Overview
An interview guide is where your research questions become conversation. The research question might be 'How do first-generation students experience academic belonging?', but no participant can answer that directly. The guide translates it into open, concrete prompts ('Tell me about a moment this term when you felt you fitted in… or didn't'), with probes that invite detail and follow-up rather than yes-or-no answers.
Focus groups add group dynamics: dominant voices, agreement pressure and the value of participants reacting to each other. A protocol needs timing, an opening round, stimulus materials, transitions and a plan for managing the room. Observation needs a different tool again, deciding in advance what counts as an observable event, how to record it and how to separate description from interpretation in field notes.
We design these instruments to fit your methodology, whether phenomenology, grounded theory, case study, ethnography or evaluation, and to match the analysis you plan, such as reflexive thematic analysis or framework analysis. You receive tools that are ready to pilot, to attach to an ethics application and to report transparently in your methods.
Who it’s for and the problems it solves
This is for you if you are…
- Students and researchers planning qualitative or mixed methods fieldwork for a thesis or project
- Researchers whose ethics committee asked to see the interview schedule or observation tool
- Evaluation and program teams running stakeholder interviews or community focus groups
- Teams needing a consistent protocol so several interviewers or moderators collect comparable data
- Education researchers designing classroom observation schedules
Common problems we help with
- Your draft questions are closed, leading or simply restate the research question
- You have too many questions for the time available and no sense of priority
- You are unsure whether you need individual interviews, focus groups or both
- Your committee wants to see how sensitive topics will be handled and how distress will be managed
- Different interviewers on your team ask questions in different ways, making data hard to compare
- Your observation notes mix what happened with what you think it meant
What’s included — and what isn’t
Included
- Mapping of research questions to interview topics, main questions and probes
- Semi-structured, structured or narrative interview guide with opening, core and closing sections
- Probe and follow-up prompts (elaboration, clarification, example, contrast) for each main question
- Focus group moderator protocol: group size and composition, timings, icebreaker, stimulus materials, activities and closing summary
- Guidance on group dynamics, turn-taking and handling dominant or quiet participants
- Observation checklist or schedule: defined behaviors or events, coding categories, sampling intervals and field note template
- Scripts for introductions, consent reminders, recording, breaks and debriefing
- Distress and disclosure protocol for sensitive topics, aligned with your ethics requirements
- Pilot interview plan and revision of the guide based on the pilot
- Interviewer or moderator briefing notes for teams to improve consistency
Not included
- Conducting interviews or moderating groups for a student's graded project; the fieldwork is yours
- Recruiting participants or offering incentives on your behalf
- Analyzing the resulting data under this service; see our thematic analysis and qualitative coding services
- Clinical or counseling protocols that require a licensed professional in the room
What you receive
- Interview guide
- A formatted guide with introduction script, main questions, probes, timing estimates and closing, plus a version stripped of notes for use in the room.
- Focus group protocol
- Moderator script with session timeline, activity instructions, stimulus materials list, note-taker role and a seating or online breakout plan.
- Observation tool
- A structured checklist or semi-structured field note template with operational definitions of each category and an example completed entry.
- Alignment table
- A table showing which question or observation category addresses which research question, useful for your methods chapter and ethics form.
- Pilot revision memo
- Notes on what the pilot showed and the changes made, so you can report instrument development transparently.
How it works
Understand the design
We review your research questions, methodology, participants and setting, and confirm whether interviews, focus groups, observation or a combination suit your aims.
Draft instruments
We draft the guide, protocol or checklist, prioritizing questions so the essentials fit comfortably within the planned session length.
Review with you
You and your supervisor or team comment; we revise wording for your participants' language, culture and literacy.
Pilot and refine
You run one or two pilot sessions. We review the recording or notes with you and refine questions that fell flat or confused people.
Finalize for fieldwork
You receive final instruments, briefing notes for any co-interviewers and the documentation to include in your ethics application.
Instrument types and techniques
- Semi-structured interviews
- A fixed set of core questions with flexible probing, the most common format for thesis research and suited to thematic and framework analysis.
- Narrative and life-history interviews
- Minimal prompts that invite participants to tell their story in their own order, used in narrative inquiry and biographical research.
- Phenomenological interviewing
- Questions focused on lived experience and specific moments rather than opinions or explanations, often used before interpretative phenomenological analysis.
- Focus group techniques
- Funnel structure from broad to specific, ranking and card-sort activities, vignettes and stimulus materials to prompt discussion.
- Structured observation
- Predefined categories with event or interval sampling, suitable when you need counts or comparisons across sites.
- Unstructured and participant observation
- Field note templates separating descriptive notes, reflective notes and emerging questions, common in ethnography.
- Online and remote data collection
- Adaptations for video-call interviews and online focus groups, including connection issues, consent recording and platform privacy settings.
