significant about the portion of the data under discussion. Often in research that employs interviews or observations , an author will present an exemplar to explain a theme that is significant to theory development or challenges an existing theory.

ATLAS.ti provides tools to restrict your view of the data to codes you find significant to your findings. The Code Manager view makes it easy to look not at the entire data set but the specific segments of text that have been coded with a particular code. In similar fashion, ATLAS.ti's Query Tool is ideal for defining a set of criteria based on the codes in the data to see which data segments are most relevant to your research inquiry.

Conduct interview research with ATLAS.ti

Qualitative data analysis made easy with our powerful tools. Try a free trial of ATLAS.ti.

The Interview Method In Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Interviews involve a conversation with a purpose, but have some distinct features compared to ordinary conversation, such as being scheduled in advance, having an asymmetry in outcome goals between interviewer and interviewee, and often following a question-answer format.

Interviews are different from questionnaires as they involve social interaction. Unlike questionnaire methods, researchers need training in interviewing (which costs money).

How Do Interviews Work?

Researchers can ask different types of questions, generating different types of data . For example, closed questions provide people with a fixed set of responses, whereas open questions allow people to express what they think in their own words.

The researcher will often record interviews, and the data will be written up as a transcript (a written account of interview questions and answers) which can be analyzed later.

It should be noted that interviews may not be the best method for researching sensitive topics (e.g., truancy in schools, discrimination, etc.) as people may feel more comfortable completing a questionnaire in private.

There are different types of interviews, with a key distinction being the extent of structure. Semi-structured is most common in psychology research. Unstructured interviews have a free-flowing style, while structured interviews involve preset questions asked in a particular order.

Structured Interview

A structured interview is a quantitative research method where the interviewer a set of prepared closed-ended questions in the form of an interview schedule, which he/she reads out exactly as worded.

Interviews schedules have a standardized format, meaning the same questions are asked to each interviewee in the same order (see Fig. 1).

   Figure 1. An example of an interview schedule

The interviewer will not deviate from the interview schedule (except to clarify the meaning of the question) or probe beyond the answers received.  Replies are recorded on a questionnaire, and the order and wording of questions, and sometimes the range of alternative answers, is preset by the researcher.

A structured interview is also known as a formal interview (like a job interview).

• Structured interviews are easy to replicate as a fixed set of closed questions are used, which are easy to quantify – this means it is easy to test for reliability .
• Structured interviews are fairly quick to conduct which means that many interviews can take place within a short amount of time. This means a large sample can be obtained, resulting in the findings being representative and having the ability to be generalized to a large population.

Limitations

• Structured interviews are not flexible. This means new questions cannot be asked impromptu (i.e., during the interview), as an interview schedule must be followed.
• The answers from structured interviews lack detail as only closed questions are asked, which generates quantitative data . This means a researcher won’t know why a person behaves a certain way.

Unstructured Interview

Unstructured interviews do not use any set questions, instead, the interviewer asks open-ended questions based on a specific research topic, and will try to let the interview flow like a natural conversation. The interviewer modifies his or her questions to suit the candidate’s specific experiences.

Unstructured interviews are sometimes referred to as ‘discovery interviews’ and are more like a ‘guided conservation’ than a strictly structured interview. They are sometimes called informal interviews.

Unstructured interviews are most useful in qualitative research to analyze attitudes and values. Though they rarely provide a valid basis for generalization, their main advantage is that they enable the researcher to probe social actors’ subjective points of view.

Interviewer Self-Disclosure

Interviewer self-disclosure involves the interviewer revealing personal information or opinions during the research interview. This may increase rapport but risks changing dynamics away from a focus on facilitating the interviewee’s account.

In unstructured interviews, the informal conversational style may deliberately include elements of interviewer self-disclosure, mirroring ordinary conversation dynamics.

Interviewer self-disclosure risks changing the dynamics away from facilitation of interviewee accounts. It should not be ruled out entirely but requires skillful handling informed by reflection.

• An informal interviewing style with some interviewer self-disclosure may increase rapport and participant openness. However, it also increases the chance of the participant converging opinions with the interviewer.
• Complete interviewer neutrality is unlikely. However, excessive informality and self-disclosure risk the interview becoming more of an ordinary conversation and producing consensus accounts.
• Overly personal disclosures could also be seen as irrelevant and intrusive by participants. They may invite increased intimacy on uncomfortable topics.
• The safest approach seems to be to avoid interviewer self-disclosures in most cases. Where an informal style is used, disclosures require careful judgment and substantial interviewing experience.
• If asked for personal opinions during an interview, the interviewer could highlight the defined roles and defer that discussion until after the interview.
• Unstructured interviews are more flexible as questions can be adapted and changed depending on the respondents’ answers. The interview can deviate from the interview schedule.
• Unstructured interviews generate qualitative data through the use of open questions. This allows the respondent to talk in some depth, choosing their own words. This helps the researcher develop a real sense of a person’s understanding of a situation.
• They also have increased validity because it gives the interviewer the opportunity to probe for a deeper understanding, ask for clarification & allow the interviewee to steer the direction of the interview, etc. Interviewers have the chance to clarify any questions of participants during the interview.
• It can be time-consuming to conduct an unstructured interview and analyze the qualitative data (using methods such as thematic analysis).
• Employing and training interviewers is expensive and not as cheap as collecting data via questionnaires . For example, certain skills may be needed by the interviewer. These include the ability to establish rapport and knowing when to probe.
• Interviews inevitably co-construct data through researchers’ agenda-setting and question-framing. Techniques like open questions provide only limited remedies.

Focus Group Interview

Focus group interview is a qualitative approach where a group of respondents are interviewed together, used to gain an in‐depth understanding of social issues.

This type of interview is often referred to as a focus group because the job of the interviewer ( or moderator ) is to bring the group to focus on the issue at hand. Initially, the goal was to reach a consensus among the group, but with the development of techniques for analyzing group qualitative data, there is less emphasis on consensus building.

The method aims to obtain data from a purposely selected group of individuals rather than from a statistically representative sample of a broader population.

The role of the interview moderator is to make sure the group interacts with each other and do not drift off-topic. Ideally, the moderator will be similar to the participants in terms of appearance, have adequate knowledge of the topic being discussed, and exercise mild unobtrusive control over dominant talkers and shy participants.

A researcher must be highly skilled to conduct a focus group interview. For example, the moderator may need certain skills, including the ability to establish rapport and know when to probe.

• Group interviews generate qualitative narrative data through the use of open questions. This allows the respondents to talk in some depth, choosing their own words. This helps the researcher develop a real sense of a person’s understanding of a situation. Qualitative data also includes observational data, such as body language and facial expressions.
• Group responses are helpful when you want to elicit perspectives on a collective experience, encourage diversity of thought, reduce researcher bias, and gather a wider range of contextualized views.
• They also have increased validity because some participants may feel more comfortable being with others as they are used to talking in groups in real life (i.e., it’s more natural).
• When participants have common experiences, focus groups allow them to build on each other’s comments to provide richer contextual data representing a wider range of views than individual interviews.
• Focus groups are a type of group interview method used in market research and consumer psychology that are cost – effective for gathering the views of consumers .
• The researcher must ensure that they keep all the interviewees” details confidential and respect their privacy. This is difficult when using a group interview. For example, the researcher cannot guarantee that the other people in the group will keep information private.
• Group interviews are less reliable as they use open questions and may deviate from the interview schedule, making them difficult to repeat.
• It is important to note that there are some potential pitfalls of focus groups, such as conformity, social desirability, and oppositional behavior, that can reduce the usefulness of the data collected.

For example, group interviews may sometimes lack validity as participants may lie to impress the other group members. They may conform to peer pressure and give false answers.

To avoid these pitfalls, the interviewer needs to have a good understanding of how people function in groups as well as how to lead the group in a productive discussion.

Semi-Structured Interview

Semi-structured interviews lie between structured and unstructured interviews. The interviewer prepares a set of same questions to be answered by all interviewees. Additional questions might be asked during the interview to clarify or expand certain issues.

In semi-structured interviews, the interviewer has more freedom to digress and probe beyond the answers. The interview guide contains a list of questions and topics that need to be covered during the conversation, usually in a particular order.

Semi-structured interviews are most useful to address the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ research questions. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses can be performed on data collected during semi-structured interviews.

• Semi-structured interviews allow respondents to answer more on their terms in an informal setting yet provide uniform information making them ideal for qualitative analysis.
• The flexible nature of semi-structured interviews allows ideas to be introduced and explored during the interview based on the respondents’ answers.
• Semi-structured interviews can provide reliable and comparable qualitative data. Allows the interviewer to probe answers, where the interviewee is asked to clarify or expand on the answers provided.
• The data generated remain fundamentally shaped by the interview context itself. Analysis rarely acknowledges this endemic co-construction.
• They are more time-consuming (to conduct, transcribe, and analyze) than structured interviews.
• The quality of findings is more dependent on the individual skills of the interviewer than in structured interviews. Skill is required to probe effectively while avoiding biasing responses.

The Interviewer Effect

Face-to-face interviews raise methodological problems. These stem from the fact that interviewers are themselves role players, and their perceived status may influence the replies of the respondents.

Because an interview is a social interaction, the interviewer’s appearance or behavior may influence the respondent’s answers. This is a problem as it can bias the results of the study and make them invalid.

For example, the gender, ethnicity, body language, age, and social status of the interview can all create an interviewer effect. If there is a perceived status disparity between the interviewer and the interviewee, the results of interviews have to be interpreted with care. This is pertinent for sensitive topics such as health.

For example, if a researcher was investigating sexism amongst males, would a female interview be preferable to a male? It is possible that if a female interviewer was used, male participants might lie (i.e., pretend they are not sexist) to impress the interviewer, thus creating an interviewer effect.

Flooding interviews with researcher’s agenda

The interactional nature of interviews means the researcher fundamentally shapes the discourse, rather than just neutrally collecting it. This shapes what is talked about and how participants can respond.

• The interviewer’s assumptions, interests, and categories don’t just shape the specific interview questions asked. They also shape the framing, task instructions, recruitment, and ongoing responses/prompts.
• This flooding of the interview interaction with the researcher’s agenda makes it very difficult to separate out what comes from the participant vs. what is aligned with the interviewer’s concerns.
• So the participant’s talk ends up being fundamentally shaped by the interviewer rather than being a more natural reflection of the participant’s own orientations or practices.
• This effect is hard to avoid because interviews inherently involve the researcher setting an agenda. But it does mean the talk extracted may say more about the interview process than the reality it is supposed to reflect.

Interview Design

First, you must choose whether to use a structured or non-structured interview.

Characteristics of Interviewers

Next, you must consider who will be the interviewer, and this will depend on what type of person is being interviewed. There are several variables to consider:

• Gender and age : This can greatly affect respondents’ answers, particularly on personal issues.
• Personal characteristics : Some people are easier to get on with than others. Also, the interviewer’s accent and appearance (e.g., clothing) can affect the rapport between the interviewer and interviewee.
• Language : The interviewer’s language should be appropriate to the vocabulary of the group of people being studied. For example, the researcher must change the questions’ language to match the respondents’ social background” age / educational level / social class/ethnicity, etc.
• Ethnicity : People may have difficulty interviewing people from different ethnic groups.
• Interviewer expertise should match research sensitivity – inexperienced students should avoid interviewing highly vulnerable groups.

Interview Location

The location of a research interview can influence the way in which the interviewer and interviewee relate and may exaggerate a power dynamic in one direction or another. It is usual to offer interviewees a choice of location as part of facilitating their comfort and encouraging participation.

However, the safety of the interviewer is an overriding consideration and, as mentioned, a minimal requirement should be that a responsible person knows where the interviewer has gone and when they are due back.

Remote Interviews

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated remote interviewing for research continuity. However online interview platforms provide increased flexibility even under normal conditions.

They enable access to participant groups across geographical distances without travel costs or arrangements. Online interviews can be efficiently scheduled to align with researcher and interviewee availability.

There are practical considerations in setting up remote interviews. Interviewees require access to internet and an online platform such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Skype through which to connect.

Certain modifications help build initial rapport in the remote format. Allowing time at the start of the interview for casual conversation while testing audio/video quality helps participants settle in. Minor delays can disrupt turn-taking flow, so alerting participants to speak slightly slower than usual minimizes accidental interruptions.

Keeping remote interviews under an hour avoids fatigue for stare at a screen. Seeking advanced ethical clearance for verbal consent at the interview start saves participant time. Adapting to the remote context shows care for interviewees and aids rich discussion.

However, it remains important to critically reflect on how removing in-person dynamics may shape the co-created data. Perhaps some nuances of trust and disclosure differ over video.

Vulnerable Groups

The interviewer must ensure that they take special care when interviewing vulnerable groups, such as children. For example, children have a limited attention span, so lengthy interviews should be avoided.

Developing an Interview Schedule

An interview schedule is a list of pre-planned, structured questions that have been prepared, to serve as a guide for interviewers, researchers and investigators in collecting information or data about a specific topic or issue.

• List the key themes or topics that must be covered to address your research questions. This will form the basic content.
• Organize the content logically, such as chronologically following the interviewee’s experiences. Place more sensitive topics later in the interview.
• Develop the list of content into actual questions and prompts. Carefully word each question – keep them open-ended, non-leading, and focused on examples.
• Add prompts to remind you to cover areas of interest.
• Pilot test the interview schedule to check it generates useful data and revise as needed.
• Be prepared to refine the schedule throughout data collection as you learn which questions work better.
• Practice skills like asking follow-up questions to get depth and detail. Stay flexible to depart from the schedule when needed.
• Keep questions brief and clear. Avoid multi-part questions that risk confusing interviewees.
• Listen actively during interviews to determine which pre-planned questions can be skipped based on information the participant has already provided.

The key is balancing preparation with the flexibility to adapt questions based on each interview interaction. With practice, you’ll gain skills to conduct productive interviews that obtain rich qualitative data.

The Power of Silence

Strategic use of silence is a key technique to generate interviewee-led data, but it requires judgment about appropriate timing and duration to maintain mutual understanding.

