The commonest failure in qualitative fieldwork is treating the guide as a script and reading it out in order. The result is short answers to your questions rather than an account of the participant's experience — a questionnaire administered slowly.
Enter your topic and this tool builds a funnel-ordered guide: rapport-building openers, core questions tied to your objectives, a bank of probes for any answer, and closing questions. The technique notes matter as much as the questions themselves.
Opening questions are broad and easy: role, background, how the topic arises in the participant's life. Their function is rapport, not data. Someone who has talked comfortably for two minutes will answer a difficult question at minute twenty far more fully than someone asked it immediately.
Core questions narrow toward your objectives; closing questions widen again. "What would you change?" and "what have I not asked about?" routinely surface the thing you did not know to ask, and that last question has rescued more qualitative projects than any other technique.
"Could you say more about that?", "what did that look like in practice?", "can you give me an example?" — these convert a one-sentence answer into the concrete detail that makes a findings chapter readable. Keep them written down, because they are easy to forget in a live interview.
Silence is the most underused probe of all. Waiting three or four seconds after an answer feels awkward and very often produces the most valuable sentence in the transcript. Do not fill the pause with your next question.
"Don't you think the system is too slow?" confirms your opinion. "How would you describe the speed of the system?" gets theirs. Leading questions are the most damaging error in qualitative interviewing precisely because the data looks fine — it simply reflects you rather than the participant.
Ask one thing at a time; a double question returns one answer and you will not know which half it addressed. Keep questions open, and avoid your own theoretical vocabulary — ask what people do and experience, not whether they "experience institutional barriers".
Interview in the language the participant is most fluent in. If that is Nepali or another local language and you will report in English, translate during transcription and keep the original wording for key quotes so you can check the rendering later. Note the translation approach in your methodology — examiners ask how meaning was preserved.
Ask permission to record and wait for an explicit yes. Explain how the recording will be stored and when it will be destroyed. Transcribe within a day or two while tone and context are fresh, and write a short memo immediately after each interview: those memos are where thematic analysis actually begins.
A structured interview asks fixed questions in fixed order — comparable, but closed to anything unanticipated. An unstructured interview follows the participant almost entirely, giving depth at the cost of comparability across participants.
Semi-structured sits between: a guide of topics asked in whatever order the conversation takes, with freedom to follow what emerges. It is the usual choice for student qualitative work because it balances comparability against discovery. Name your choice in your methodology and say why it suits your question.
Eight to fifteen is typical for a Master's project, chosen for variety rather than volume. The usual stopping rule is saturation, when new interviews stop yielding new themes.
Forty-five to sixty minutes. Beyond that, attention and data quality both drop.
In whichever language the participant is most fluent. Translate during transcription, keep original wording for key quotes, and document the process.
A question opens a new topic; a probe deepens the answer just given. Most of your strongest material comes from probes.
Yes — explicit permission to record, alongside informed consent to participate. Both normally require ethical approval beforehand.