ABSTRACT
A common way to collect evidence for a qualitative study is to conduct interviews. There are several reasons why we might want to conduct interviews rather than simply mailing out a questionnaire or administering a survey online. The downside is that doing interviews is a good deal more time-consuming than administering written surveys. New interview data may be needed to help us explore this new thinking. In interview-based studies, convenience sampling methods such as snowball sampling are commonly used. Snowball sampling involves referrals provided by respondents to other potential respondents. Unstructured interviews are called for when we have developed a reasonably well-defined research question and a general understanding of a topic, but there are still a lot of things we do not know.