• Unlike ordinary conversation, the interviewer aims to facilitate the interviewee’s contribution without interrupting. This often means resisting the urge to speak at the end of the interviewee’s turn construction units (TCUs).
• Leaving a silence after a TCU encourages the interviewee to provide more material without being led by the interviewer. However, this simple technique requires confidence, as silence can feel socially awkward.
• Allowing longer silences (e.g. 24 seconds) later in interviews can work well, but early on even short silences may disrupt rapport if they cause misalignment between speakers.
• Silence also allows interviewees time to think before answering. Rushing to re-ask or amend questions can limit responses.
• Blunt backchannels like “mm hm” also avoid interrupting flow. Interruptions, especially to finish an interviewee’s turn, are problematic as they make the ownership of perspectives unclear.
• If interviewers incorrectly complete turns, an upside is it can produce extended interviewee narratives correcting the record. However, silence would have been better to let interviewees shape their own accounts.

Recording & Transcription

Design choices.

Design choices around recording and engaging closely with transcripts influence analytic insights, as well as practical feasibility. Weighing up relevant tradeoffs is key.

• Audio recording is standard, but video better captures contextual details, which is useful for some topics/analysis approaches. Participants may find video invasive for sensitive research.
• Digital formats enable the sharing of anonymized clips. Additional microphones reduce audio issues.
• Doing all transcription is time-consuming. Outsourcing can save researcher effort but needs confidentiality assurances. Always carefully check outsourced transcripts.
• Online platform auto-captioning can facilitate rapid analysis, but accuracy limitations mean full transcripts remain ideal. Software cleans up caption file formatting.
• Verbatim transcripts best capture nuanced meaning, but the level of detail needed depends on the analysis approach. Referring back to recordings is still advisable during analysis.
• Transcripts versus recordings highlight different interaction elements. Transcripts make overt disagreements clearer through the wording itself. Recordings better convey tone affiliativeness.

Transcribing Interviews & Focus Groups

Here are the steps for transcribing interviews:

• Play back audio/video files to develop an overall understanding of the interview
• Format the transcription document:
• Add line numbers
• Separate interviewer questions and interviewee responses
• Use formatting like bold, italics, etc. to highlight key passages
• Provide sentence-level clarity in the interviewee’s responses while preserving their authentic voice and word choices
• Break longer passages into smaller paragraphs to help with coding
• If translating the interview to another language, use qualified translators and back-translate where possible
• Select a notation system to indicate pauses, emphasis, laughter, interruptions, etc., and adapt it as needed for your data
• Insert screenshots, photos, or documents discussed in the interview at the relevant point in the transcript
• Read through multiple times, revising formatting and notations
• Double-check the accuracy of transcription against audio/videos
• De-identify transcript by removing identifying participant details

The goal is to produce a formatted written record of the verbal interview exchange that captures the meaning and highlights important passages ready for the coding process. Careful transcription is the vital first step in analysis.

Coding Transcripts

The goal of transcription and coding is to systematically transform interview responses into a set of codes and themes that capture key concepts, experiences and beliefs expressed by participants. Taking care with transcription and coding procedures enhances the validity of qualitative analysis .

• Read through the transcript multiple times to become immersed in the details
• Identify manifest/obvious codes and latent/underlying meaning codes
• Highlight insightful participant quotes that capture key concepts (in vivo codes)
• Create a codebook to organize and define codes with examples
• Use an iterative cycle of inductive (data-driven) coding and deductive (theory-driven) coding
• Refine codebook with clear definitions and examples as you code more transcripts
• Collaborate with other coders to establish the reliability of codes

Ethical Issues

Informed consent.

The participant information sheet must give potential interviewees a good idea of what is involved if taking part in the research.

This will include the general topics covered in the interview, where the interview might take place, how long it is expected to last, how it will be recorded, the ways in which participants’ anonymity will be managed, and incentives offered.

It might be considered good practice to consider true informed consent in interview research to require two distinguishable stages:

• Consent to undertake and record the interview and
• Consent to use the material in research after the interview has been conducted and the content known, or even after the interviewee has seen a copy of the transcript and has had a chance to remove sections, if desired.

Power and Vulnerability

• Early feminist views that sensitivity could equalize power differences are likely naive. The interviewer and interviewee inhabit different knowledge spheres and social categories, indicating structural disparities.
• Power fluctuates within interviews. Researchers rely on participation, yet interviewees control openness and can undermine data collection. Assumptions should be avoided.
• Interviews on sensitive topics may feel like quasi-counseling. Interviewers must refrain from dual roles, instead supplying support service details to all participants.
• Interviewees recruited for trauma experiences may reveal more than anticipated. While generating analytic insights, this risks leaving them feeling exposed.
• Ultimately, power balances resist reconciliation. But reflexively analyzing operations of power serves to qualify rather than nullify situtated qualitative accounts.

Some groups, like those with mental health issues, extreme views, or criminal backgrounds, risk being discredited – treated skeptically by researchers.

This creates tensions with qualitative approaches, often having an empathetic ethos seeking to center subjective perspectives. Analysis should balance openness to offered accounts with critically examining stakes and motivations behind them.

Potter, J., & Hepburn, A. (2005). Qualitative interviews in psychology: Problems and possibilities.  Qualitative research in Psychology ,  2 (4), 281-307.

Houtkoop-Steenstra, H. (2000). Interaction and the standardized survey interview: The living questionnaire . Cambridge University Press

Madill, A. (2011). Interaction in the semi-structured interview: A comparative analysis of the use of and response to indirect complaints. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 8 (4), 333–353.

Maryudi, A., & Fisher, M. (2020). The power in the interview: A practical guide for identifying the critical role of actor interests in environment research. Forest and Society, 4 (1), 142–150

O’Key, V., Hugh-Jones, S., & Madill, A. (2009). Recruiting and engaging with people in deprived locales: Interviewing families about their eating patterns. Social Psychological Review, 11 (20), 30–35.

Puchta, C., & Potter, J. (2004). Focus group practice . Sage.

Schaeffer, N. C. (1991). Conversation with a purpose— Or conversation? Interaction in the standardized interview. In P. P. Biemer, R. M. Groves, L. E. Lyberg, & N. A. Mathiowetz (Eds.), Measurement errors in surveys (pp. 367–391). Wiley.

Silverman, D. (1973). Interview talk: Bringing off a research instrument. Sociology, 7 (1), 31–48.

• Structured Interviews: Definition, Types + [Question Examples]

In carrying out a systematic investigation into specific subjects and contexts, researchers often make use of structured and semi-structured interviews. These are methods of data gathering that help you to collect first-hand information with regards to the research subject, using different methods and tools. 

Structured and semi-structured interviews are appropriate for different contexts and observations. As a researcher, it is important for you to understand the right contexts for these types of interviews and how to go about collecting information using structured or semi-structured interviewing methods. 

What is a Structured Interview?

A structured interview is a type of quantitative interview that makes use of a standardized sequence of questioning in order to gather relevant information about a research subject. This type of research is mostly used in statistical investigations and follows a premeditated sequence. 

In a structured interview, the researcher creates a set of interview questions in advance and these questions are asked in the same order so that responses can easily be placed in similar categories. A structured interview is also known as a patterned interview, planned interview or a standardized interview. 

What is a Semi-Structured Interview?

A semi-structured interview is a type of qualitative interview that has a set of premeditated questions yet, allows the interviewer to explore new developments in the cause of the interview. In some way, it represents the midpoint between structured and unstructured interviews. 

In a semi-structured interview, the interviewer is at liberty to deviate from the set interview questions and sequence as long as he or she remains with the overall scope of the interview. In addition, a semi-structured interview makes use of an interview guide which is an informal grouping of topics and questions that the interviewer can ask in different ways. 

Examples & Advantages of Semi-structured Interviews

An example of a semi-structured interview could go like this;

• Did you visit the doctor yesterday?
• Why did you have the visit?
• What was the outcome of the visit?

Each question is a prompt aimed at getting the respondent to give away more information

Advantages of a Semi-structured Interview

• They offer a more personalized approach that allows respondents to be a lot more open during the interview
• This interview-style combines both unstructured and structured interview styles so it merges the advantages of both.
• Allows two-way communication between candidates and interviewers

Types of Structured Interview

Structured interview examples can be classified into three, namely; the face-to-face interview, telephone interviews, and survey/questionnaires interviews

Face-to-Face Structured Interview

A face-to-face structured interview is a type of interview where the researcher and the interviewee exchange information physically. It is a method of data collection that requires the interviewer to collect information through direct communication with the respondent in line with the research context and already prepared questions. 

Face-to-face structured interviews allow the interviewer to collect factual information regarding the experiences and preferences of the research respondent. It helps the researcher minimize survey dropout rates and improve the quality of data collected, which results in more objective research outcomes. 

Learn: How to Conduct an Exit Survey

Advantages of Face-to-face Structured Interview

• It allows for more in-depth and detailed data collection.
• Body language and facial expressions observed during a face-to-face structured interview can inform data analysis.
• Visual materials can be used to support face-to-face structured interviews.
• A face-to-face structured interview allows you to gather more accurate information from the research subjects. 

Disadvantages of Face-to-face Structured Interview

• A face-to-face structured interview is expensive to conduct because it requires a lot of staff and personnel. Different costs are incurred during a face-to-face structured interview including logistics and remuneration. 
• This type of interview is limited to a small data sample size.
• A face-to-face structured interview is also time-consuming.
• It can be affected by bias and subjectivity . 

Tele-Interviews

A tele-interview is a type of structured interview that is conducted through a video or audio call. In this type of interview, the researcher gathers relevant information by communicating with the respondent via a video call or telephone conversation. 

Tele-interviews are usually conducted in accordance with the standardized interview sequence as is the norm with structured interviews. It makes use of close-ended questions in order to gather the most relevant information from the interviewee, and it is a method of quantitative observation. 

Advantages of Tele-interviews

• Tele-interviews are more convenient and result in higher survey response rates.
• It is not time-consuming as interviews can be completed relatively fast.
• It has a large data sample size as it can be used to gather information over a large geographical area.
• It is cost-effective.
• It helps the interviewee to target specific data samples.

Disadvantages of a Tele-interview

• It does not allow for qualitative observation of the research sample.
• It can lead to survey response bias.
• It is subject to network availability and other technical parameters.
• It is difficult for the interviewer to build rapport with an interviewee via this means; especially if they are meeting for the first time. 
• It may be difficult to read the interviewee’s body language, even with a video call. Body language usually serves as a means of gathering additional information about the research subjects. 

Use this: Interview Schedule Form

Surveys/Questionnaires  

A structured questionnaire is a common tool used in quantitative observation. It is made up of a set of standardized questions, usually close-ended arranged in a standardized interview sequence, and administered to a fixed data sample, in order to collect relevant information. 

In other words, a questionnaire is a method of data gathering that involves gathering information from target groups via a set of premeditated questions. You can administer a questionnaire physically or you can create and administer it online using data-gathering platforms like Formplus. 

Advantages of Survey/Questionnaire

• It is time-efficient and allows you to gather information from large data samples.
• Information collected via a questionnaire can easily be processed and placed in data categories.
• A questionnaire is a flexible and convenient method of data collection.
• It is also cost-efficient; especially when administered online.
• Surveys and questionnaires are useful in describing the numerical characteristics of large sets of data. 

Disadvantages of Surveys/Questionnaires  

• A high rate of survey response bias due to survey fatigue.
• High survey drop-out rate. 
• Surveys and questionnaires are susceptible to researcher error; especially when the researcher makes wrong assumptions about the data sample.
• Surveys and questionnaires are rigid in nature.
• In some cases, survey respondents are not entirely honest with their responses and this affects the accuracy of research outcomes. 

Tools used in Structured Interview 

• Audio Recorders

An audio recorder is a data-gathering tool that is used to collect information during an interview by recording the conversation between the interviewer and the interviewee. This data collection tool is typically used during face-to-face interviews in order to accurately capture questions and responses. 

The recorded information is then extracted and transcribed for data categorization and data analysis. There are different types of audio recording equipment including analog and digital audio recorders, however, digital audio recorders are the best tools for capturing interactions in structured interviews. 

• Digital Camera

A digital camera is another common tool used for structured tele-interviews. It is a type of camera that captures interactions in digital memory, which are pictures. 

In many cases, digital cameras are combined with other tools in a structured interview in order to accurately gather information about the research sample. It is an effective method of gathering visual information. 

Just as its name implies, a camcorder is the hybridization of a camera and a recorder. It is a portable dual-purpose tool used in structured interviews to collect static and live-motion visual data for later playback and analysis. 

A telephone is a communication device that is used to facilitate interaction between the researcher and interviewee; especially when both parties in different geographical spaces.

• Formplus Survey/Questionnaire

Formplus is a data-gathering platform that you can use to create and administer questionnaires for online survey s. In the form builder, you can add different fields to your form in order to collect a variety of information from respondents. 

Apart from allowing you to add different form fields to your questionnaires and surveys, Formplus also enables you to create smart forms with conditional logic and form lookup features. It also allows you to personalize your survey using different customization options in the form builder. 

Best Types of Questions For Structured Interview

Open-ended questions.

An open-ended question is a type of question that does not limit the respondent to a set of answers. In other words, open-ended questions are free-form questions that give the interviewee the freedom to express his or her knowledge, experiences and thoughts. 

Open-ended questions are typically used for qualitative observation where attention is paid to an in-depth description of the research subjects. These types of questions are designed to elicit full and detailed responses from the research subjects, unlike close-ended questions that require brief responses. 

Examples of Open-Ended Questions

• What do you think about the new packaging?
• How can we improve our services?
• Why did you choose this outfit?
• How can we serve you better? 

Advantages of Open-Ended Questions

• Open-ended questions are useful for qualitative observation.
• Open-ended questions help you gain unexpected insights and in-depth information. 
• It exposes the researcher to an infinite range of responses.
• It helps the researcher arrive at more objective research outcomes. 

Disadvantages of Open-ended Questions 

• Data collection using open-ended questions is time-consuming.
• It cannot be used for quantitative research.
• There is a great possibility of capturing large volumes of irrelevant data. 

Using Open-ended Questions for Interviews 

In interviews, open-ended questions are used to gain insight into the thoughts and experiences of the respondents. To do this, the interviewer generates a set of open-ended questions that can be asked in any sequence, and other open-ended questions may arise in follow-up inquiries.

