I’m Michelle Crosby, Co-Owner and Operator of Crosby Consulting & Associates with expertise in semi-structured interviews, survey design & analysis, and quantitative analysis. I’d like to share some notes of caution for your consideration when conducting qualitative interviews:

You are part of your interview! As much as we would like to believe that the interview process is not about us, we are actually part of the interview too. The goal is to mitigate that influence as much as possible. For example, when I close my eyes and picture a construction worker, I don’t picture a woman—do you? We can bring our own unconscious bias into an interview if we are not adequately prepared, starting from preparing the environment and setting of the interview, to the interview guide and quality of question construction.

Qualitative design and analysis have its own set of challenges that can, in some cases, be much more time-intensive than quantitative approaches. This is because nothing will replace the reading and close study of your interviews after you have conducted them, which should be aided by a transcript. A transcript is the verbatim capture of your interview word by word, but also the dynamics of your interview, including pauses and non-verbal communication.

The most high-tech and expensive content analysis software, including trendy software that can perform “sentiment” analysis will never replace your own close examination of interviews, including re-reading them several times. In order to assist this process, I like to listen to my transcripts using a speech reader. Your Office package might have a text reader under the “Review” tab “Read Aloud” in Word. I also use Speechify, which is an App that can convert any text to speech with lots of nice voices.

Analyzing interviews involves quantitative analysis, since often you may be looking at frequencies of words or phrases. For example, after having received a training intervention, you would expect that your trainees use certain words or phrases more frequently than before the training, and you would want to search your text for those counts. Or perhaps you started to uncover certain themes from a few interviews and you would like to count the number of times those themes appear in other interviews.

Counting words or phrases is a quantitative exercise that you might not expect if you are just starting your journey as a qualitative researcher, just as coding might be another unexpected part of qualitative research. In order for other researchers to replicate the work you have done, and inspect whether your observations are valid and make sense, reporting the codes you used to detect words and phrases is important and should be a mandatory part of your documentation if you are aiming for a high-quality investigation.

These tips will serve to assist you in constructing a fuller picture and therefore allowing you to answer your research questions more robustly. Happy interviewing!