Plan, run and analyse an interview or focus group practical on a health topic, apply the ethical rules for school research, and answer the four kinds of question asked about the method.
Each is in the Psychology glossary, with every other term in the subject.
The point in qualitative data collection at which further interviews or observations produce no new codes or themes, used to decide when a sample is large enough.
The planned list of questions and follow-up probes used to guide an interview, so that the same topics are covered with every participant.
A change in participants’ answers caused by the characteristics or behaviour of the interviewer, such as age, gender, status or reactions, rather than by the participants’ own views.
A planned follow-up question in an interview that asks the participant for more detail, such as an example, what happened next or how something felt.
A relationship of trust and mutual understanding between interviewer and participant that encourages open and honest answers.
A written, word-for-word record of an interview or focus group, usually anonymised, which forms the raw data for qualitative analysis.
A short written story about a fictional person or situation, used in interviews or questionnaires so that participants can give their views without describing their own experience.
Describe the main types of interview and the features of a focus group.
Explain how to plan an interview practical: aim, type of interview, sampling and sample size.
Apply the ethical rules for school practicals to an interview on a health and well-being topic.
Design an interview schedule with open, non-leading questions, probes and a funnel structure.
Describe how interview data are recorded, transcribed and analysed into themes, and how their credibility is checked.
Explain each of the six concepts in relation to an interview practical.
Evaluate interviews as a research method, with reference to a published interview study.
Compare and contrast interviews with other research methods, and design another method on the same topic.
An interview is a research method in which a researcher asks questions and records the answers, usually in conversation and usually as qualitative data. It is the method of the class practical in the health and well-being context, because much of what matters in health is a person’s own experience: how stress feels, why someone keeps exercising or gives up, what helps them recover.
Interviews give access to meanings and reasons that a number cannot capture. They also raise questions of bias, because the interviewer is part of the data; of measurement, because words must be turned into findings; and of responsibility, because people are asked to talk about themselves.
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Scope: The interview class practical, carried out in the health and well-being context: structured or semi-structured individual interviews or a focus group, planned, conducted, analysed and evaluated. The general theory of interviews as a research method belongs to research methods; this subtopic is about using the method in a practical, and the assessment focuses on the method rather than on the topic investigated.
Interviews are a form of self-report: participants describe their own thoughts, feelings and behaviour. Most interviews in psychology are qualitative research, which aims to understand experiences from the participant’s point of view rather than to measure variables and test a hypothesis. The approach is usually inductive: the researcher starts from what participants say and builds an understanding from it, instead of starting from a prediction.
Because nothing is manipulated, an interview cannot show that one variable causes another. It can describe how people understand a behaviour, what they think causes it and how they cope with it. Those descriptions are often the starting point for later experiments and questionnaires, and they show the perspective of the people being studied.
Interviews differ in how much is decided before the conversation starts. In a structured interview every participant hears the same questions in the same order with the same wording, and the interviewer does not add questions. In a semi-structured interview the interviewer works from a prepared list of open questions but may change their order and ask follow-up questions. An unstructured interview is close to a guided conversation around a topic, with few or no prepared questions.
Each position on this continuum is a trade-off. Structured interviews are easy to replicate and their answers can be counted, but they cannot follow up an interesting answer. Unstructured interviews give the most depth but depend heavily on the interviewer’s skill, and no two interviews are alike. Semi-structured interviews keep enough structure to compare participants while leaving room to explore what each person says.
A focus group is a group interview: a facilitator leads a discussion among a small group of people who share a relevant characteristic, usually with a semi-structured list of questions. The data include not only what each person says but how the group talks: where members agree, where they disagree and how one person’s comment sparks another’s.
Focus groups suit topics where shared experience matters, such as how students manage everyday stress or what a class made of a mindfulness session. They have their own problems. A confident member can dominate, quieter members may hold back, and some may go along with the group view, which is a form of conformity. Personal matters are also harder to discuss in front of peers than with one interviewer.