Use this: Interview Feedback Form 

Close-Ended Questions

A close-ended question is a type of question that restricts the respondent to a range of probable responses as options. It is often used in quantitative research to gather statistical data from interviewees, and there are different types of close-ended questions including multiple choice and Likert scale questions . 

A close-ended question is primarily defined by the need to have a set of predefined responses which the interviewee chooses from. These types of questions help the researcher to categorize data in terms of numerical value and to restrict interview responses to the most valid data. 

Examples of Close-ended Questions

1. Do you enjoy using our product?

• I don’t Know

2. Have you ever visited London?

3. Did you enjoy the relationship seminar?

• No, I did not
• I can’t say

4. On a scale of 1-5, rate our service delivery. (1-Poor; 5-Excellent). 

5. How often do you visit home? 

• Somewhat often
• I don’t visit home. 

Advantages of Close-ended Questions 

• It is useful for statistical inquiries.
• Close-ended questions are straight-forward and easy to respond to.
• Data gathered through close-ended questions are easy to analyze.
• It reduces the chances of gathering irrelevant responses.

Disadvantages of Close-Ended Questions 

• Close-ended questions are highly subjective in nature and have a high probability of survey response bias .
• Close-ended questions do not allow you to collect in-depth information about the experiences of the research subjects.
• Close-ended questions cannot be used for qualitative observation. 

Using Close-ended Questions for Unstructured Interviews

Close-ended questions are used in interviews for statistical inquiries. In many cases, interviews begin with a set of close-ended questions which lead to further inquiries depending on the type, that is, structured, unstructured, or semi-structured interviews. 

Also Read: Structured vs Unstructured Interviews

Multiple Choice Question

A multiple-choice question is a type of close-ended question that provides respondents with a list of possible answers. The interviewee is required to choose one or more options in response to the question; depending on the question type and stipulated instructions. 

Typically, a multiple-choice question is one of the most common types of questions used in a survey or questionnaire. It is also a valid means of quantitative inquiry because it pays attention to the numerical value of data categories. A multiple-choice question is made up of 3 parts which are the stem, the correct answer(s) and the distractors.  

Examples of Multiple Choice Questions

• How many times do you visit home?

2. What types of shirts do you wear? (Choose as many that apply)

• Long-sleeved Shirt
• Short-sleeved Shirt 

3. Which of the following gadgets do you use?

4. What is your highest level of education?

Advantages of Multiple Choice Question

• A multiple-choice question is an effective method of assessment; especially n qualitative research. 
• It is time-efficient. 
• It reduces the chances of interviewer bias because of its objective approach. 

Disadvantages of Multiple Choice Questions

• Multiple Choice questions are limited to certain types of knowledge. 
• It cannot be used for problem-solving and high-order reasoning assessments. 
• It can lead to ambiguity and misinterpretation which causes survey response bias. 
• Survey fatigue leads to high survey drop-out rates. 

Dichotomous Questions

A dichotomous question is a type of close-ended question that can only have two possible answers. It is a method of quantitative observation and it is typically used for educational research and assessments, and other research processes that involve statistical evaluation. 

It is important for researchers to limit the use of dichotomous questions to situations where there are only 2 possible answers. These types of questions are restricted to yes/no, true/false or agree/disagree options and they are used to gather information related to the experiences of the research subjects. 

Examples of Dichotomous Questions

1. Do you enjoy using this product?

2. I have always used this product for my hair.

3. Are you lactose-intolerant?

4. Have you ever witnessed an explosion?

5. Have you ever visited our farm?

Advantages of Dichotomous Questions

• It is an effective method of quantitative research. 
• Surveys containing dichotomous questions are easy to administer.
• It is non-ambivalent in nature.
• It allows for ease of data-gathering and analysis.
• Dichotomous questions are brief, easy and simplified in nature. 

Disadvantages of Dichotomous Questions

• A dichotomous question is limited in nature.
• It cannot be used to gather qualitative information in research. 
• It is not suitable for in-depth data gathering. 

Learn: Types of Screening Interview 

How to Prepare a Structured Interview

• Choose the right setting

It’s important to provide a comfortable setting for your respondent. If you don’t, they’ll be subject to participant bias which can then skew the results of your interview.

• Tell them the purpose of your interview

You need to give your participants a heads up on why you’re conducting this. This is also the stage where you talk about any confidentiality clauses and get informed consent from your researchers. Explain how these answers will be used and who will have access to it. 

• Prepare your questions

Start by asking the basics to warm up your respondents. Then depending on your structured interview style, you can then choose tailored questions. E.g multiple-choice, dichotomous, open-ended, or close-ended questions. Ensure your questions are as neutral as possible and give room for your respondents to add any extra impressions or comments.

• Verify that your tools are working

Check that your audio recorder is working fine and that your camera is properly placed before you kick off the interview. For phone interviews, confirm that you have enough call credits or that your internet connection is stable. If you’re using Formplus, you don’t have to bother about getting cut off thanks to the offline form feature. This means you can still record responses even when your respondents have poor or zero internet connection

• Make notes and record observations

Ensure that your notes are legible and clear enough for you to revert. Write down your observations. Were your respondents nervous or surprised at any particular question?

Also Read: Unstructured Interviews

How to Use Formplus For Structured Interview

Sign into formplus.

In the Formplus builder, you can easily create a questionnaire for your structured interview by dragging and dropping preferred fields into your form. To access the Formplus builder, you will need to create an account on Formplus. 

Once you do this, sign in to your account and click on “Create Form ” to begin. 

Edit Form Title

Click on the field provided to input your form title, for example, “Structured Interview Questionnaire”.

• Click on the edit button to edit the form.
• Add Fields: Drag and drop preferred form fields into your form in the Formplus builder inputs column. There are several field input options for survey forms in the Formplus builder including table fields and you can create a smarter questionnaire by using the conditional logic feature. 
• Edit fields: You can modify your form fields to be hidden, required or read-only depending on your data sample and the purpose of the interview. 
• Click on “Save”
• Preview form. 

Customise Form

Formplus allows you to add unique features to your structured questionnaire. You can personalize your questionnaire using various customization options in the builder. Here, you can add background images, your organization’s logo, and other features. You can also change the display theme of your form. 

Share your Form Link with Respondents

Formplus allows you to share your questionnaire with interviewees using multiple form-sharing options. You can use the direct social media sharing buttons to share your form link to your organization’s social media pages. 

You can also embed your questionnaire into your website so that form respondents can easily fill it out when they visit your webpage. Formplus enables you to send out email invitations to interviewees and to also share your questionnaire as a QR code.

Conclusion  

It is important for every researcher to understand how to conduct structured and unstructured interviews. While a structured interview strictly follows an interview sequence comprising standardized questions, a semi-structured interview allows the researcher to digress from the sequence of inquiry, based on the information provided by the respondent. 

You can conduct a structured interview using an audio recorder, telephone or surveys. Formplus allows you to create and administer online surveys easily, and you can add different form fields to allow you to collect a variety of information using the form builder. 

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How to carry out great interviews in qualitative research.

11 min read An interview is one of the most versatile methods used in qualitative research. Here’s what you need to know about conducting great qualitative interviews.

What is a qualitative research interview?

Qualitative research interviews are a mainstay among q ualitative research techniques, and have been in use for decades either as a primary data collection method or as an adjunct to a wider research process. A qualitative research interview is a one-to-one data collection session between a researcher and a participant. Interviews may be carried out face-to-face, over the phone or via video call using a service like Skype or Zoom.

There are three main types of qualitative research interview – structured, unstructured or semi-structured.

• Structured interviews Structured interviews are based around a schedule of predetermined questions and talking points that the researcher has developed. At their most rigid, structured interviews may have a precise wording and question order, meaning that they can be replicated across many different interviewers and participants with relatively consistent results.
• Unstructured interviews Unstructured interviews have no predetermined format, although that doesn’t mean they’re ad hoc or unplanned. An unstructured interview may outwardly resemble a normal conversation, but the interviewer will in fact be working carefully to make sure the right topics are addressed during the interaction while putting the participant at ease with a natural manner.
• Semi-structured interviews Semi-structured interviews are the most common type of qualitative research interview, combining the informality and rapport of an unstructured interview with the consistency and replicability of a structured interview. The researcher will come prepared with questions and topics, but will not need to stick to precise wording. This blended approach can work well for in-depth interviews.

Free eBook: The qualitative research design handbook

What are the pros and cons of interviews in qualitative research?

As a qualitative research method interviewing is hard to beat, with applications in social research, market research, and even basic and clinical pharmacy. But like any aspect of the research process, it’s not without its limitations. Before choosing qualitative interviewing as your research method, it’s worth weighing up the pros and cons.

Pros of qualitative interviews:

• provide in-depth information and context
• can be used effectively when their are low numbers of participants
• provide an opportunity to discuss and explain questions
• useful for complex topics
• rich in data – in the case of in-person or video interviews , the researcher can observe body language and facial expression as well as the answers to questions

Cons of qualitative interviews:

• can be time-consuming to carry out
• costly when compared to some other research methods
• because of time and cost constraints, they often limit you to a small number of participants
• difficult to standardize your data across different researchers and participants unless the interviews are very tightly structured
• As the Open University of Hong Kong notes, qualitative interviews may take an emotional toll on interviewers

Qualitative interview guides

Semi-structured interviews are based on a qualitative interview guide, which acts as a road map for the researcher. While conducting interviews, the researcher can use the interview guide to help them stay focused on their research questions and make sure they cover all the topics they intend to.

An interview guide may include a list of questions written out in full, or it may be a set of bullet points grouped around particular topics. It can prompt the interviewer to dig deeper and ask probing questions during the interview if appropriate.

Consider writing out the project’s research question at the top of your interview guide, ahead of the interview questions. This may help you steer the interview in the right direction if it threatens to head off on a tangent.

Avoid bias in qualitative research interviews

According to Duke University , bias can create significant problems in your qualitative interview.

• Acquiescence bias is common to many qualitative methods, including focus groups. It occurs when the participant feels obliged to say what they think the researcher wants to hear. This can be especially problematic when there is a perceived power imbalance between participant and interviewer. To counteract this, Duke University’s experts recommend emphasizing the participant’s expertise in the subject being discussed, and the value of their contributions.
• Interviewer bias is when the interviewer’s own feelings about the topic come to light through hand gestures, facial expressions or turns of phrase. Duke’s recommendation is to stick to scripted phrases where this is an issue, and to make sure researchers become very familiar with the interview guide or script before conducting interviews, so that they can hone their delivery.

What kinds of questions should you ask in a qualitative interview?

The interview questions you ask need to be carefully considered both before and during the data collection process. As well as considering the topics you’ll cover, you will need to think carefully about the way you ask questions.

Open-ended interview questions – which cannot be answered with a ‘yes’ ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ – are recommended by many researchers as a way to pursue in depth information.

An example of an open-ended question is “What made you want to move to the East Coast?” This will prompt the participant to consider different factors and select at least one. Having thought about it carefully, they may give you more detailed information about their reasoning.

A closed-ended question , such as “Would you recommend your neighborhood to a friend?” can be answered without too much deliberation, and without giving much information about personal thoughts, opinions and feelings.

Follow-up questions can be used to delve deeper into the research topic and to get more detail from open-ended questions. Examples of follow-up questions include:

• What makes you say that?
• What do you mean by that?
• Can you tell me more about X?
• What did/does that mean to you?

As well as avoiding closed-ended questions, be wary of leading questions. As with other qualitative research techniques such as surveys or focus groups, these can introduce bias in your data. Leading questions presume a certain point of view shared by the interviewer and participant, and may even suggest a foregone conclusion.

An example of a leading question might be: “You moved to New York in 1990, didn’t you?” In answering the question, the participant is much more likely to agree than disagree. This may be down to acquiescence bias or a belief that the interviewer has checked the information and already knows the correct answer.

Other leading questions involve adjectival phrases or other wording that introduces negative or positive connotations about a particular topic. An example of this kind of leading question is: “Many employees dislike wearing masks to work. How do you feel about this?” It presumes a positive opinion and the participant may be swayed by it, or not want to contradict the interviewer.

Harvard University’s guidelines for qualitative interview research add that you shouldn’t be afraid to ask embarrassing questions – “if you don’t ask, they won’t tell.” Bear in mind though that too much probing around sensitive topics may cause the interview participant to withdraw. The Harvard guidelines recommend leaving sensitive questions til the later stages of the interview when a rapport has been established.

More tips for conducting qualitative interviews

Observing a participant’s body language can give you important data about their thoughts and feelings. It can also help you decide when to broach a topic, and whether to use a follow-up question or return to the subject later in the interview.

Be conscious that the participant may regard you as the expert, not themselves. In order to make sure they express their opinions openly, use active listening skills like verbal encouragement and paraphrasing and clarifying their meaning to show how much you value what they are saying.

Remember that part of the goal is to leave the interview participant feeling good about volunteering their time and their thought process to your research. Aim to make them feel empowered , respected and heard.

Unstructured interviews can demand a lot of a researcher, both cognitively and emotionally. Be sure to leave time in between in-depth interviews when scheduling your data collection to make sure you maintain the quality of your data, as well as your own well-being .

Recording and transcribing interviews

Historically, recording qualitative research interviews and then transcribing the conversation manually would have represented a significant part of the cost and time involved in research projects that collect qualitative data.

Fortunately, researchers now have access to digital recording tools, and even speech-to-text technology that can automatically transcribe interview data using AI and machine learning. This type of tool can also be used to capture qualitative data from qualitative research (focus groups,ect.) making this kind of social research or market research much less time consuming.

Data analysis

Qualitative interview data is unstructured, rich in content and difficult to analyze without the appropriate tools. Fortunately, machine learning and AI can once again make things faster and easier when you use qualitative methods like the research interview.

Text analysis tools and natural language processing software can ‘read’ your transcripts and voice data and identify patterns and trends across large volumes of text or speech. They can also perform khttps://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/research/sentiment-analysis/

which assesses overall trends in opinion and provides an unbiased overall summary of how participants are feeling.

Another feature of text analysis tools is their ability to categorize information by topic, sorting it into groupings that help you organize your data according to the topic discussed.

