Key informant interviews: planning, questions and notes

What is a key informant interview?

A key informant interview, or KII, is a planned conversation with one person who has special knowledge about your topic. The person might be a township official, a teacher, a religious leader, a clinic nurse, a market trader or a staff member of a partner organisation. You are not asking about their own household. You are asking what they know about the community, the service or the project.

KIIs are a qualitative method. They give you explanations, opinions and examples. They do not give you percentages. A MEAL officer (monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning officer) uses KIIs to understand why something is happening, to check the context, and to explain surprising numbers from a survey.

When should you use a KII?

Use a KII when:

• you need expert or local knowledge quickly, before you design a larger survey;
• the topic is sensitive and people may not speak openly in a group;
• you want to understand how a service, rule or process really works;
• you need to explain a result, such as why attendance dropped in one village.

Do not use a KII when you need to count how many people did or said something. For that, use a survey, as in our guide to the baseline survey. If you want to hear community discussion rather than one voice, a focus group discussion may fit better.

How do you plan the interviews?

1. Write down what you need to know. List three to five evaluation or learning questions. Every KII question must link back to one of them.
2. Choose informants for what they know. Make a short table of groups, such as local authorities, community leaders, service providers, women's group leaders and partner staff. Pick two or three people from each group. Aim for different views, not only the people who are easiest to reach.
3. Decide the format. Face-to-face is best for trust. Use phone or online calls when access is limited. Plan 30 to 60 minutes; most people lose focus after an hour.
4. Prepare the logistics. Book a private place where nobody can overhear. Agree who leads and who takes notes. If you work in two languages, decide in advance who translates.
5. Test the guide. Try the questions on a colleague. Remove any question that is confusing, leading or not needed.

What questions should you ask?

A KII guide is a semi-structured list of questions. You follow the list loosely and follow the informant's answers where they are useful. Aim for 8 to 12 main questions.

Good questions are open. They start with "what", "how" or "why", and they ask for examples.

Add short probes under each question: "Can you give an example?", "Who else was involved?", "What happened next?". Put sensitive questions in the middle or near the end, after you have built some trust. Ask about the informant's own role first, because it is an easy start and it shows you how far their knowledge goes.

How do you open the interview and get consent?

Before you ask any question, read a short consent script. Guidance used in humanitarian evaluations, such as a UNICEF evaluation interview guide, includes the same points:

• say who you are, where you are from and what the conversation is about;
• explain how long it will take and how you will record the answers;
• explain that taking part is voluntary, that the person can skip a question or stop at any time, and that refusing will not affect any help they receive;
• explain that answers are confidential and will not be linked to their name in a report;
• check that the person is in a place where they can speak freely, and ask if they have questions.

Never promise what you cannot deliver. If a report will quote "a community leader in Township X", the informant must know this. In places where speaking out could be risky, leave names and exact locations out of your notes and reports.

How do you take good notes?

Good notes are what makes a KII useful later. Use one note template for every interview.

• Header: date, place, interviewer, note taker, informant group (a code, not the name).
• Answers by question: write what the person said, close to their own words. Mark direct quotes with quotation marks.
• Your observations: mood, interruptions, anything that may affect how you read the answers. Keep these separate from the answers.
• Follow-up: documents promised, people to contact, facts to check.

Use two people if you can: one asks, one writes. If you work alone, write short keywords during the talk and complete the notes within a few hours. Type up the notes the same day and save them in a protected folder. After a few interviews, mark the main themes in each set of notes and count how many informants raised each theme. This is how scattered notes become findings.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Leading questions. "Don't you think the training was useful?" invites a yes.
• Only asking the powerful. Include informants who see the project from the edge, such as a volunteer or a person who was not selected.
• Treating one opinion as the truth. Compare answers across informants and with other data. This is called triangulation.
• Late write-up. Notes written a week later miss detail and tone.
• Weak data protection. Do not email raw notes with names. Keep codes and the name list in separate files.

How EMPO can help

EMPO is a trusted, Yangon-based training and consultancy provider and one of Myanmar's leading names in practical NGO training, with 1,200+ people trained and 15 partner organisations. We run MEAL training and intensive support for NGO and CSO teams, online over Zoom or in person across Myanmar, in English and Burmese. See our training and organisational development services or contact us to design a session for your team.

Sources

• Key informant interviews: a practical guide for refugee and displacement researchers — Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, 2023
• UNICEF L3/L2 Horn of Africa Response Evaluation: Key Informant Interview (KII) Guide — UNICEF Evaluation Office