Type | How it works | Main strength | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
Structured | Fixed questions, order and wording; often short or closed answers | Comparable and replicable; answers can be counted | No follow-up, so answers stay shallow |
Semi-structured | A schedule of open questions plus probes; order can change | Depth with some comparability | Interviews differ; probes can lead; slow to analyse |
Unstructured | A conversation around a topic, led by the participant’s answers | Maximum depth on new topics | Hard to compare or replicate; most open to interviewer influence |
Focus group | A facilitator leads 3–8 participants through open questions | Several views at once; ideas build on each other | Dominant voices, conformity, less privacy |
Health and well-being include physical and mental health and a person’s own sense that life is going well. Well-being in particular is subjective: it can only be reported by the person who has it. Interviews let researchers explore how people experience stress, sleep, exercise or screen use, how they explain these experiences and which coping strategies they find useful.
Interviews also show how culture shapes health beliefs. People from different backgrounds may describe the same symptoms in different terms, through an explanatory model of what is wrong and what should be done. An open question lets participants answer in their own terms, which is the aim of an emic approach, rather than forcing their experience into categories chosen by the researcher.
A class practical is a small piece of real research carried out in class, either led by the teacher (who may act as researcher, with students as participants) or led by students under supervision. Planning answers five questions: what the practical aims to find out, which type of interview fits that aim, who will take part, how many, and how the data will be recorded and analysed.
An interview aim is usually an open “how” or “what” question about experience, rather than a prediction. “To investigate how Grade 11 students experience the effect of exercise on their mood and stress” suits an interview. “To find out whether students who exercise more have lower stress scores” is a correlational question that a questionnaire would answer better. A clear aim names the topic, the population and the kind of understanding sought.
The choice follows from the aim. A semi-structured individual interview suits a topic where each person’s story matters, such as how a school counsellor or a yoga teacher helps students relax. A focus group suits a shared experience, such as how a class found a short mindfulness practice. A structured interview suits a practical whose aim is to compare answers across people, for example how many students use each of a list of stress-reduction strategies.
The target population is the group the practical wants to understand, such as students in their final two years at one school. Most interview practicals use self-selected sampling (volunteers who answer a notice) or opportunity sampling (whoever is available and willing). Qualitative researchers often choose participants because they have the relevant experience, which is purposive sampling; when the group is hard to reach, participants can recruit others they know, which is snowball sampling.
Interview samples are small, because each interview produces a large amount of data. For a student-led practical the minimum is one participant in an individual interview, or a single focus group of three to eight people. Larger studies keep interviewing until new interviews add no new ideas, a point called data saturation.
Hennink, Kaiser and Marconi (2017) tested how quickly saturation is reached in 25 in-depth interviews from a health study. The range of issues (code saturation) was identified after nine interviews, but 16 to 24 interviews were needed before the researchers had a rich understanding of each issue (meaning saturation). A class practical rarely reaches saturation, which limits the transferability of its findings.
Sources: Hennink, M. M., Kaiser, B. N. & Marconi, V. C. (2017). Code saturation versus meaning saturation: how many interviews are enough? _Qualitative Health Research, 27(4), 591–608._
The ethical principles of psychology, such as informed consent, the right to withdraw, protection from harm, anonymity and debriefing, apply to every practical. Because class practicals are carried out by students, often with other students as participants, schools apply a stricter set of rules on top of them.
Rule for school practicals | What it means for an interview |
|---|---|
Teacher supervision | The teacher approves the plan and the questions before anyone is interviewed; student-led practicals outside lessons use the school’s practical research form. |
Written informed consent | Each participant signs a consent form after being told the aim, what will happen and their right to withdraw. Implied consent (for example, simply turning up) is not enough. |
Parental consent under 16 | Participants under 16 also need a parent’s or guardian’s written consent. |
Right to withdraw | Participants can stop at any time, skip any question and ask for their recording or transcript to be deleted. |
No harm or distress | No questions that are likely to cause anxiety, embarrassment or upset. |
No sensitive topics | No questions about mental health problems or diagnoses, bullying, self-harm or similar issues. |
Anonymity and data protection | Names are replaced by codes; recordings are stored securely, used only for the agreed purpose and deleted afterwards. |
Debriefing | At the end, participants are thanked, told how their data will be used and given a chance to ask questions. |
These rules shape what can be studied. Health topics suitable for students include healthy lifestyle habits, sleep routines, ways of reducing everyday stress, exercise and mood, and media use. Topics such as depression, eating problems or experiences of bullying are suitable for professional researchers with trained interviewers and support services, but not for a class practical. A useful technique from published research is the vignette: participants discuss a short story about a fictional person instead of their own experience, which keeps a study about health beliefs at a safe distance from their own lives.
