In foresight they are often used as formal consultation instruments, intended to gather knowledge that is distributed across the range of interviewees. This may be tacit knowledge that has not been put into words, or more documented knowledge that is more easily located by discussions with experts and stakeholders than by literature review. Interviews play an important role in the evaluation of foresight (e.g. assessing how well resources are being or have been used). They normally help in getting a sense of local experiences and understating of how studies are designed and carried out. Interviews may be more or less “open-ended”, at one extreme taking a very exploratory form, at the other being much closer to a questionnaire survey that happens to be conducted in a face-to-face manner. More open-ended approaches, as long as the interview is structured with guidelines for major topic or thematic areas (in order to ensure some comparability across themes), areas or sectors, are more effective for pulling in knowledge, but organisation of the qualitative data that results from them can be very challenging