All in all, interviews are a valuable technique for qualitative research in business, yielding rich and detailed unstructured data. Historically, they have only been limited by the human capacity to interpret and communicate results and conclusions, which demands considerable time and skill.

When you combine this data with AI tools that can interpret it quickly and automatically, it becomes easy to analyze and structure, dovetailing perfectly with your other business data. An additional benefit of natural language analysis tools is that they are free of subjective biases, and can replicate the same approach across as much data as you choose. By combining human research skills with machine analysis, qualitative research methods such as interviews are more valuable than ever to your business.

Related resources

Market intelligence 10 min read, marketing insights 11 min read, ethnographic research 11 min read, qualitative vs quantitative research 13 min read, qualitative research questions 11 min read, qualitative research design 12 min read, primary vs secondary research 14 min read, request demo.

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What Are Structured Interviews (and Why Use Them)?

Interviews are a necessary part of your hiring process. And yet, determining whether a candidate is right for a role can be challenging. Can a one-hour interview truly tell you everything you need to know before hiring a new team member?

Which questions hiring team members ask and how they assess whether a candidate is the right fit ultimately informs who gets passed on and who gets an offer. But the structure of this process matters just as much as the Qs asked and post-interview evaluation.

Ensuring everyone involved in the hiring process is aligned is critical to running successful interview processes and, at the end of the day, employing the right individuals and providing a stellar experience to each candidate engaged.

This is where structured interviews can help.

What is a structured interview?

A structured interview is a method of assessment that measures how competent a candidate is for a role by asking each prospect one interviews the same set of questions and comparing them against the same criteria.

• This approach require a hiring team to develop a clearly defined purpose for each interview, along with a specific set of structured interview questions for each interviewer to ask.

Moreover, it includes a rubric or scorecard of some kind that helps interview panelists assess answers to each question. This means all candidates are asked the same predetermined questions (and in the same order) and their responses are evaluated using the same scale.

Why are structured interviews better?

Conducting job interviews can seem pretty straightforward:

• Candidates come into your talent pipeline.
• You choose the ones you’d like to interview.
• You ask them a series of relevant questions.
• Based on their responses and your hiring team’s collective feedback, you move forward with the candidate you think is the best fit for the role.

Upon second glance, however, you’ll find that a brief interview and a “gut feeling” aren’t enough to make the most effective hiring decisions — especially when other stakeholders or influencers are involved.

Rather, you need an organized approach to speaking with prospective hires. Fail yo implement such a process, and you could very well end up employing the wrong person.

Hiring the wrong candidate can be costly. Studies have shown that, on average, a bad hire can cost a company upwards of $15,000 . Meanwhile, 74% of managers say they’ve hired the wrong person for a position at one time or another.

This makes having a structured interview process crucial.

The advantages of using structured interviews

Many recruiters consider structured interviews to be more effective, as they’re based on a clearly defined role and its core objectives: a hiring team uses a rubric and deliberate set of questions that foster data-driven hiring decisions.

Let’s dive deeper into the specific, key advantages of structured interviews :

• Better predict job performance : As we mentioned above, studies have shown that structured interviews can help you better predict a candidate’s job performance.
• Eliminate confirmation bias : All candidates are asked the same open-ended questions and assessed with the same rubric. This ensures your hiring is equitable and fair.
• Data-driven vs. emotional hiring : As candidates are assessed based on standardized criteria rather than ‘feeling’, hiring teams can make more data-driven hiring decisions.
• Optimize interview time : Having a structured interview framework in place can help managers and stakeholders optimize the time they have with each candidate.
• Understanding of interpersonal skills : A bonus benefit is recruiters, hiring managers, and prospective peers of a candidate can gauge their personality and behavior.

Benefits of leveraging structured interviews for both candidates and employers

The intention of structured interviews is to help hiring teams make objective, intelligent hiring decisions, which ultimately benefits both the candidate who gets hired and the org.

In other words? It ensures they don’t have semi -structured interview processes (or, worse, unstructured interview processes) that prevent panelists from comparing candidates and discerning the strongest-fit individuals.

The structured interview is ultimately a type of interview approach that ensures :

• Candidates are assessed based on skills and qualities as they relate to the core objectives of the role (versus personal preference)
• All candidates are asked the same questions and assessed using the same criteria, making the hiring process more intentional and fair
• Interviews are more deliberate and outcome-oriented , which maximizes the time a candidate has with a hiring manager

There aren’t just pros for prospects, though. Structured interviews help employers :

• Reduce unconscious bias and/or confirmation bias in interviews
• Create a more deliberate, intentional, and standardized process for interviews that helps hiring teams choose the right candidates
• Leverage their time with candidates more productively by asking the right questions

Why you should use a structured interview framework

If structured interviews are more effective, why don’t all hiring teams use them when recruiting and nurturing candidates? Well, it could have a lot to do with comfort.

• Research has shown that, in general, interviewers tend to think they’re great at interviewing , so few will update their skills or practice new ways of conducting interviews.

But interviewing can quickly become an informal, almost casual process if you’re tasked with interviewing candidates often or at scale. This can lead to ineffective interviews that hinder hiring teams from properly assessing candidates — and can lead to the ‘interview effect.’

In short, the “interview effect” occurs when an interviewer unintentionally influences the interviewee . For example, an interviewer’s body language and responses can influence how a candidate answers questions.

• Given interviews — structured and unstructured — are social interactions, a casual or unstructured approach can bias people’s responses or behaviors in an interview.

In this sense, having a structured interview framework enables your hiring team to conduct more productive, unbiased interviews — and help employers like yours extend offers to and hire top talent more efficiently and effectively.

Download our Structured Hiring 101 guide to learn how your talent acquisition team can implement a highly structured interview process that leads to smarter hiring.

Further reading

How to modernize your full-cycle recruiting approach, creating a highly effective employee referral program, improving the candidate journey with an ats: a guide.

What Is a Structured Interview & Why Is It Better?

About the Author

Lauren is a Senior Content Manager at VidCruiter, with expertise in technology and human resources. She is celebrated for her contributions to Forbes, Fast Company, Meta, Lyft, and McCain.

Reviewed by

The VidCruiter Editorial Team offers practical recruitment advice, drawing on insights from seasoned professionals. Our award-winning content, supported by industry specialists, underscores VidCruiter's dedication to innovation in recruitment.

Last Modified

A structured interview is an employment assessment tool where every part of the process is kept consistent. All candidates are asked the same questions, and their responses are evaluated against the same role-related criteria using a predefined rating system. The intention is to be fair and objective while accurately assessing the candidates’ potential job performance.

Table of Contents

• What are structured interviews?

Why is structured interviewing better for recruiting?

Structured vs. unstructured interviews, structured interview question examples, advantages of structured interviews, disadvantages of structured interviews, benefits of using structured interviews, frequently asked questions, what is a structured interview.

The definition of a structured interview is having a systematic and consistent process for interviewing job candidates. Following a standardized interview template is not a new concept. This interview structure was practiced and called a “patterned interview” by Robert McMurray in 1947. Structured interviews have been around for a long time, and thanks to technological advances, the structured interview can now easily be combined with video interviewing in the form of live structured video interviews or pre-recorded (asynchronous) video interviews.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management defines a structured interview as a “standardized assessment method designed to evaluate candidates’ job-related skills by systematically asking how they have responded in past experiences and how they would behave in hypothetical situations.”

Ideally, a good interview structure for employers would be based on a job analysis that details the abilities and qualities needed for the position, as per Cosmin Gabriel Sofron . Structured employment interviews use a standardized scoring method to reduce bias in the evaluation process, and hone in on professional knowledge, job skills, interpersonal skills, and, when appropriate, the mental skills related to performing the job responsibilities. All these elements come together to ensure candidates receive equal opportunities to provide information and undergo an identical assessment.

As the Society for Human Resource Management explains, in a structured interview, the interviewer typically asks all candidates the same questions for a specific role. Interviewer(s) ask the questions in a predetermined order in case changing the order impacts the candidate’s answers in any way.

Structured interviewing uses a standardized scoring method, which helps reduce the impact of bias in the evaluation process. Using this structured approach, it’s easier for the interviewer to evaluate candidates and compare their skills fairly, objectively, and, accurately.

Looking for the best way to conduct an interview?

There are several reasons why structured interviewing is the best way to hire.

Structured interviewing also creates a more efficient process for the talent acquisition or recruitment team. By enhancing objectivity and consistency and assessing only job-related information, the structure of an interview can mitigate bias and reduce discrimination in the hiring process. And because the questions are based on job analysis, it can improve the accuracy of your employment decisions.

Structured interviewing goes hand in hand with interview compliance. The highly documented and rigorous format provides evidence of fair and ethical hiring practices, enabling legal defensibility and corporate responsibility.

What is interview compliance?

Interview compliance is a framework that ensures all interviews adhere to proven methods and procedures, maximize effectiveness and fairness, and remain responsive to legal, ethical, and social values.

Candidate experience may improve when interviewees participate in a professional and competency-focused interview. Explaining the structured interview process helps applicants understand that it’s designed to give them an equal opportunity to succeed.  

Structured interviews can also provide deeper insights into a candidate’s skills and experience, and you can use panels to mitigate the influence of bias on the recruitment process. Implementing a fully structured interview process makes recruitment more equitable, efficient, effective, and beneficial for everyone involved.

As much as unstructured and structured interviews seem binary, they actually exist on a spectrum with different characteristics depending on where your process lands.

Unstructured interview definition

An unstructured interview is a type of job interview without a set format. This means questions and ratings criteria are not determined in advance, and any aspect of the format may change from candidate to candidate.

When comparing structured and unstructured interviews, structured interviews are about two times better at predicting job performance ( Journal of Applied Psychology ) even for jobs that are unstructured. This is a big reason why structured interviewing is so effective for increasing the quality of your hires. The research agrees that the more controlled and consistent the interview process is, the more accurate it is as a hiring tool, which is why structured interviewing is recommended over unstructured interviewing. 

There are several distinct differences between unstructured and structured interviews.

As you can see from the table above, a structured interview is specifically designed to be objective, valid, reliable, legally defensible, and job-focused.

Semi-structured interviews

There are organizations that might believe they are using a structured process, but their interview process is only semi-structured. On opposite sides of the spectrum, you’ve got structured and unstructured interviews. In the middle are semi-structured interviews.

What is semi-structured interviewing?

Semi-structured interviews for hiring are more casual and conversational. Some semi-structured interview questions are planned, and some are off the cuff, creating a loosely structured format. An example of a semi-structured interview would be preparing questions in advance but then changing the question order, interviewers, or interview methods (in-person, remote, hybrid) between candidates.

Why are semi-structured interviews good? An advantage of semi-structured interviews is that they allow organizations to collect some data points by using a semi-structured interview guide while still providing the freedom to go “off-script.”

One of the benefits of using semi-structured interviews is that they offer more flexibility than structured interviews. However, the more rigidity you remove, the more you lose the benefits of structured interviewing. The interview guide exists for a reason — it sets out how things should be done to maintain consistency, prevent interviewers from asking problematic questions, reduce unintended rater bias, and keep the reliability of the candidate data intact to enable merit-based hiring.

In structured interviews, most questions will be open-ended, and a few might be close-ended questions to collect information about the job seeker. Combine competency-based, behavioral, and situational questions to get a well-rounded overview of a candidate’s skills.

Competency-based questions

Competency-based interview questions evaluate candidates’ strengths and weaknesses and see how they pair up with the competencies required for the role. These questions shift the conversation away from a candidate’s qualifications and experiences and toward their performance in various situations. Answers are typically rated based on the thinking that led them to the behaviors they exhibited and the decisions they made. These questions require candidates to narrate past experiences relevant to the job.

Competency-based question examples

If you were looking for someone who demonstrates they can overcome obstacles, you could ask something like, “Describe a time where you were pushed to stretch your energy during a customer meeting,” or “Tell me about a time you failed at something in your work life.”

Behavioral questions

You use behavioral questions to gather information about the candidate’s past behavior. Behavioral questions probe past experiences, knowledge, and abilities, while competency-based interview questions assess specific traits and behaviors.

Behavioral question examples

For example, let’s say you’re writing a behavioral question for a customer service role. The question could be, “Can you describe a time when you went above and beyond to help a customer?” The candidate’s answer will give you insight into their customer service skills and will likely indicate how they’ll behave in the future.

Situational questions

While behavioral questions ask for examples of past experiences, situational questions explore how candidates will respond to situations they may face in the future. These questions give insight into the candidate’s intentions, which are closely tied to their future behavior.

Situational question example

For instance, if you’re interviewing a candidate for a managerial role, you could ask, “How would you handle a team member who constantly misses deadlines?” The candidate’s answer will show their problem-solving abilities and interpersonal skills.

By taking this approach to formulate questions, you can gain deep insights into the candidate’s competencies, experience, and anticipated behavior.

Interview questions to avoid

An important aspect of conducting structured interviews is being aware of statements and questions to avoid. For example, it’s advisable to avoid mentioning long-term employment to ensure nothing you say can be interpreted as a job offer or commitment.

Steer away from off-topic questions and questions that are not job-related. Moreover, beware of certain taboo topics, such as alcohol consumption, the candidate’s personal relationships, and their high school graduation date ( SHRM ). 

To prevent unintentionally introducing employment discrimination, the EEOC recommends against asking questions pertaining to race, gender, color, religion, age, pregnancy, disability, or national origin. The exceptions are when such a question is directly related to job qualifications or required by law. Here are some of the top interview questions to avoid .

Improves quality of hires

Structured interviews are reliable when it comes to making accurate hiring decisions. Research shows when used as a recruitment method, structured interviews can predict job performance with between .55 and .70 validity on a standalone basis ( CQ Net ). Structured interviews also produce fully-comparable responses, meaning it’s far easier to confidently move the right candidates forward.

Increases efficiency

Research shows 3 or 4 unstructured interviews can provide the same level of validity for predicting job performance as a structured interview administered by a single interviewer ( Journal of Applied Psychology ). This shows how taking time to create the process and being well-prepared ends up saving time and increasing your chances of finding the right candidate.