Ethics also affect the data. Participants who know they can skip questions may skip the most revealing ones, and those who volunteer for a study of exercise may be keener on exercise than others. Anonymity has the opposite effect, because it can make people more willing to say what they really think. Each of these effects is a link between responsibility and the quality of the findings.
The interview schedule is the data collection tool of an interview: the list of questions, probes and instructions the interviewer takes into the room. A good schedule turns the aim into a small number of areas, asks about each in open, neutral language and moves from easy to harder questions.
Divide the aim into areas. For exercise and mood: what exercise participants do, how they feel during and after it, what stops them exercising, and whether they use it on purpose to manage stress.
Write one or two open questions per area. Begin with “how”, “what” or “tell me about”. An open question invites a description; a closed question, such as whether someone exercises at all, invites a yes or no.
Add probes. A probe is a planned follow-up that asks for more detail: for an example, for what happened next, or for how something felt.
Order the questions as a funnel. Start with general, easy questions that build trust and move towards more specific ones.
Check each question for leading wording, jargon and two questions in one.
Pilot the schedule with one person who is not in the sample, and rewrite any question that confuses them or produces one-word answers.
Most weak interview questions fail in one of four ways. A leading question suggests the answer the researcher expects. A double-barrelled question asks two things at once, so the answer is impossible to interpret. Jargon uses words participants may not know. A closed question shuts down the answer it is supposed to open.
Rapport is the relationship of trust and ease between interviewer and participant. Participants who feel comfortable give longer and more honest answers. Interviewers build rapport by explaining the purpose clearly, starting with easy questions, listening without judging, using the participant’s own words and allowing silences.
The setting matters too. A quiet room where the conversation cannot be overheard protects confidentiality and reduces distraction. In a school, the setting should feel neutral: an interview held in a teacher’s office may feel like a disciplinary meeting.
YouTubeThe interviewer is part of the situation that produces the data. An interviewer effect occurs when characteristics or behaviour of the interviewer, such as age, gender, status, tone of voice or visible reactions, change what participants say. A student interviewing a classmate about exercise may hear different answers from a teacher interviewing the same student, because the classmate is a peer and the teacher is an authority.
Interviewer effects combine with social desirability bias, the tendency of participants to give answers that make them look good. Students may overstate how much they exercise or understate how late they stay up. Interviewers reduce these effects with neutral wording, a non-judgemental manner, a standard introduction and, where possible, an interviewer who is not in a position of power over the participant.
A focus group needs a facilitator who keeps the discussion on the topic, invites quieter members to speak and stops one person from dominating. Ground rules at the start help: one person speaks at a time, there are no right answers, and what is said in the room stays in the room. A second researcher can take notes on who speaks when, which makes the recording much easier to transcribe.
Interviews are audio-recorded with the participant’s consent, so that the interviewer can listen rather than write. Notes are a back-up and can record things a recording misses, such as a pause or a gesture. Afterwards the recording is turned into a transcript, a written word-for-word record of what was said, in which names and identifying details are replaced by codes such as “P3”.
YouTubeInterview data are words, so analysis means finding patterns of meaning in them. The most common way to do this is thematic analysis, in which the researcher reads the transcripts closely, labels short extracts with codes and groups related codes into themes. A practical uses a simplified version of the full method.
Become familiar with the data. Read each transcript several times and note first impressions.
Code. Give short labels to extracts that relate to the aim: “exercise as a break”, “guilt about skipping”, “music while running”. A coding label summarises what an extract is about.
Search for themes. Group codes that share a meaning into a theme, such as “exercise as a way to switch off from schoolwork”.
Review and name the themes. Check each theme against the transcripts: is it supported by several participants, and are there extracts that contradict it?
Report. Describe each theme and support it with short anonymised quotations.
A structured interview can also be analysed with numbers. If every participant answered the same closed question, the researcher can count how many gave each answer, which is a simple form of content analysis that produces quantitative data. Most interview practicals, however, report themes rather than percentages.
Credibility is the extent to which qualitative findings give a true picture of what participants meant. Three checks are practical in a school. In researcher triangulation, two students code the same transcript separately and compare their codes; agreement suggests the themes are not just one person’s reading. In member checking, participants read a summary of the themes and say whether it captures their views. In reflexivity, the researchers note how their own views and their role may have shaped the questions and the analysis.
Every research method can be analysed through the six concepts. For interviews, each concept points to a specific strength or weakness, and each one can be tied to a decision made in an actual practical.
