semi structured interviewing in practice close research

Semi-structured interviewing in practice-close research

Affiliation.

• 1 School of Nursing University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. [email protected]
• PMID: 20618640
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1744-6155.2010.00243.x

Publication types

• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
• Clinical Nursing Research* / methods
• Clinical Nursing Research* / organization & administration
• Data Collection / methods
• Disabled Children
• Family Health*
• Interviews as Topic / methods*
• Pediatric Nursing*
• Qualitative Research*

Semi-structured Interviews

• Reference work entry
• First Online: 01 January 2020
• pp 4825–4830
• Cite this reference work entry

• Danielle Magaldi 3 &
• Matthew Berler 4  

20k Accesses

59 Citations

Open-ended interview ; Qualitative interview ; Systematic exploratory interview ; Thematic interview

The semi-structured interview is an exploratory interview used most often in the social sciences for qualitative research purposes or to gather clinical data. While it generally follows a guide or protocol that is devised prior to the interview and is focused on a core topic to provide a general structure, the semi-structured interview also allows for discovery, with space to follow topical trajectories as the conversation unfolds.

Introduction

Qualitative interviews exist on a continuum, ranging from free-ranging, exploratory discussions to highly structured interviews. On one end is unstructured interviewing, deployed by approaches such as ethnography, grounded theory, and phenomenology. This style of interview involves a changing protocol that evolves based on participants’ responses and will differ from one participant to the next. On the other end of the continuum...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Baumbusch, J. (2010). Semi-structured interviewing in practice-close research. Journal for Specialists in Pediatric Nursing; Hoboken, 15 (3), 255–258.

Article   Google Scholar  

Clarkin, A. J., Ammaniti, M., & Fontana, A. (2015). The use of a psychodynamic semi-structured personality assessment interview in school settings. Adolescent Psychiatry, 5 (4), 237–244. https://doi.org/10.2174/2210676606666160502125435 .

Cooper, Z., & Fairburn, C. (1987). The Eating Disorder Examination: A semi-structured interview for the assessment of the specific psychopathology of eating disorders. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 6 (1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1002/1098-108X(198701)6:1<1::AID-EAT2260060102>3.0.CO;2-9 .

Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Google Scholar  

Dearnley, C. (2005). A reflection on the use of semi-structured interviews. Nurse Researcher, 13 (1), 19–28. https://doi.org/10.7748/nr2005.07.13.1.19.c5997 .

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

DiCicco-Bloom, B., & Crabtree, B. F. (2006). The qualitative research interview. Medical Education, 40 (4), 314–321. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2006.02418.x .

Elliott, R., Fischer, C. T., & Rennie, D. L. (1999). Evolving guidelines for publication of qualitative research studies in psychology and related fields. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 38 (3), 215–229.

Fylan, F. (2005). Semi-structured interviewing. In A handbook of research methods for clinical and health psychology (pp. 65–77). New York: Oxford University Press.

Galanter, C. A., & Patel, V. L. (2005). Medical decision making: A selective review for child psychiatrists and psychologists. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 46 (7), 675–689. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2005.01452.x .

Galletta, A. (2013). Mastering the semi-structured interview and beyond: From research design to analysis and publication . New York: New York University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Gibbs, L., Kealy, M., Willis, K., Green, J., Welch, N., & Daly, J. (2007). What have sampling and data collection got to do with good qualitative research? Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 31 (6), 291–295. https://doi.org/10.1028/bdj.2008.192 .

Glenn, C. R., Weinberg, A., & Klonsky, E. D. (2009). Relationship of the Borderline Symptom List to DSM-IV borderline personality disorder criteria assessed by semi-structured interview. Psychopathology; Basel, 42 (6), 394–398.

Haverkamp, B. E. (2005). Ethical perspectives on qualitative research in applied psychology. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52 (2), 146.

Hill, C., Knox, S., Thompson, B., Williams, E., Hess, S., & Ladany, N. (2005). Consensual qualitative research: An update. Journal of Counseling Psychology . Retrieved from http://epublications.marquette.edu/edu_fac/18

Hutsebaut, J., Kamphuis, J. H., Feenstra, D. J., Weekers, L. C., & De Saeger, H. (2017). Assessing DSM–5-oriented level of personality functioning: Development and psychometric evaluation of the Semi-Structured Interview for Personality Functioning DSM–5 (STiP-5.1). Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 8 (1), 94–101. https://doi.org/10.1037/per0000197 .

Kallio, H., Pietilä, A., Johnson, M., & Kangasniemi, M. (2016). Systematic methodological review: Developing a framework for a qualitative semi-structured interview guide. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 72 (12), 2954–2965. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13031 .