Once it’s all laid out, structured interviews follow an interview guide, so they become predictable. Removing variability and focusing on continual improvement (with help from interview intelligence if possible) also allows interviewers to achieve greater efficiency for the process itself.

Reduces the impact of bias

An advantage of a structured interview is that many measures are in place to help reduce unintended rater bias. While structured interviewing is rigorous, things like training interviewers on how to avoid common rating errors, and creating and using a standardized interview and scoring method, are what help to mitigate unconscious bias. As a result of using a highly structured interview process, you can be assured your organization is making merit-based hiring decisions.

Requires an initial investment of time and resources

Developing and implementing structured interview processes requires time, energy, and resources upfront. It is an investment, but one that will pay off dividends in the long run.

Everyone needs to follow the process

Consistency is key with structured interviews. In order to get the full benefit, your entire hiring team needs to stick to the process.

Requires maintenance

Structured interview processes require oversight in order to protect your investment and continuously improve the outcomes.

Structured interviewing is a valuable tool that benefits recruiters, employers, and candidates alike. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of structured interviewing.

A more efficient, replicable process for the recruitment team

Structured interviewing helps you feel more prepared and confident during your conversation with candidates. With a standardized set of questions and rating system, it’s easier to evaluate the candidates’ responses more objectively and systematically.

Structured interviewing also allows you to do a better quality assessment — especially if you are using hiring software to collect more data points — in less time, making the recruitment process more efficient and streamlined.

Enhanced objectivity and consistency in interviewing

A structured interview lets you maximize objectivity and consistency in the recruitment process. Because you use a predefined, standardized set of questions and rating system, nothing is left to your subjective opinion. Instead, you objectively gather information that lets you make data-driven hiring decisions.

All your questions should zero in on the specific skills and competencies a candidate needs to succeed in the role. As a result, the interview is more targeted and effective, and the information you obtain is objective and job-related.

On top of that, because you use a rating system to evaluate the candidate’s responses in the moment, you have to pay close attention to be able to critically evaluate the skills your questions address.

It’s important to note that the standardized rating system can drive objectivity when comparing candidates. It makes it easier to compare their skills, experience, and qualifications. This can be especially helpful when you’re interviewing multiple candidates with similar backgrounds or qualifications, as it provides a clear framework for assessing each person’s strengths and weaknesses as they relate to the position.

The ability to use and apply interview intelligence

Structured interviews provide the consistency necessary for you to study, test and improve the hiring process itself. Interview intelligence uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, or powerful automation to streamline, assess and enhance hiring processes. Structured interviewing can be done with or without HR software involved in the process, but interview intelligence is really only possible if you’re using a hiring platform that enables it.

Here are some ways interview intelligence can help in the interview planning step.

Interview intelligence can help improve every step of the hiring process from planning to interviewer analysis and real-time coaching.

Even if you had hiring software, if you are following a semi-structured or unstructured interview process there would be no valid way to derive useful information about what’s working and what isn’t. The structured interview process provides the uniformity necessary to collect quality data and make meaningful improvements.

Reduced bias and discrimination in the hiring process

Structured interviews use standardization, which makes them an effective tool for reducing bias and discrimination in the hiring process ( SHRM ). Before the interview process starts, you develop a series of questions that are based on an analysis of the job requirements. You also create a rating system that clearly defines which responses are unacceptable, acceptable, and outstanding.

By using a consistent set of questions for each candidate, you can focus on those factors that relate directly to job performance—not on irrelevant or discriminatory criteria. By doing so, you ensure you evaluate each candidate based on the same set of objective criteria, which goes a long way to reducing bias and promoting fairness.

The use of a predetermined rating system requires you to evaluate the responses of each candidate objectively. Consequently, you can make informed hiring decisions based on the merits of their skills, qualities, and experience.

If you are hiring remotely or even just using video interviews as part of your structured interview process, offering video interviewing greatly enlarges and diversifies the talent pool. An employer that’s open to video interviews and remote work has access to more—and more diverse—talent.

Can interview questions be biased?

Yes. Using masculine language, including adjectives like “competitive” and “determined,” results in women “perceiving that they would not belong in the work environment.” On the other hand, words like “collaborative” and “cooperative,” tend to draw more women than men. When writing interview questions, it’s helpful to get feedback from a variety of perspectives to ensure the language doesn’t invite hiring bias .

Improved accuracy of hiring decisions

Structured interviews are proven to be highly effective when it comes to making accurate hiring decisions.

Structured interview questions are based on a detailed job analysis. As such, everything you ask in a structured interview is directly related to the specific requirements of the job. With carefully crafted questions, you can gain a clear understanding of how the candidate has performed in similar professional situations in the past. You can also gain insights into how they would respond in hypothetical professional situations in the future.

While you may ask interview questions about soft skills such as communication and critical thinking, make sure they relate to job-specific circumstances. By doing so, you can avoid evaluating the candidate based on your personal impressions or influenced by biases.

Because you rate each candidate’s responses according to a set system, you can accurately and reliably distinguish between regular employees and high performers. This makes the structured interview extremely attractive for employers.

Evidence of fair and ethical hiring practices

Structured interviews provide a powerful tool for organizations to demonstrate their commitment to fair and ethical hiring practices.

Because interview panels allow for a diverse group of interviewers, they’re an effective way to reduce the impact of biases in candidate assessments. At the same time, a diverse selection of interviewers communicates to the candidate that the organization values diversity and fair treatment.

Structured interviews should be meticulously documented, preferably using video recordings, as well as notes you take yourself. This documentation can provide valuable proof in favor of the employer in the event a candidate files an employment discrimination complaint. By documenting the interview process, you can show you’ve adhered to all applicable state and federal employment laws.

A study in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment shows that unstructured interviews were more frequently challenged in court than any other type of candidate selection device. On top of that, almost 60% of discrimination lawsuits based on unstructured interviews were determined to be discriminatory, while 100% of discrimination lawsuits based on structured interviews were found to be not discriminatory.

A better candidate experience

Generally, structured interviewing is very organized and orderly, so candidates should know what’s coming next and what’s expected.

Taking the time to explain the process and why you are using it, then asking questions that are within the framework, instills confidence in the applicant that they are being treated fairly and professionally, which can also lead to a better experience.

A good chronological and in-depth structured interview process has communication built in, allowing employers to provide a high-touch candidate experience where interviewees don’t feel like they are being left in the dark.

Eight out of 10 unhappy candidates will tell at least one person about a bad recruitment experience ( Deloitte ). This is why taking the extra care to open, conduct, and close interviews properly matters.

Deeper insights into candidates

To hire the best candidate for the job, you need sufficient insight into their qualifications. A structured interview lets you evaluate qualities that are challenging to measure using other methods.

For instance, it’s common practice to use psychometric tests to evaluate cognitive ability, strategic thinking, and other skills. However, they provide little to no insight into competencies such as interpersonal skills, leadership potential, and communication skills.

In the structured interview, you ask candidates about past job-related experiences and how they would respond in a hypothetical professional situation. This allows you to make a more in-depth, comprehensive evaluation of their abilities and preparedness for the job.

Mitigated influence of bias on the hiring process through the use of panels

Our brains can process 11 million bits of information a second, but our conscious minds can only handle 40 to 50 bits a second ( National Public Radio ). This is why our brains occasionally take cognitive shortcuts that can lead to unconscious or implicit bias.

In the context of job interviews, bias refers to a preference or tendency that impacts objectivity and impartiality in decision-making. It can stem from organizational culture or individual beliefs and values.

Bias in the interview process can negatively impact the evaluation of candidates. One effective strategy to minimize bias in the interview process is to establish a diverse panel of interviewers who understand equity and diversity and bring a range of perspectives and experiences to the table. Incorporating a panel interview step in the structured interview process can help mitigate individual biases interviewers may have, resulting in a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates.

When selecting panelists, consider age, gender, race, ethnicity, cognitive diversity, seniority or tenure with the organization, education, training, and more.

What are the three types of interview structures?

The three interview types are structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews. While they seem like they might be pretty clearly differentiated and defined — it’s more like they’re on a spectrum together, with structured and unstructured interviews on opposite sides and semi-structured interviewing somewhere in the middle.

What kind of questions are asked in a structured interview?

They can be job-specific or general. The questions will depend on the role, the organization the candidate is applying at, and what competencies and skills the organization is looking for. Interviewers could ask different types of questions (competency-based, behavioral, or situational). Still, they shouldn’t ask about your race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, marital status, or anything unrelated to the job.

With structured interviews, candidates can always be sure that the questions will be the same for everyone.

When should you use a structured interview?

It depends on the situation, but generally, it works best to use structured interviewing early on in the interview process to help fairly narrow down the applicants. This may mean doing a structured pre-recorded interview or phone screening, then a live structured interview (in-person, remote, or hybrid) for a subsequent interview.

Are structured interviews formal or informal?

A structured job interview requires the interviewer to plan, prepare, and follow their interview guide. As a result, it would be fair to say structured interviews are more formal than unstructured job interviews. This is why structured interviews are often also referred to as planned interviews or standardized interviews.

What is better: structured or unstructured interviews

In terms of mitigating the potential for unintended rater bias, increasing predictive validity, and finding the candidate most likely to succeed in a specific role, structured interviews are the better choice. 

If you are not concerned about legal or organizational consequences, don’t have the resources to control any element of the interview process, and prefer unplanned, conversational interviews, unstructured interviewing makes sense. If you are trying to improve your reputation with stakeholders, conducting structured interviews means the organization cares about its social, legal, and ethical responsibilities. 

Removing consistency increases the organizational risk of non-compliance and opportunities for unconscious bias.

The Modern Guide to Structured Interviewing

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Related topics

What is an Applicant Tracking System?

Ways to overcome hiring bias.

What is video interviewing?

How to conduct a structured panel interview.

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Structured Question: What Is It & Use in Market Research

Surveys are a type of quantitative market research. Surveys for communication research use different questions to collect data supporting the research questions or hypotheses. Survey questions come in two varieties:

• Structured questions
• Unstructured questions.

Structural survey questions usually give more accurate results because the respondent only needs to use lower-level thinking to answer.

Also, researchers find it easier to code and analyze structural questions. Single-answer, multiple-answer, scaled, and ranking questions are structural questions.

Quantitative research uses structured questions and can sort the answers so that people who answer one way are sent to a different question. Structured survey questions are common in online surveys and take less time and effort to answer.

In this blog, we will discuss what structured question is and their use of it in market research plan . 

What is a structured question?

A structured question is a closed-ended inquiry employed in surveys to elicit quick and accurate responses while minimizing participant thought.

These questions will lessen the researcher’s job candidates because the solutions are straightforward and easy to analyze. A thorough survey can still be conducted with much information that can be revealed quickly when several structured questions are combined.

Structured questions offer the following two main benefits:

• More accurate data and a higher response rate are typically the results. They demand less of the respondent’s mental capacity. They lessen the amount of thought that a response needs to do to do the assignment.
• As a result, coding and analysis are simpler for the researcher. This is of utmost importance, mainly if you run a research business by yourself.

Structured questions come in a variety of forms, such as:

• Nominal or ordinal categories in a single response (e.g., From the following list, please select the category that includes your visited places)
• Multiple replies (e.g., From the following list of side dish menus, please choose any or all that you regularly prefer)
• Scaled questions (for example, From “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree,” rate how well the manager is performing the duties of his role.), and
• There are numerous variants of these basic types.

Types of structured question

Structured questions are questions that have a specific format and often require a focused, concise response. They are commonly used in surveys, assessments, interviews, and research studies to gather specific information. Here are several types of structured questions:

01. Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs):

These questions present respondents with a list of options, and they must choose the correct or most appropriate answer. MCQs are commonly used to assess knowledge or preferences.

02. True/False Questions:

In these questions, participants indicate whether a statement is true or false. They are straightforward and are often used to gauge understanding of basic concepts.

03. Likert Scale Questions:

Likert scale questions measure participants’ opinions or attitudes by asking them to rate their level of agreement or disagreement with a series of statements. The scale typically ranges from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.”

04. Ranking Questions:

Respondents are asked to rank a set of items based on a specific criterion. This type of question helps determine preferences or priorities.

05. Scale Questions:

Similar to Likert scale questions, scale questions ask participants to rate their opinions or feelings on a numerical scale. However, the scale might not follow the traditional Likert format.

06. Dichotomous Questions:

These questions have only two possible answers, often “yes” or “no,” making them simple to answer.

07. Matrix Questions:

A table or grid of connected questions with the same set of response choices is presented as a matrix question. This approach is effective when using the same questions and response options repeatedly.

08. Closed-ended Questions:

These questions have predefined response options and do not allow for open-ended answers. They are easy to analyze but might limit the depth of response.

09. Open-ended Questions:

Unlike closed-ended questions, open-ended questions allow participants to provide detailed, unrestricted answers. These questions are useful for gathering qualitative research insights and opinions.

10. Demographic Questions:

These questions gather information about respondents’ personal characteristics, such as age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and occupation. They are often used for categorization and segmentation.

11. Binary Questions:

Binary questions are yes-or-no questions that offer a straightforward choice. They are useful for quickly categorizing participants or situations.

12. Frequency Questions:

These questions inquire about how often a certain behavior or event occurs. Responses might be in terms of daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

13. Semantic Differential Scale Questions:

These questions ask participants to rate a concept or object on a set of bipolar adjectives, such as “hot-cold,” “happy-sad,” or “fast-slow.”

14. Conjoint Analysis Questions:

These questions are used in market research to understand how people value different product or service attributes. Participants evaluate various combinations of attributes and choose their preferred options.

LEARN ABOUT: Structured Questionnaire

How to do market research using structured question

When several structured questions are combined, they can quickly provide information while still allowing for a thorough survey. To ensure a fair and comprehensive selection process, the hiring team decided to conduct structured interviews with standardized questions for all candidates.

There are numerous variations on the structured question, but some are more prevalent than others. The participant is asked to choose a range in a single response using ordinal categories, a structured question.

For example, “Please select the group corresponding to your yearly spending.”

For respondents to express their opinions easily, scaled questions are often used with responses like “agree” and “disagree” or a simple numerical scale. When the researcher needs a range of reactions, such as asking, “Which of these countries have you visited?” Multiple-choice questions are another common kind of structured question.