Concept | How it applies to an interview practical |
|---|---|
Bias | Interviewer effects and leading probes; social desirability in participants’ answers; confirmation bias when researchers code what they expected; conformity and dominant voices in a focus group; a self-selected sample of keen volunteers. |
Causality | An interview cannot establish cause and effect: nothing is manipulated and nothing is controlled. It records what participants believe causes their behaviour, which may differ from what actually causes it. |
Change | Findings can suggest changes, such as a school policy that protects time for exercise. Interviews can also be repeated over time to explore how experiences change, for example before and after a well-being programme. |
Measurement | Data are self-reported words, not measurements of behaviour. The quality of the schedule (open, neutral, piloted) and of the analysis (coding checked by a second coder) decides how credible the findings are. |
Perspective | Interviews give an emic, holistic view of a behaviour from the participant’s perspective. The researcher’s own perspective shapes the questions and the themes, which is why reflexivity matters. |
Responsibility | Written consent, the right to withdraw and to skip questions, anonymised transcripts, deleted recordings, and avoiding sensitive topics. These choices also shape the data, for instance when participants skip the most revealing questions. |
Two of these links are especially useful when evaluating interview research. Causality is the method’s clearest limitation, because a participant’s explanation of their own behaviour is a belief, not evidence of a cause. Perspective is its clearest strength, because an open question lets people describe health in their own terms, which a questionnaire written by researchers may not allow.
The following worked practical follows one semi-structured focus group from plan to findings. It is the kind of study a class carries out on a health and well-being topic. The findings are hypothetical.
The schedule turns the aim into four areas: what activity students do, how it affects how they feel, what stops them, and whether they use it on purpose. Each area has one main question and planned probes.
The procedure follows the ethical rules for school practicals at each step, from the consent form before the session to the deletion of the recording after the analysis.
Two students coded the anonymised transcript separately, compared their codes and agreed on the themes before writing them up.
Professional researchers use the same method with more participants, trained interviewers and much more careful analysis. Three examples show the range of what interviews can do in health and well-being.
Brown and Harris (1978) interviewed women in Camberwell, London, with the Life Events and Difficulties Schedule, a semi-structured interview in which trained interviewers asked about recent events and then rated how threatening each was in the context of the woman’s life. The interview format let raters judge the meaning of an event, such as a move of house, instead of counting it as equally stressful for everyone. The method showed that severe life events and long-term difficulties often came before the onset of depression.
Kleinman (1982) used clinical interviews with patients in Hunan, China, who had been diagnosed with neurasthenia, a diagnosis that emphasised physical symptoms such as tiredness and headaches. Many of them also met the criteria for major depressive disorder, showing how open interviews can bring out the different ways cultures express distress.
Focus groups are used to hear young people’s own views on health topics, for example how adolescents see the effects of social media on their mental health. Their strength is that participants react to each other’s ideas; their weakness is that the group may converge on a shared view that not every member holds.
Karasz used semi-structured interviews to compare how two cultural groups in New York City understood the symptoms of depression. The study is a model for interview research on health because it used a vignette, so that participants discussed a fictional person rather than their own mental health.
The study aimed to find out whether South Asian immigrants and European Americans hold different “conceptual models” of depressive symptoms: different ideas about what the problem is, what causes it and what should be done about it. The background was a public health problem: members of ethnic minority groups are less likely than white middle-class people to seek professional treatment for depression.
The participants were 36 South Asian immigrants and 37 European Americans living in New York City. Each read a short vignette describing a person with typical depressive symptoms, such as low mood, poor sleep and loss of interest, without the word “depression” being used. A semi-structured interview then asked what the person’s problem was, what had caused it, what the person should do and where they could get help.
Using a vignette operationalised the participants’ health beliefs as their explanations of someone else’s symptoms. The open questions let each participant describe the problem in their own words, so that the categories came from the participants rather than from a psychiatric checklist. The answers were then compared across the two groups.
