Designing Qualitative Interviews
Qualitative interviewing design is flexible, iterative, and continuous, rather than prepared in advance and locked in stone..
Iterative design means that each time you repeat the basic process of gathering information, analyzing it, winnowing it, and testing it, you come closer to a clear and convincing model of the phenomenon you are studying.
The continuous nature of qualitative interviewing means that the questioning is redesigned throughout the project.
The purpose of qualitative interviewing is to obtain rich data to build theories that describe a setting or explain a phenomenon.
In building these theories, researchers listen carefully to hear the underlying building block ideas, or concepts, and the themes that both describe the culture and explain why events happen.