Interviewing

Interviewing

Interviewing is a conversational practice where knowledge is produced through the interaction between an interviewer and an interviewee or a group of interviewees. In most cases, research interviewing involves a “one-way dialogue” with the researcher asking questions and the interviewee being cast in the role of respondent.

Many different forms of interviewing exist. Interviews can be formally conducted in surveys, through the internet, over the telephone, or in face to- face interaction, and they can be informally conducted; for example, as part of ethnographic fieldwork. Research interviews can be more or less structured. In survey research interviewing, standardized questions are posed and the answers are given in forms that are amenable to quantitative procedures.

The interview itself is carried out to enable the researcher to answer one or more of his or her research questions. These are formulated in advance when the researcher thematizes and designs the study. Before deciding to carry out the interview, the researcher should always consider whether interviewing is in fact the most adequate way in which to answer the questions that interest the researcher.

Usually, the interviewer has prepared an interview guide in which the research questions are given a form that renders them suitable to be posed directly as interview questions. Good questions are typically brief, simple, and open, and often the researcher will be interested in concrete descriptions of the respondent’s experiences rather than more abstract reflections.

It is the transcription rather than the original oral interview conversation that serves as the researcher’s primary data source when he or she interprets and analyzes the interview. Transcribing interviews is an interpretive process that demands prolonged practice and sensitivity to the many differences between oral speech and written texts, and the disembodied and decontextualized nature of texts should be kept in mind during the later processes of analysis.

Qualitative interviews also became part of industrial research to maximize workers’ effectiveness and since the 1950s commercial and market interviews, especially in the form of focus groups, have been a growth industry.

Important epistemological discussions concerning the objectivity, validity, reliability, and generalizability of the knowledge produced through interviewing continue in current debates. One aspect of this discussion that is integral to the practitioners of interviewing concerns the issue of whether interviews can provide a more or less direct pipeline to the participants’ life worlds provided that the interviewer engages in no directional unbiased questioning.