Question in the interview | South Asian immigrants | European Americans |
|---|---|---|
What is the problem? | Mostly described in social and moral terms: a reaction to a difficult life situation or problems in relationships | Often two models side by side: a biological illness (“hormonal imbalance”, “neurological problem”) and a situational stress model |
What should the person do? | Manage it themselves; turn to family and friends (lay referral) | Depended on the model used: a biological explanation pointed towards medical treatment, a situational one towards dealing with the life problem |
Are the models consistent? | Largely one shared social model | Sometimes contradictory models held by the same person |
Sources: Karasz, A. (2005). Cultural differences in conceptual models of depression. _Social Science & Medicine, 60(7), 1625–1635._
The differences were pervasive. South Asian participants rarely described the symptoms as an illness. European American participants often described them as a disease needing professional treatment, but many also held a second, situational explanation similar to that of the South Asian group.
Cultural groups can hold different explanatory models of the same symptoms, and these models predict different ways of seeking help. Low use of professional treatment among some minority groups may therefore reflect a different understanding of the problem rather than a lack of access alone. Services that assume a biological model may not match how many potential patients understand their own distress.
The vignette made the stimulus identical for every participant, so differences in answers can be attributed to how people interpreted it rather than to different experiences. Open questions captured the participants’ own models, which a questionnaire with fixed options such as “chemical imbalance” would have missed. However, explaining a fictional person’s symptoms is not the same as experiencing them, so the models may differ from how participants would act if they were unwell themselves.
Interviewer effects and language could shape the answers: participants who are less fluent in English, or who see the interviewer as an outsider, may give shorter or more socially acceptable answers. The analysis also depended on the researcher’s interpretation of what counts as a “biological” or “social” model, which is why checks such as a second coder matter. The samples were small and from one city, so the findings may not transfer to South Asian communities elsewhere or to second-generation immigrants.
By using a vignette, the study learned about beliefs on depression without asking anyone about their own mental health, which reduced the risk of distress. The findings also carry responsibility in how they are reported: describing a group’s model as less “correct” would stigmatise it, while describing it as different supports services that respect patients’ own understanding.
Paper 2 Section A asks four questions on one class practical, named by its method. The questions focus on the method, not on the topic, so the same four types come up every time: describe how the method was used [4], explain one concept in relation to it [4], compare and contrast it with another method [6], and design a study on the same topic with a different method [6]. The model answers use the worked practical on exercise and mood.
An explain question gives one concept. The answer needs the concept explained and then two or three specific links to decisions in the practical.
Compare and contrast questions need similarities and differences, each explained and each tied to both methods. A table of points is a useful plan.
Point | Interview (focus group) | Experiment |
|---|---|---|
Data | Qualitative words, analysed into themes | Quantitative scores, analysed with descriptive statistics |
Control | Little control over what is discussed | IV manipulated, extraneous variables controlled |
Causality | Cannot show cause and effect | A true experiment can show cause and effect |
Perspective | Emic: the participants’ own terms | Etic: the researcher’s operational definitions |
Shared | Both need consent forms, the right to withdraw and a debrief; both can be affected by demand characteristics and researcher bias; both are usually run with small, self-selected or opportunity samples of students |
An interview is a self-report method that collects mostly qualitative data; types range from structured to semi-structured and unstructured, and a focus group is a group interview led by a facilitator.
Interviews suit health and well-being because they capture people’s own experience and explanations, in their own terms.
Planning covers the aim (a “how” or “what” question), the type of interview, the sample (usually self-selected or opportunity) and sample size, judged by data saturation.
School practicals need written consent forms, parental consent under 16, the right to withdraw and skip questions, anonymised transcripts, deleted recordings and no sensitive topics.
The interview schedule uses open, neutral, single questions in a funnel order, with probes, and is piloted first.
Rapport improves answers; interviewer effects, social desirability and, in focus groups, conformity and dominant voices are the main biases.
Recordings are transcribed and analysed into themes; credibility is checked with a second coder, member checking and reflexivity.
Karasz (2005) used a vignette and semi-structured interviews to show that South Asian immigrants and European Americans held different models of depressive symptoms.
Interviews cannot establish causality, but they give depth and an emic perspective that experiments and questionnaires can miss.
I can describe structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews and focus groups, with a strength and a limitation of each.
I can explain how to plan an interview practical, including its aim, type, sampling technique and sample size.
I can apply the ethical rules for school practicals to an interview on a health topic.
I can write an interview schedule with open, non-leading questions, probes and a funnel structure.
I can describe how interview data are transcribed and analysed into themes, and how credibility is checked.
I can explain each of the six concepts in relation to my interview practical.
I can evaluate interviews with reference to Karasz (2005).
I can compare and contrast interviews with an experiment, and design an observation on the same topic.