Hello Lakshitha,

Doing a qualitative interview requires that you determine who exactly you want to interview, why you want to interview them and what information you want from them. You may wan to interview respondents who experience the challenge you are investigating or executives who operate what causes the challenge or community leaders where you are investigating. Next you decide the data collection instruments to use: Interview Guide and Focus Group Discussion. The interview can be conducted on face-to-face if you are sure the interviewees will be available but if not, you can use phone, zoom, or even Whatsap conversation. Your interviewees MUST be aware you will record the interview session but assure them it would be for research purpose ONLY. After linking up with your interviewees, fix a date/time and make sure your are available. Each session should not be more than 1hr maximum. Fourty to Fifty minutes is advisable. Develop questions for the interview based on the research objectives. Make sure the questions are not many and should be followed by probing questions.

A good source on how to do qualitative interviews is the textbook by Rubin & Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data.

Assuming you have chosen your sample interviewees and arranged their consent for the interview to be recorded, you will need to decide on the type of interview - structured, semi-structured or unstructured.

Structured interviews require the exact same questions to be asked of all interviewees. This constrains you to the answers they give, however, long/brief, insightful/unhelpful or detailed/vague they might be. The benefit is that you have a specific set of data that should be highly consistent in terms of analysis and easier replicability of data collection.

Unstructured interviews are based on a very broad open question to start the dialogue, e.g. "what impacts do you believe GHG have had on your immediate environment?" and then follow the line of discussion that follows on from that starting point. There is little in the way of replicability in this form as you do not exercise control over the responses and it may generate wildly differing responses from different interviewees making analysis more complex.

Semi-structured interviews rely on a small set of predetermined wide open questions (e.g. Tell me about... what are your feelings on... Explain what you mean.../why you did... Describe....) to give a structure to the interview but also allow you to ask supplementary questions for clarification or exploration of a particular concept. This provides some degree of replicability but also allows the interviewer to get a better understanding of people's experience, belief or knowledge of a topic. Analysis can be time consuming dependent on the themes that you are choosing or generating from the data.