Additionally, structured interview questions can be used with open-ended questions to elicit more information from participants and develop contingency questions (one response leads to a new, specific question).

For example, a structured question could be, “Have you ever owned an IOS phone?” The researcher can then ask them unstructured interview questions to learn more about their ideas if they respond “yes.”

This blog has described the structured question and its use in market research, including examples. Structured interviews can be used in many types of research, including marketing research. Questions can differ depending on what the survey or research needs to find out. 

So depending on the need, structured questions can be chosen. 

Here at QuestionPro, we provide access to a library of long-term research insights and tools for data collection, such as our survey software. For a demonstration or additional information, visit InsightHub.

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Structured Interview Questions & Answers + More

Regardless of whether we talk about an interview at a small corner gas station, local elementary school, or in a big international corporation, with thousands of employees, some bias will always be present . Recruiters and hiring managers will–often unwittingly , prefer people they like on a personal level , people similar to them, people they feel good around. And while it is certainly great for them, it isn’t ideal for the organization or company they work for… Because the company wants to choose the best match for the job , and not the person the hiring manager likes the most.

While we cannot avoid the bias completely , we can do a few things to minimize the impact of personal preferences of people leading the interviews. The so called “structured interview” is the no. 1 tool to help us. Structured basically means that:

• The interviewers ask each and every candidate the same questions, in the same order .
• There is a clear evaluation process in place , which means that a hiring manager knows how many points they should assign to each candidate for each of their answer (this becomes more difficult with open-ended behavioral questions, more on it later on).
• At the end of the interviews, instead of relying on emotions and impressions (“I think the candidate no. 7 was the best one”), the managers simply count the points each candidate scored , and the one with the most points is the one they will offer the job to.

Table of Contents

Most common questions you will face in a structured interview

As you can likely imagine after reading the opening to this post, the questions depend a lot on the job you apply for . What I try to say is that it doesn’t make sense asking about accounting software in a nursing interview, or about your ability to work in a team when you interview for a job of a lighthouse keeper…

Having said that, hiring managers aren’t interested only in your hard skills related to the job. Interviewing is more complex, and in order to get a better picture of each candidate, they will typically include some typical interview questions in each structured interview. Some questions you will most likely face in any structured interview:

• Why did you apply for this job?
• Why do you want to leave your present job/why did you leave your past job?
• How is your previous working experience relevant for this job?
• Why do you think you are a good candidate for this position?
• Where do you see yourself in five years time?
• What are your main strengths and weaknesses?
• What do you like to do in your spare time?

Behavioral questions in a structured interview

Behavioral (often also labelled as “STAR” or “situational” questions) also repeat in most structured interviews . At the end of the day, regardless of your job title and place of work, you will face the same tricky situations at work –conflict with a colleague, dealing with pressure, trying to meet a deadline, and so on. Make sure to prepare for the following questions:

• Tell us about an obstacle you overcame .
• Give an example of a time when you showed initiative at work .
• Describe a conflict you had with one of your colleagues in your last job.
• Describe a situation when you were under pressure. How did you deal with it?
• Have you ever worked on a project that was a failure?
• Tell us about a time when you had to meet a tight deadline.
• Tell me about a time when you improved a process .

Behavioral questions form the core of interviewing in multinational corporations and Fortune 500 companies nowadays. However, answers of job applicants aren’t always easy to evaluate, and compare . For this reason, in a truly structured interview–one in which they try to virtually eliminate the bias and make sure personal preferences of the interviewers play no role, they often replace behavioral questions with tests , and simple case studies. For example, instead of asking you about a time when you had to meet a tight deadline, you will find the following situations in a test:

Imagine that it is Friday 2pm, and you already think about the weekend. Suddenly your superior arrives and asks you to prepare a presentation for Monday morning, for a meeting with an important client. But you know it will take at least 7-8 hours to do this presentation, and you won’t manage to do it until 5pm, the end of your working week. What will you do in such a situation? Option A: I will explain the situation to the manager and ask them to reschedule the meeting for Tuesday morning, to have sufficient time to prepare a quality presentation. Option B: I will stay at work until 9pm, sacrificing my free time, to make sure the presentation is ready. Option C: I will explain the situation to the manager, and together try to find a way how the presentation can be done, without me spending half of the weekend working on it. Option D: I will refuse the task, knowing I could not meet the deadline. Option E: Since my priority is meeting the deadline, I will do the best presentation I can within the time allotted, even if that won’t be the best presentation possible.

In this form of structured interview, you simply pick one of the options A to E , and the hiring managers know exactly how many points you should get for choosing each option. As a result, instead of judging your answers based on their impression, they simply score your answers according to pre-defined criteria . In my opinion, this is a more sensible way of using behavioral questions in a structured interview.

Technical questions in a structured interview

The third thing they evaluate is your readiness for the “technical aspect” of the job . Do not let the word technical confuse you, however. It simply refers to hard/soft skills necessary to the job in question . Education often also fits the bracket. Let me give you two examples:

• For a job of a website designer you need to know HTML, CSS, etc. You also need to know to work with certain software programs and platforms, such as WordPress for example. These are some of the necessary technical skills for the role.
• For a job of a secondary school teacher, you need a relevant university degree, and a good knowledge of the subject you will teach (PE, Physics, Biology, French language, etc). Once again we can label these abilities as “technical skills”.

As you can likely imagine, technical questions depend a lot on the job you try to get , and may differ from one interview to another. I will give you some examples below, just to know what type of questions you can expect. Make sure to read the job description carefully and think about a typical day in your new job. It should help you understand what skills/abilities you need, and what they may ask you in this interview.

• Can you tell us more about your experience with MS Excel?
• How do you feel about lifting objects weighting 40 pounds?
• Have you ever worked with a mentally disabled person?
• What kind of water pump will you use in this or that setup?
• In your opinion, which of the following two cars is better for a family of four, and why?
• Explain a difference between a debit card and a credit card.
• What types of forklifts have you worked with up to this point?

Tests and case studies as an alternative in a structured interview

If you want to really know if someone can swim, and how well do they swim, what will you do? Will you ask them whether they can swim? Or will you rather take them to the swimming pool and ask them to jump to the water and swim to the other end of the pool?

I think the answer is obvious. Someone with strong communication skills can convince us of almost everything . However, once you ask them to perform some task, words won’t help them. Either they can do it, or they can’t…. Many employers learned this lesson the hard way (paying the price with wrong hires), and hence instead of asking you any technical questions, they will simply ask you to demonstrate your skills . Depending on the job you try to get, you can face the following tasks in the interviews:

• Here is a simple IQ test. You have 15 minutes to complete it.
• Look at this math riddle. Try to solve it as quickly as possible.
• We have a defected window here. Here are the tools. Please diagnose the defect and repair it.
• Look at this purchasing contract. Can you see any mistakes on it? What can you do to improve it for the buyer?
• Imagine that I am a client on the phone. Try to convince me to open an account with this bank.
• Sell me this pen .
• Here are some data from the stock market. Please analyze the data now and suggest what assets should an investor buy on the market today.
• Here is a set of data about sales of a certain car model in 2022. Look at the data set, enter the data to MS Excel, make some pie charts to illustrate the trends, and interpret the data.

Drawbacks of a structured interview

While structured interviews have their advantages, and can help the company to fight nepotism and hiring based on personal preferences of the interviewing managers, they aren’t perfect. To the main disadvantages belong:

• Inability to use elaborate behavioral questions, such as “Tell us about a time when you did X. Why you did X, what was the outcome, and what would you do differently in the same situation?” Answers to such questions can tell us a lot about the job candidate and their attitude to work, but it is almost impossible to compare answers of two candidates or score their answers with some point system. Hence we cannot use them in a truly structured interview.
• Once the company uses exactly the same questions with each and every candidate, and even asks them in the same order, it is super easy for the questions to leak online . Sure, you can find interview guides for any job/employer online nowadays (and of course the best guides you will find here, on InterviewPenguin.com). But if the interviews aren’t structured the guide cannot tell you exactly what questions you will face. If they are structured, however, it is enough if a single candidate leaks the questions on some online forum or social media platform , and other candidates can use the list for years to prepare for the interview in advance.
• Certain things just cannot be measured by scores and scales . While personal preferences of a hiring managers shouldn’t decide the outcome of an interview process, their gut feeling and first-hand impression from the candidate is something we should not completely ignore …

Final words

The world we live in today places of lot of value on equal opportunity . It forces the companies to use interview formats that aren’t necessarily the best, but minimize the impact of personal preferences of the hiring managers. Structured interview is such a format. I hope this article helped you to understand what it means, and how to prepare for it. Good luck in your next interview!

May also interest you:

• Emotional intelligence interview questions.
• Teamwork interview questions .
• 15 most common interview questions and answers.
• Recent Posts

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20 Common Researcher Interview Questions and Answers

Common Researcher interview questions, how to answer them, and sample answers from a certified career coach.

You’ve been invited to interview for a research position—congratulations! You know you have the skills and experience, but now it’s time to prove it.

The key to success? Being prepared. To help make sure you shine in your upcoming interview, we’ve compiled some of the most common questions asked during research interviews. Read on, get familiar with them, and practice your answers so you can ace that job interview like a pro.

• What research methods do you use to collect data?
• How do you ensure the accuracy and validity of your research results?
• Describe a time when you had to analyze complex data sets and draw meaningful conclusions from them.
• Explain how you would go about designing an experiment or survey to answer a specific research question.
• Are you familiar with any statistical software programs? If so, which ones?
• What strategies do you use to stay organized while conducting research?
• How do you handle ethical considerations when conducting research?
• Have you ever encountered a situation where you had to adjust your research methodology due to unexpected circumstances?
• Describe a time when you had to present your research findings in a clear and concise manner.
• Do you have experience working with large datasets?
• What challenges have you faced when collecting primary data for a research project?
• How do you approach writing up a research paper or report?
• What techniques do you use to identify potential sources of bias in your research?
• How do you evaluate the quality of secondary sources used in your research?
• What strategies do you use to keep track of changes in the field of research you are studying?
• How do you decide which research questions to pursue?
• What is your experience with peer review processes?
• How do you manage competing demands on your time when conducting research?
• What strategies do you use to ensure that your research remains relevant and up-to-date?
• How do you ensure that your research meets the highest standards of academic integrity?

1. What research methods do you use to collect data?

Research methods are the core of any researcher’s job. You’ll need to be familiar with a variety of different methods, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and experiments, and be able to explain how you use each one in your work. This will help the interviewer understand your process and how you can contribute to their organization.

How to Answer:

You should be prepared to explain the research methods you have used in your past work. Talk about how you use surveys, interviews, focus groups, and experiments to collect data, as well as any other methods you may have experience with. If you’re just starting out, then talk through the steps you would take to select a method for each project. You can also mention any specialized methods or software that you are familiar with.

Example: “I use a variety of research methods to collect data, depending on the project. I often use surveys and interviews as primary sources of information, but I also have experience with focus groups, experiments, and software tools like Qualtrics for collecting quantitative data. I’m familiar with specialized methods such as content analysis and ethnography when appropriate. My goal is always to select the method that will provide the most accurate and reliable data for each project.”

2. How do you ensure the accuracy and validity of your research results?

Research requires a level of precision that goes beyond the normal workplace. Good researchers are able to identify what data is relevant and how to collect it in order to make reliable conclusions. Interviewers will want to know that you have the skills and knowledge to conduct research that is both accurate and valid. They’ll also want to know if you use any specific methods or tools to ensure accuracy and validity.

You should be prepared to explain what methods you use to ensure accuracy and validity of your research. This could include double-checking sources, using multiple data points, or triangulating information from different sources to verify results. You can also mention any specific tools or techniques you use, such as conducting surveys or interviews with experts in the field. Be sure to emphasize how important it is for you to make sure that your research is accurate and valid before drawing conclusions.

Example: “When I was working on a research project for ABC Corporation, I had to analyze the data from three different sources. My approach was to use statistical analysis techniques and software tools to cross-reference the data sets and identify any potential discrepancies or outliers. After analyzing the results, I identified a number of key trends that allowed us to draw meaningful conclusions about the company’s operations. The insights gained from this research ultimately led to improvements in the organization’s processes, resulting in increased efficiency and productivity.”

3. Describe a time when you had to analyze complex data sets and draw meaningful conclusions from them.

Research projects often involve a lot of data analysis and interpretation. Knowing how to take large amounts of data and make it into something meaningful is a valuable skill for any researcher. This question is a way for the interviewer to gauge your ability to work with data and draw meaningful conclusions from it.

You should be prepared to provide a specific example of when you had to analyze complex data sets and draw meaningful conclusions from them. Talk about the project, your approach to analyzing the data, and any insights or conclusions that you drew from it. Be sure to emphasize the impact of your findings on the project or organization as well.

Example: “I recently worked on a project for my previous employer in which I had to analyze a large and complex data set. My approach was to break down the data into smaller, more manageable chunks and then look for patterns or correlations between different variables. After doing this, I was able to identify a few key trends that were relevant to the project goals. This allowed us to make better decisions about how to allocate resources and focus our efforts, resulting in a successful outcome.”

4. Explain how you would go about designing an experiment or survey to answer a specific research question.

This question is designed to determine if you have the skills necessary to design and implement valid research experiments. The interviewer wants to know if you understand the fundamentals of research design, such as how to select a sample, how to develop a hypothesis, and how to determine the validity of a study. They also want to know if you can explain the process in a clear and concise manner.

Start by explaining the steps you would take to design an experiment or survey. You should include the following: defining the research question, selecting a sample, developing a hypothesis, creating a data collection plan, and determining how to analyze the results. Be sure to explain any specific techniques you might use in each step, such as random sampling or stratified sampling for your sample selection process. Finally, emphasize the importance of validating the results to ensure they are accurate and reliable.

Example: “When designing an experiment or survey, the first step is to define the research question. Once the research question has been identified, I would then select a sample that is representative of the population being studied. I would also develop a hypothesis based on my understanding of the research question and the available data. After that, I would create a data collection plan that outlines how the data will be collected, such as using surveys, interviews, or focus groups. Finally, I would determine the best method for analyzing the results in order to draw valid conclusions from the research. In all cases, it’s important to validate the results to ensure they are accurate and reliable.”

