Structured Interview: Advantages & Disadvantages

A structured interview is one where the interviewer asks each participant the same set of questions in the exact same order (including probes), in order to gather consistent and comparable data.

This method of interviewing is also known as the Standardized Open-Ended Interview (Patton, 2002) and uses preestablished questions with limited response categories.

It is open-ended in the sense that participants have the freedom to respond in their own words, however the topics they can cover in their responses are pre-decided and limited.

Questions in a Structured Interview

All qualitative research interviews are structured to varying degrees, but structured interviews are the most rigid.

Not only are the questions pre-decided, so is the way they are asked. Interviewers never deviate from the question wording and never interpret the meaning of a question in their own words during an interview (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994).

Here’s an example of a structured interview question:

So far we have discussed your training and expectations from this assignment.
Now let’s talk about your experience working in this team.
Thinking about the second half of this assignment when you were actively working in this team, what was your experience?

Probing questions:

What did you like?
What did you dislike?
What was the impact on your work?

It is important for the questions in a structured interview to be detailed to maintain consistency across interviews, particularly when there are multiple interviewers involved.

Detailed questions are also helpful in maintaining critical documentation of the interview protocol that may be required for approval of a dissertation proposal.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Structured Interviews

Advantages

Lesser interviewer bias – Since the questions and their exact wording is pre-decided, the element of ‘interviewer judgment’ is removed from interviews, leading to consistency in both methodology as well as breadth of information gathered from each participant.

Faster execution – Thanks to the limited response categories in structured interviews, researchers can cover a larger audience because they can conducted the interviews relatively faster compared to unstructured or semi-structured interviews.

Comparable responses – Because every participant in a structured interview responds to the same question and probes, it’s easier to find and compare responses during analysis (Patton, 2002).

Disadvantages

No flexibility – Interviewers are restricted to pre-decided questions, which means they cannot step outside the interview protocol to explore unanticipated and interesting topics that surface during the interview.

Not full reports – Structured interviews do not allow for full exploration of individual perspectives and circumstances, leading to fragmentary information (Weiss, 1994).

Questions are subject to interpretation – All respondents may not share the same vocabulary and may interpret questions in a structured interview differently based on their personal view (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). This may result in a variation in types of responses.

In theory, structured interviews focus on consistency and follow a rigid structure, but in practice every respondent is different and interviewers must be flexible enough to make proper adjustments for unanticipated developments (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994).

It is also common for structured interviews to be used in combination with other types of research interviews. For e.g. an interviewer may choose structured interviews in the descriptive research stage and later use semi-structured or unstructured interviews to explore specific areas.