Interviews

An interview can work well if you need a more personal, in-depth response from participants. This method can be very effective for gathering personal stories or case studies that you can then use in various resources. You can conduct interviews over the phone or face to face; think about which will be easier for the interviewee to participate in and the interviewer to lead.

Things to consider:

• What skills and experience does the interviewer have?
• What emotional responses might you expect from interviewees? How will you manage this?
• Are there any issues around consent? Think about age and capacity. You may need to ask for a consent form from a parent/guardian and the person taking part. Be sure you communicate how you plan to use what people say and how much personal information you share.
• Is confidentiality a consideration? How can you assure interviewees that you have taken the necessary steps to protect their identity or personal data, if necessary?
• Make sure you prepare your questions in advance? Remember to keep them as consistent as possible during all interviews, as this will help your analysis later on.
• Think about how you will give feedback on the results and what you will do as a result. The 'You said…We did tool' (With instructions | Without instructions) in this toolkit is a simple way of doing this and can be shared in a digital format or hard copies. You may want to create charts or an infographic to represent what you learnt visually.

Next - Discussion and focus groups

Methods menu

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.