Interviews or focus groups? Choosing the right format
Individual interviews are better for personal, sensitive or detailed experiences and for participants who may not speak freely in front of peers or managers. Focus groups are better for exploring shared norms, the language a community uses, and how views form and shift in interaction.
The two are not interchangeable. A focus group of employees and their line manager will produce a different kind of data from private interviews with the same people. We help you choose, and if you combine formats, we design the instruments so that each adds something the other cannot.
Writing questions that open up, not close down
Strong interview questions are open, singular, concrete and non-judgmental. We favor 'Can you describe…' and 'Walk me through…' over 'Do you think…', and questions about specific episodes over general opinions, which tend to produce rehearsed answers.
Each main question is paired with probes: 'What happened next?', 'Can you give me an example?', 'How did that compare with…?'. Probes are where depth comes from, and planning them helps less experienced interviewers avoid filling silences with leading suggestions.
What goes into a focus group protocol
A protocol is a script and a timetable for the moderator. Ours typically cover the following elements.
- Group composition: homogeneity on key characteristics, and a typical size of six to ten in person or fewer online
- Welcome, ground rules, confidentiality reminder and recording notice
- An easy opening round everyone can answer, to get every voice in the room early
- Key questions with time allocations and optional activities or stimulus materials
- A summary-and-check at the end, inviting participants to correct the moderator's understanding
- A role description for an assistant moderator or note-taker
Observation checklists that separate seeing from interpreting
An observation tool must define what the observer records. 'Student engagement' is an interpretation; 'student asks a question', 'student responds to peer' and 'student off-task for more than 30 seconds' are observable events. We write operational definitions, decide on event or time sampling, and build a field-note template that keeps descriptive notes separate from your reflections, which strengthens trustworthiness and makes inter-observer agreement checks possible.
What the work can look like
Illustrative example — fictional data
Protocols for a study of telehealth adoption among rural clinicians
A fictional doctoral researcher plans a qualitative case study of three rural clinics to understand why telehealth use varies. They want interviews with clinicians, a focus group with administrative staff and observation of clinic workflows.
Interview guide
Nine main questions were organized around a technology adoption framework, each with two to four probes. A pilot interview ran 78 minutes against a planned 45, so two questions were merged and one moved to the focus group.
Focus group protocol
A 75-minute protocol for six to eight administrative staff included a card-sort ranking of the main barriers to scheduling telehealth appointments, followed by discussion of the top three.
Observation checklist
Twelve defined workflow events (for example 'patient redirected from video to in-person visit') were recorded using event sampling across two half-day visits per site, with a separate column for reflective notes.
Illustrative, invented scenario. Real protocols are shaped by your methodology, setting, participants and ethics requirements.
What you’ll need to provide
- Research questions, methodology and the analysis approach you plan to use
- A description of participants, setting and whether sessions are in person, by phone or online
- Planned session length and any constraints from gatekeepers or sites
- Any draft questions and relevant literature or theory you want the instrument to reflect
- Ethics committee templates or requirements if you are applying
You don’t need everything ready to ask for a quote — tell us what you have and we’ll say what’s missing.
What affects price and turnaround
Price depends on
- Number of instruments and participant groups (for example separate guides for staff, managers and service users)
- Whether focus group activities and stimulus materials need to be designed
- Sensitivity of the topic and the depth of distress or safeguarding protocol required
- Number of languages or versions
- Whether pilot review and interviewer briefing are included
Turnaround depends on
- How settled your research questions and methodology are at the start
- Scheduling of pilot sessions with real participants
- Feedback cycles with supervisors, co-investigators or ethics reviewers
Every project is quoted individually. How we price our work.
Questions people ask before starting
How many interview questions should I have?
For a 45 to 60 minute semi-structured interview, many researchers use around six to twelve main questions with probes. Fewer, well-probed questions usually produce richer data than a long list. We help you prioritize so the essential questions are always asked.
Do I have to ask every question in the same order?
In semi-structured interviews, no. The guide sets out topics and questions, and you follow the participant's flow while making sure each topic is covered. Structured interviews and some evaluation designs do require a fixed order, and we write the guide accordingly.
My ethics committee wants the final questions but I expect them to evolve. What do I do?
This is common in qualitative research. We help you submit the guide with a statement that probes and follow-up questions will emerge within the approved topics, which many committees accept. Substantial new topics may need an amendment.
Can you adapt the guide for online interviews?
Yes. We add scripts for technical checks, verbal consent recording, what to do if the connection drops and how to handle privacy when participants join from home or shared spaces.
Can you run the interviews for me?
For graded student research, the fieldwork is part of your own work, so we help you prepare and practice instead. For institutional or commissioned evaluation projects, data collection can be discussed as a separate scope.
What happens after I collect the data?
Recordings can go to our transcription service, and analysis support is available through our thematic analysis and qualitative data analysis software services.