5. Are you familiar with any statistical software programs? If so, which ones?

Researchers often have to analyze data and present it in a meaningful way. This requires familiarity with statistical software programs like SPSS, SAS, or R. Knowing how to use these programs is a critical part of being a successful researcher, so this question is meant to gauge your level of expertise.

If you are familiar with any of the programs mentioned above, be sure to mention that and explain how you have used them in past research projects. If you are not familiar with these programs, it is still important to emphasize your ability to learn new software quickly. Explain how you approach learning new technologies and provide examples of times when you have successfully done so in the past.

Example: “I have used SPSS and SAS in my previous research projects. I am also comfortable with learning new statistical software programs, as I have done so on multiple occasions in the past. For example, when starting a new project at my last job, I was asked to learn R quickly in order to analyze data. Within two weeks, I had become proficient enough to use it for all of our research needs.”

6. What strategies do you use to stay organized while conducting research?

Research can be a long and complex process, with lots of data to sift through, organize, and analyze. It’s important to show the interviewer that you have a system in place to stay organized throughout the research process, from the initial research plan to the final report. This will demonstrate that you can effectively manage your time and resources, as well as prioritize tasks and remain focused on the task at hand.

You can answer this question by talking about the strategies you use to stay organized while conducting research. You could mention that you create detailed research plans, break down large tasks into smaller ones, and prioritize tasks based on importance and deadlines. Additionally, you could talk about how you utilize organizational tools such as spreadsheets and databases to store data, track progress, and easily access information when needed. Finally, you might also discuss how you take notes during your research process in order to keep track of important ideas or findings.

Example: “I use a variety of strategies to stay organized while conducting research. I always start by creating a detailed research plan that outlines the scope of my work and any deadlines associated with it. From there, I break down large tasks into smaller ones in order to tackle them more efficiently. Additionally, I prioritize tasks based on importance and deadlines in order to remain focused on the task at hand. To help store data, track progress, and access information quickly, I also utilize organizational tools such as spreadsheets and databases. Finally, I take notes during my research process in order to keep track of important ideas or findings.”

7. How do you handle ethical considerations when conducting research?

Research often involves collecting personal data, and it’s important that researchers understand how to approach these situations with respect and integrity. Interviewers want to know that you are aware of ethical considerations and that you are capable of adhering to them. This question is likely to be asked to all potential researchers, as it is an important part of the job.

Talk about the ethical considerations you take into account when conducting research. These can include obtaining informed consent from participants, ensuring confidentiality and anonymity of data, respecting privacy laws, protecting vulnerable populations, and considering potential biases that may arise in your research. You should also mention any processes or protocols you have implemented to ensure ethical compliance with research projects. Finally, emphasize how important it is for researchers to adhere to ethical standards and how seriously you take them.

Example: “I understand the importance of adhering to ethical standards when conducting research, and I take this responsibility very seriously. In my current position as a researcher at ABC University, I follow a strict protocol for obtaining informed consent from participants and ensuring that data is kept confidential and anonymous. I also make sure to consider any potential biases in our research before collecting data and am familiar with applicable privacy laws. Lastly, I always strive to protect vulnerable populations, such as children or those with disabilities, when conducting research.”

8. Have you ever encountered a situation where you had to adjust your research methodology due to unexpected circumstances?

Research is a dynamic process and researchers must be prepared to adjust their methods as needed. This question is designed to assess the flexibility of potential candidates and their ability to think on their feet. It also provides insight into how well a candidate understands the research process, including how to identify and address potential problems.

To answer this question, provide an example of a situation where you had to adjust your research methodology due to unexpected circumstances. Explain how you identified the problem and how you adjusted your methods in order to successfully complete the project. Be sure to emphasize any creative solutions you implemented and the positive outcome that resulted from your adjustment.

Example: “I recently encountered a situation where I had to adjust my research methodology due to unexpected circumstances. I was conducting a survey to analyze consumer behavior in relation to a new product launch. After collecting the first round of data, I noticed a discrepancy in the results that could not be explained. After further investigation, I realized that the sample size I was using was not large enough to accurately capture the data. I quickly adjusted my methodology by increasing the sample size and collecting more data, which ultimately allowed me to identify the discrepancy and provide an accurate analysis of consumer behavior.”

9. Describe a time when you had to present your research findings in a clear and concise manner.

Researchers often have to communicate their findings to colleagues, stakeholders, and the public. The ability to communicate complex research findings in an understandable way is a key skill for someone in this role. This question allows the interviewer to gauge your ability to explain complex concepts in a clear and concise manner.

You should come prepared with an example of a time when you had to present your research findings. Talk about the project, what the goal was, and how you went about presenting it. If possible, provide specific details such as the type of presentation (oral, written, etc.), who you presented to, and the feedback you received. You should also explain the strategies that you used to make sure that the audience understood your message. This could include using visual aids, breaking down complex concepts into simpler terms, or providing examples to illustrate your points.

Example: “My most recent research project focused on the long-term effects of climate change on agricultural production. I knew that it was important to make sure that the findings were presented in a way that was easy to understand and digest. I created a PowerPoint presentation that included visuals and graphs to illustrate my points, as well as a written report that provided a detailed breakdown of the findings. I then presented my findings to a group of stakeholders and received positive feedback. They appreciated my ability to take complex concepts and explain them in a way that was easy to understand.”

10. Do you have experience working with large datasets?

Many research roles require the ability to work with large datasets and analyze the information within them. This question helps employers understand how comfortable you are with such tasks, and it also serves as a way to gauge your technical skills. To answer this question, talk about how you’ve used various tools and techniques to analyze data and how you’ve been able to draw meaningful insights from it.

Start by talking about the types of datasets you’ve worked with, such as structured or unstructured data, and explain how you’ve gone about analyzing them. Then, provide a few examples of projects you’ve completed that involved working with large datasets. Finally, discuss any tools or techniques you’ve used to work with the data, such as statistical software, data visualization tools, machine learning algorithms, etc. Be sure to emphasize your ability to draw meaningful insights from the data and how those insights have helped inform decisions.

Example: “I have experience working with large datasets in both structured and unstructured formats. I have utilized various tools and techniques to analyze the data, such as statistical software and data visualization tools. I’ve also employed machine learning algorithms to uncover patterns and trends from the data. For example, in my most recent project I utilized a variety of data sources to identify potential new markets for our company. Through analyzing the data, I was able to identify key demographic, geographic, and psychographic trends that we could use to target our new customers. This analysis provided valuable insights that informed our marketing strategy and ultimately led to increased sales.”

11. What challenges have you faced when collecting primary data for a research project?

Research often involves gathering primary data from sources such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observations. It’s important to determine whether the candidate has the skills necessary to design and implement a research project in order to successfully collect data. This question helps the interviewer understand the candidate’s ability to handle the logistics and challenges of primary data collection.

When answering this question, it’s important to provide specific examples of challenges you have faced and how you overcame them. For example, you could talk about the challenge of finding participants for a survey or focus group, or the difficulty in scheduling interviews with busy professionals. You can also discuss any logistical issues that arose during data collection, such as having unreliable equipment or dealing with uncooperative participants. Be sure to emphasize your problem-solving skills and ability to think on your feet when facing unexpected obstacles.

Example: “I’ve encountered a few challenges when gathering primary data for research projects. For example, when I was working on a survey project for a university, it took me several weeks to find participants willing to answer the survey. I had to be creative in my approach and reach out to different groups, such as student organizations, to recruit participants. I also encountered a few logistical issues, such as having unreliable equipment or dealing with uncooperative participants. I was able to quickly come up with solutions to these issues, such as having backup equipment and developing strategies to engage the participants. Overall, I was able to successfully gather the data I needed and produce valuable research findings.”

12. How do you approach writing up a research paper or report?

Research is a process that requires both creativity and structure. As a researcher, you must be able to synthesize information from a variety of sources, develop strong arguments, and communicate those arguments clearly and concisely in written form. Being able to articulate your approach to researching and writing up a paper will demonstrate your ability to think critically and logically.

Your answer should include the steps you take when writing up a research paper or report. This could include outlining your topic, researching relevant sources, organizing and synthesizing data, developing an argument, drafting and revising the paper, and proofreading for accuracy. It is also important to emphasize how you use critical thinking skills to develop strong arguments and draw meaningful conclusions from your research. Finally, make sure to mention any specific techniques or strategies that you have used successfully in the past.

Example: “When writing up a research paper or report, I approach the task systematically. I begin by outlining my topic and any relevant research questions. I then conduct research to find relevant sources, both primary and secondary. I carefully review and analyze the information I find, and use it to develop my argument. After that, I draft and revise the paper, making sure to include evidence to support my points. Finally, I proofread for accuracy and clarity. Throughout the process, I strive to use critical thinking skills to ensure that my arguments are sound and my conclusions are meaningful.”

13. What techniques do you use to identify potential sources of bias in your research?

Researchers need to be able to identify potential sources of bias in their work, such as selection bias or confirmation bias, in order to ensure the accuracy of their data and the validity of their results. By asking this question, the interviewer is gauging your ability to identify potential sources of bias and how you handle them.

To answer this question, you should discuss the techniques you use to identify potential sources of bias in your research. This could include methods such as double-checking data for accuracy and completeness, using multiple sources of information, or conducting blind studies. Additionally, you can talk about how you handle any biases you may find, such as adjusting your research design or changing your methodology. Be sure to emphasize that accuracy and validity are important to you and that you take steps to ensure they remain a priority.

Example: “I understand the importance of accuracy and validity in research, so I always strive to identify and address any potential sources of bias. I use several techniques to identify bias, such as double-checking my data for accuracy and completeness, using multiple sources of information, and conducting blind studies. When I do identify a potential source of bias, I adjust my research design or change my methodology to address it. I also make sure to communicate any changes to my team and stakeholders to ensure that we’re all on the same page.”

14. How do you evaluate the quality of secondary sources used in your research?

One of the most important skills of a researcher is being able to evaluate the quality of sources used in research. This question allows the interviewer to get a better understanding of your research process and your ability to critically evaluate sources. It also allows them to gauge your level of experience in the field and your knowledge of the research landscape.

To answer this question, you should explain your process for evaluating secondary sources. You can talk about the criteria that you use to evaluate a source’s credibility such as its author or publisher, the date of publication, and any peer reviews that have been conducted on the source. Additionally, you can mention any methods you use to assess the accuracy of information in the source such as cross-referencing with other sources or conducting additional research on the topic. Finally, you should discuss how you use these evaluations to inform your own research.

Example: “When evaluating the quality of secondary sources I use in my research, I consider a few key factors. I always look at the author or publisher of the source, the date of publication, and any peer reviews that have been conducted. I also use a variety of methods to assess the accuracy of the information in the source, such as cross-referencing with other sources and conducting additional research. From there, I use my evaluations to inform my own research and determine how best to use the source. This helps me ensure that I’m using the most reliable and up-to-date sources in my research.”

15. What strategies do you use to keep track of changes in the field of research you are studying?

Research is an ever-evolving field and keeping up with changes in the field is essential to remain relevant and up to date. Interviewers want to know that you have the skills and strategies to stay on top of the latest research, trends, and developments in the field. They’ll be looking for evidence that you have the self-discipline and organizational skills to stay on top of your work and be able to provide timely, accurate research.

You should be prepared to discuss the strategies and tools you use to stay up-to-date on changes in your field. Talk about how you keep track of new research articles, publications, conferences, and other sources of information that are relevant to your work. You can also talk about how you use technology such as RSS feeds, social media, or email alerts to ensure that you’re aware of any news or updates related to your research. Additionally, mention any methods you have for organizing and cataloging the information you collect so it is easily accessible when needed.

Example: “To stay on top of changes in my field, I use a variety of strategies and tools. I subscribe to relevant RSS feeds and email alerts to ensure I’m aware of any new research articles or publications. I also use social media to follow industry leaders and experts in the field and get updates on their work. I also keep an organized library of research material that I have collected over the years. I use a combination of software tools and physical filing systems to keep track of all the information I need. This allows me to quickly access any information I need, when I need it.”

16. How do you decide which research questions to pursue?

Being a researcher requires the ability to prioritize and select the best questions to pursue in order to achieve the desired outcome. This question helps the interviewer get a sense of your process and how you approach problem solving. It also gives them an insight into your critical thinking skills, as well as your ability to analyze data and make meaningful conclusions.

The best way to answer this question is to provide a step-by-step approach of how you decide which research questions to pursue. Start by explaining the research process you go through, such as collecting data, analyzing it and forming hypotheses. Then explain how you prioritize certain questions based on their importance and relevance to the project at hand. Finally, discuss how you use your findings to make informed decisions about which questions are worth pursuing further.

Example: “When I’m deciding which research questions to pursue, I start by gathering all the available data related to the project. From there, I analyze the data to form hypotheses and then prioritize the questions based on their importance and relevance to the project. I also consider the impact each question could have on the overall outcome of the research. Once I have a list of the most important questions, I evaluate the data and use my findings to make informed decisions about which questions are worth pursuing further. Ultimately, my goal is to select the best questions that will yield the most meaningful results.”

17. What is your experience with peer review processes?

Peer review is a critical part of the research process. It requires that researchers review and critique each other’s work in order to ensure that the research is unbiased and credible. This question is a way for the interviewer to assess your knowledge of the research process and your ability to work with other researchers.

To answer this question, you should provide specific examples of your experience with peer review processes. Talk about how you have worked with other researchers to review and critique their work, as well as how you have incorporated feedback from peers into your own research. You can also discuss any challenges or successes you had during the process. Finally, emphasize your understanding of the importance of peer review in the research process and why it is necessary for producing high-quality results.

Example: “I have extensive experience with peer review processes, both as a reviewer and as an author. I have worked with other researchers to review their work and provide constructive feedback, as well as incorporating feedback from peers into my own research. I understand the importance of peer review in the research process and am committed to producing high-quality results. I have also had success in resolving disagreements between reviewers and authors when needed, and I have a strong track record of producing quality research that has been accepted for publication.”

18. How do you manage competing demands on your time when conducting research?

Research can be a demanding job, with a lot of deadlines, competing agendas, and complex data sets to analyze. The interviewer wants to make sure you can prioritize tasks, keep track of multiple projects, and adjust when needed. Your ability to manage competing demands on your time is a key indicator of how successful you will be at the job.

