Given Hapunda

115 of issues by examining participants’ knowledge, values and attitudes, perceptions, opinions as well as understanding their experiences. Therefore, through participants’ opinions, semi-structured interviews can also be used to gauge how project interventions work and assess whether their impacts are either positive or negative. When conducting semi-structured interviews, like focus group discussions, the interviewer needs to help and facilitate a comfortable and relaxed atmosphere in order to develop rapport, which is critical for the interviewees to express themselves clearly. When planning to use a semi-structured interview, one can use the following guidelines in the Focus Box 2 below to help in the process. Focus Box 2: Guidelines for Semi-structured Interviews 1. Write down the topics and questions you consider useful for your interview and avoid questions that can be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. 2. When designing an interview guide, use terms that interviewees can understand given their characteristics in terms of their education and knowledge, age, language and cultural background etc. 3. Prepare and provide an overview of the purpose of the study and ethical considerations (anonymity and confidentiality, volunteerism etc.) to your interviewee. 4. Get permission for recording or note taking. 5. When beginning the interview ensure that you start with ‘warm-up’ questions (including those to do with job title and responsibilities, time with the organisation). 6. Develop rapport with the interviewee by being aware of your non-verbal communication like body posture, eye contact, smiles, nodding and establish a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere. 7. The key questions should be open-ended to solicit detailed responses e.g. “Tell me how the women’s club started in this community?” 8. Avoid using leading questions such as; “When you said that most women do not participate in local community leadership roles, did you mean they are not interested?” Instead you can ask, what did you mean when you said women do not participate in…? 9. Probes can help generate more in-depth responses but also being silent once the interviewee pauses to encourage them to continue. 10. When ending an interview, always endeavour to find out if there is anything else the interviewee may want to talk about or if they are willing to be contacted later in case of further questions. Adapted from Zorn (2011) The success or failure of semi-structured interviews will be depend on whether participants have some knowledge and/or experience on the subject matter in order to give detailed explanations of change unlike a questionnaire which may just solicit ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. Questionnaires A questionnaire is simply a form with a set of close-ended (structured) questions used for collecting statistical (quantitative) data from a large sample size. A number of monitoring and evaluation studies use questionnaires to try and understand specific performance or indicators. In certain cases, researchers choose to include open-ended questions like those used for semi-structured interviews or focus group