Hello, I am very new to research and currently in the middle of my dissertation.
I am researching factors that could influence resilience and due to limited time and resources, I have created an online questionnaire with open-ended questions for participants to answer (interviews would have been ideal).
I am getting a little lost with the terminology. Would it still be considered a structured interview? I am asking the same questions, I am just not receiving the answers face-to-face.
And what would the best method to analyze the data be? I was planning on doing a thematic analyses.
Thank you in advance for the help!!!
Yes, I would consider this a structured interview. The main distinction is between structured- and semi-structured, but you cannot make choices about how closely to follow your questioning routed, so this has to be structured- rather than semi-structured.
And I don't see any problem with using Thematic Analysis, although I would recommend using a more up-to-date version beyond Braun and Clarke (2006).
Phrasing and sequencing interview questions can draw the core distinction between the three approaches to interviewing: Structured, unstructured, and semi-structured. In a structured interview, questions follow the exact wording or appear in the same order for all respondents. On the other hand, in unstructured interviewing, questions vary in phrasing and sequencing across interviews, i.e., they do not have any fixed verbal or structural pattern. As a middle ground between the two extremes, the semi-structured interview enjoys some variation in verbalizing or arranging the questions that the interviewer may harness for a reason, such as a directed, in-depth understanding of some aspects of the problem under investigation. In short, it is not only the type of questions (e.g., closed-ended vs. open-ended) that manifest the interviewing approach but also their sequence when asked.
In your case, if the open-ended questions are worded and arranged in the same manner for all respondents, your online interview survey can be structured. However, if you manage through the settings of the platform delivering your web-based open-ended questionnaire to vary the sequence of the questions or harness artificial intelligence to ask a few extra questions across the interviews, it could be semi-structured. Here is a helpful read.
Braun, V., Clarke, V., Boulton, E., Davey, L., & McEvoy, C. (2021). The online survey as a qualitative research tool. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 24(6), 641–654. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020.1805550
Good luck,
For better or worse, the term "semi-structured Interview" is only loosely defined in qualitative research. I personally think of it as meaning that the interviewer starts with a written interview guide, but has considerable freedom with regard to how to follow that guide, such as changing the order in which questions are asked, probing more deeply into some questions than others, and so on. None of that is possible with an online, open-ended questionnaire, so I would call that structured rather than semi-structured.
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