To answer this question, you should focus on how you prioritize tasks and manage deadlines. Talk about the strategies you use to stay organized, such as setting up a calendar or using task management tools. Also discuss any techniques you have for staying focused when there are multiple demands on your time. Finally, emphasize your ability to adjust your plans when needed, such as if an unexpected project comes in or a deadline needs to be moved up.

Example: “I have a few strategies for managing competing demands on my time when conducting research. I prioritize tasks by breaking them down into smaller, manageable chunks and then assigning deadlines to each one. I also use task management tools to keep track of what I need to do and stay organized. And I make sure to take regular breaks to stay focused and energized. When I need to adjust my plans due to unexpected events, I’m able to reassess and re-prioritize my tasks accordingly. I’m confident in my ability to manage competing demands on my time and stay organized when conducting research.”

19. What strategies do you use to ensure that your research remains relevant and up-to-date?

Research is a dynamic field, and the best researchers know that they need to stay informed of the latest developments and trends in order to remain relevant. This question allows your interviewer to assess your knowledge of the field and your commitment to keeping up with the latest research. It shows that you are aware of the need to stay ahead of the curve and that you have the skills to do so.

To answer this question, you should start by discussing the strategies that you use to stay informed. You can talk about how you read industry publications, attend conferences and seminars, or network with other researchers in your field. You should also mention any specific platforms or tools that you use to keep up-to-date on the latest research. Finally, you should explain why staying informed is important to you and how it helps you do better work.

Example: “I use a variety of strategies to ensure that my research remains relevant and up-to-date. I read industry publications, attend conferences and seminars, and network with other researchers to stay informed. I also use specific tools like Google Scholar and ResearchGate to keep track of new developments in my field. It’s important to me to stay ahead of the curve and make sure that my research is as current and relevant as possible. Doing so not only helps me do better work, but it also helps me to provide more value to my employer and contribute to the success of their projects.”

20. How do you ensure that your research meets the highest standards of academic integrity?

Research is the backbone of any organization, and it is crucial for a researcher to maintain the highest standards of academic integrity. Employers want to know that you understand the importance of being thorough and accurate, as well as ethical in your research. They may also want to know how you go about verifying the accuracy of your data and sources, and how you ensure that your research meets the standards expected in the field.

Start off by detailing the steps you take to ensure that your research meets academic integrity standards. For example, you can mention how you always double-check sources and data for accuracy and reliability, or how you use peer review processes to vet your work. Additionally, be sure to emphasize any specific techniques or methods you have used in the past to verify the validity of your findings. Finally, explain why it is important to you to maintain the highest level of academic integrity in your research.

Example: “I understand the importance of academic integrity and take it very seriously in my research. To ensure the highest standards of accuracy, I always double-check my sources and data, and use peer review processes to vet my work. Additionally, I frequently use replication studies to verify the validity of my findings. To me, it is essential to ensure that my research meets the highest standards of academic integrity, as it is the foundation of any successful research project.”

20 Interview Questions Every Data Center Engineer Must Be Able To Answer

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87 of HR's favorite interview questions for you

Latest blog posts, list of questions and preparation for a structured interview.

Structured interviews are structured for a reason. They are an easily-replicable, consistent, and thorough assessment of whether a candidate is a fit for a role. It goes hand in hand with recruiting which, if you want to learn more about that, we suggest you read our comprehensive guide to recruiting .

So, what kind of structured interview questions will help employers find the right candidate? In this article, we offer some examples, as well as examples of structured interview questions you can use as a template today.

Gather all your applicant data in one place: Personio.

• 1 What Should a Structured Interview Look Like?
• 2 What Is a Good Introductory Interview Question?
• 3 Standard Interview Questions – A Good Way to Begin
• 4 Which Structured Interview Questions Can You Use to Test Soft Skills?
• 5 Provocative Structured Interview Questions
• 6 Which Structured Interview Questions Are Off Limits?
• 7 Future Prospects

What Should a Structured Interview Look Like?

Of course, the list of questions must first be discussed internally and matched to the job profile. There are some standard questions that are suitable for pretty much any interview. More important, however, are those that are designed to draw out the candidate and have been specifically developed for the requirement profile.

Every question asked when conducting an interview should have a purpose and a goal, and provide information about candidates' soft skills. It is precisely these "soft" characteristics, such as initiative or resilience, that will help you decide whether an applicant is compatible with your company.

What’s The Difference Between A Structured and Semi-Structured Interview?

It’s all in the name! A structured interview is designed to offer a very rigid and understandable template for an interview. It is best implemented when either trying to scale, and hire a lot of people, or interviewing for very specific or ‘testable’ hard skills (like different coding languages for a developer, for instance). A semi-structured interview , on the other hand, is more of a conversation and can test both soft skills while allowing interviewees to explore ideas.

What Is a Good Introductory Interview Question?

It might sound banal, but people often do not take it into account enough: In order to find out whether you can “work together,” it is important to know your own values: What defines your company? What are your goals for the next few years? Only those who know what they are looking for can identify the “right” candidate.

And it is not just the questions you ask when giving a structured interview, but also the environment in which they are asked that is important. There is, for example, a big difference between a candidate facing a seven-person interview panel in an ornate conference room and a one-on-one chat with someone from HR in a relaxed atmosphere.

Who should take part in these discussions? Who is essential? At Personio, for example, there are up to five interviews with different people at each stage (with a specific purpose for each).

Standard Interview Questions – A Good Way to Begin

First of all, when giving a structured interview, it is worth asking some standard questions to get things going; they can break the ice and get the communication started.

For example, you could ask your interviewee what they know about your company and why they want to work for you. You will be able to tell very quickly from their answers whether the candidate has any real interest in your company.

Asking about strengths and weaknesses when interviewing someone for a job is a popular choice. “Can you tell us something about your weaknesses?” reveals more than simply asking “What are …?” Does the candidate describe their weaknesses in a differentiated and self-reflective manner, or do you get the feeling that they are repeating a list of points they have memorized in advance?

If you ask about failures, make sure that they take responsibility for the failure mentioned and reveal what they learned from it. Or, do they blame colleagues or supervisors for their own failures?

The question of role models can also be illuminating, as can asking why they chose their particular profession: “What made you choose this particular career?” If the applicant replies that they were following their parents’ wishes, this tells you something very different than if they say they are pursuing their vocation.

Touching on personal interests can relax the atmosphere and help the candidate open up during a structured interview. “What are your greatest passions?” or “What do you like to do in your free time?” are innocuous questions, but the answers can tell you a lot about the applicant’s drive, goals, and passions.

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Which Structured Interview Questions Can You Use to Test Soft Skills?

So, what is a structured interview, and what is its key purpose? The main idea is to try and get a better read on an applicant’s ‘soft skills.’ These qualities can include the ability to work as part of a team, creativity, resilience, diligence, and the ability to take criticism .

It is precisely these soft skills that you can test by asking certain questions when facilitating a structured interview for just about any position:

Showcasing Teamwork

If you are faced with a tricky problem, how do you approach it: by yourself or with the rest of your team?

How would you sum up the way you work with other people?

What role do you tend to play in a group?

What type of person do you enjoy working with?

What type of person do you not enjoy working with?

You are heading up a project. Which departments would you bring in, and how would you go about that?

The applicant’s answers will give you some indication as to whether they can think as part of a team and whether they are open to suggestions from others. They also show whether the applicant is able to delegate effectively.

You are a project manager, and half of your team is off sick with the flu. But you have a schedule you need to stick to. What do you do?

What do you do when there doesn’t seem to be a solution?

In previous jobs, how have you had to work creatively?

What freedoms are important to you in your job?

In which situations are you most creative?

What situations constrain your ability to work creatively?

These structured interview questions, and their following answers, will show you whether you are dealing with someone who can think creatively – and also whether creativity is a particular strength of theirs in stressful or time-critical situations.

What stressful situations have you had to deal with in your professional life thus far?

Have you ever failed at something? How did you deal with that?

Do you consider yourself to be resilient? What makes you say that?

You are heading up a project, and you know that most of the people involved do not have a great deal of faith in you. How would you deal with that?

The answers to these structured interview questions for managers will give you some idea of how the candidate behaves under pressure. More importantly:

Do they remain level-headed?

Are they able to deal with stressful situations professionally?

Can they work with others intelligently and appreciatively, despite being under pressure?

What does working carefully mean to you? Could you give me some examples?

How do you check your work for errors?

You are working on a time-critical project. What is more important to you: scrupulously meeting the deadline or delivering quality work, even if it means you miss the deadline?

These structured interview questions for employers are designed to make the applicant reveal their true character: Just how diligent are they? Would they sacrifice quality to meet a deadline?

The Ability to Take Criticism

You have applied for a position here. What made you leave your previous position?

Is there a particular aspect of yourself that you would like to develop further?

Your whole team comes to your desk and says: Your instructions are unclear and your deadlines are much too tight. We can’t work like this. What do you do?

Have you ever been disappointed in yourself? How did you deal with that?

These structured interview questions should reveal whether the applicant is able to reflect on their own abilities, or whether they tend to see criticism from others as an affront. A good team player should be considerate of their colleagues and also open to criticism.

Download: Template for Job Requirements

Requirement profiles help to fill open positions with the right candidates. Use this template to ask the right questions during the first interview.

Provocative Structured Interview Questions

It can be very revealing to provoke the candidate a little. How do they react? Do they remain calm and level-headed? What are their limits?

For example, anyone who wants to work in a leadership position should be able to handle provocations confidently and also possess the necessary self-confidence.

Examples of Provocative Questions for Interviewers

Are you the smartest person you know?

On a scale from one to ten: How strange are you?

What makes you get up in the morning?

What does your partner dislike about you?

I can already tell – you just want to work here to make money. This is not your dream job. Am I right?

We have been talking for two hours now: What can you say to win us over that you haven’t said already?

Which Structured Interview Questions Are Off Limits?

There are also questions that employers are not allowed to ask when conducting a structured interview. Basically, you are not allowed to ask any question if the employer has no legitimate interest in the answer (“What political party do you support?”) or if the question violates the candidate’s right to privacy (“Are you religious?”).

An applicant does not have to answer any job interview questions concerning their private life that have nothing to do with work. Preparing well should help you avoid unpleasant situations and mistakes.

Future Prospects

The use of artificial intelligence in recruiting and in the context of HR decision-making is becoming an increasing focus of discussion.While people make their decisions about applicants based on feelings and personal sympathies, algorithms are considered incorruptible. But: They are not always neutral either.

Behind every algorithm is a programmer – who can also have prejudices and transfer them to the code. It is true that the abilities of artificial intelligence are increasing every day. Nevertheless, it is still the case that people have to interact with each other in the workplace. In this respect, even the most sophisticated analyses cannot replace “real” life, and an open discussion between people can be more effective than the best practice run.

Hire The Right Candidates Faster

Financial well-being of women self-help group members: a qualitative study

• Published: 10 April 2024

Cite this article

• Barun Srivastava 1 , 2 ,
• Vinay Kandpal 3 &
• Arvind Kumar Jain 4  

This research study aims to examine the financial well-being of Women Self Help Groups members; how and in which manner SHGs have contributed to improving the financial well-being of women is the question under study. Financial well-being of women can be achieved only when the resources are equally accessible irrespective of gender differences and creating a sustainable economic environment for all. The research is qualitative; the responses were collected through a semi-structured in-depth interview with the women SHG members in Uttarakhand, India, and then thematic analysis was applied to the data until the saturation level was reached. To ensure the long-term sustainability of SHGs, access to credit, training in financial management, and market linkages need to be strengthened. Moreover, continuous monitoring, evaluation, and targeted interventions are necessary to address the specific needs and aspirations of SHG members. Still, constant efforts and effective implementation are required to ensure continuous improvement in the financial well-being of SHG members, leading to their economic and overall societal empowerment and development. This research focuses on the financial well-being of women SHG members, especially those living in hilly and rural areas, with specific contextual reference to Uttarakhand, India. This research will provide a roadmap and reveal the extent where government needs to focus on bringing sustainable development and improving the financial well-being and economic empowerment of women SHG members.

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Data is related to qualitative research on investment behavior of women. It could be made available on request.

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Srivastava, B., Kandpal, V. & Jain, A.K. Financial well-being of women self-help group members: a qualitative study. Environ Dev Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-04879-w

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Received : 18 July 2023

Accepted : 02 April 2024

Published : 10 April 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-04879-w

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Dental Education

Article Title: A 12-year follow up of principles learned in a pediatric dentistry Master of Public Health (MPH) dual degree program applied to professional practice Provisionally Accepted

• 1 University of California, Los Angeles, United States

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Introduction: Dental public health professionals play a critical role in preventing and controlling oral diseases. The purpose of this study was to assess the application of public health principles learned in a pediatric dentistry Master of Public Health (MPH) dual degree program to professional practice upon graduation. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with pediatric dentistry/MPH dual degree alumni who graduated from the program between 2012 and 2023. Interview questions inquired about characteristics of patient population, location of providers' clinic/organization, whether the program was worthwhile to their practice and application of principles learned in the program to their professional practice. Results: Twenty of the 22 program alumni agreed to be interviewed. All alumni thought the program was extremely worthwhile to their practice. They felt the MPH component of the program gave them the public health background and tools they needed to provide comprehensive and holistic care to their patients. Additionally, all alumni reported applying the public health principles they learned in the program to their professional practice through leadership roles, research and teaching that focuses on oral disease prevention and the promotion of dental health. Discussion: Given the importance of a dental public health professionals' role in reducing oral health disparities at the population level, more pediatric dentistry MPH dual degree programs are urgently needed. Additionally, more research is necessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of these programs, which will be critical to helping ensure the value of a dual degree in dentistry and public health is recognized and promoted worldwide.

Keywords: dental public health, Oral disease prevention, dental health promotion, Oral health disparities, social determinants of health, early childhood caries, underserved populations

Received: 27 Oct 2023; Accepted: 10 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Ramos-Gomez, Kinsler, Parkinson and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Dr. Janni Kinsler, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, 90095, California, United States

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