Kaufman, J., Birmaher, B., Brent, D., Rao, U., Flynn, C., Moreci, P., … Ryan, N. (1997). Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children-Present and Lifetime Version (K-SADS-PL): Initial reliability and validity data. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 36 (7), 980–988. https://doi.org/10.1097/00004583-199707000-00021 .

Knox, S., & Burkard, A. W. (2014). Qualitative research interviews: An update. In W. Lutz, S. Knox, W. Lutz, & S. Knox (Eds.), Quantitative and qualitative methods in psychotherapy research (pp. 342–354). New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Kraus, S. E., Hamzah, A., Omar, Z., Suandi, T., Ismail, I. A., & Zahari, M. Z. (2009). Preliminary investigation and interview guide development for studying how Malaysian farmers form their mental models of farming. The Qualitative Report, 14 (2), 245–260.

McTate, E. A., & Leffler, J. M. (2017). Diagnosing disruptive mood dysregulation disorder: Integrating semi-structured and unstructured interviews. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 22 (2), 187–203. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359104516658190 .

Pierucci-Lagha, A., Gelernter, J., Chan, G., Arias, A., Cubells, J. F., Farrer, L., & Kranzler, H. R. (2007). Reliability of DSM-IV diagnostic criteria using the semi-structured assessment for drug dependence and alcoholism (SSADDA). Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 91 (1), 85–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2007.04.014 .

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Polit, D. F., & Beck, C. T. (2010a). Essentials of nursing research: Appraising evidence for nursing practice . Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Polit, D. S., & Beck, C. T. (2010b). Essentials of nursing research. Appraising evidence for nursing practice (7th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven Publishers.

Ramos-Quiroga, J. A., Nasillo, V., Richarte, V., Corrales, M., Palma, F., Ibáñez, P., … Kooij, J. J. S. (2016). Criteria and concurrent validity of DIVA 2.0: A semi-structured diagnostic interview for adult ADHD. Journal of Attention Disorders . https://doi.org/10.1177/1087054716646451 .

Rennie, D. L. (2004). Reflexivity and person-centered counseling. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 44 , 182–203.

Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (2005). Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Ryan, A. B. (2006). Post-positivist approaches to research. In Researching and writing your thesis: A guide for postgraduate students (pp. 12–26). Ireland: MACE: Maynooth Adult and Community Education.

Turner, D. W. (2010). Qualitative interview design: A practical guide for novice researcher. The Qualitative Report, 15 (3), 754–760.

Whiting, L. S. (2008). Semi-structured interviews: Guidance for novice researchers. Nursing Standard, 22 (23), 35–40.

Williams, E. N., & Morrow, S. L. (2009). Achieving trustworthiness in qualitative research: A pan-paradigmatic perspective. Psychotherapy Research, 19 (4–5), 576–582.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

City University of New York, Lehman College, New York City, NY, USA

Danielle Magaldi

Pace University, New York City, NY, USA

Matthew Berler

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Danielle Magaldi .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

Virgil Zeigler-Hill

Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

Department of Educational Sciences, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

Patrizia Velotti

Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Magaldi, D., Berler, M. (2020). Semi-structured Interviews. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_857

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_857

Published : 22 April 2020

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-24610-9

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-24612-3

eBook Packages : Behavioral Science and Psychology Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

Share this entry

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Acquisition
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music and Religion
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Society
• Law and Politics
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Games
• Computer Security
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business Strategy
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Systems
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Politics and Law
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

A newer edition of this book is available.

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

14 Unstructured and Semi-Structured Interviewing

Svend Brinkmann, Department of Communication & Psychology, University of Aalborg

• Published: 01 July 2014
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This chapter gives an introduction to qualitative interviewing in its unstructured and semistructured forms. Initially, the human world is depicted as a conversational reality in which interviewing takes a central position as a research method. Interviewing is presented as a social practice that has a cultural history and that today appears in a variety of different formats. A number of distinctions are introduced, which are relevant when mapping the field of qualitative interviewing between different levels of structure, numbers of participants, media of interviewing, and also interviewer styles. A more detailed exposition of semistructured life world interviewing is offered because this is arguably the standard form of qualitative interviewing today.

Qualitative interviewing has today become a key method in the human and social sciences and also in many other corners of the scientific landscape from education to the health sciences. Some have even argued that interviewing has become the central resource through which the social sciences—and society—engages with the issues that concern it ( Rapley, 2001 ). For as long as we know, human beings have used conversation as a central tool to obtain knowledge about others. People talk with others in order to learn about how they experience the world, how they think, act, feel, and develop as individuals and in groups, and, in recent decades, such knowledge-producing conversations have been refined and discussed as qualitative interviews. 1

This chapter gives an overview of the landscape of qualitative interviewing, with a focus on its unstructured and semistructured forms. But what are interviews as such? In a classic text, Maccoby and Maccoby defined the interview as “a face-to-face verbal exchange, in which one person, the interviewer, attempts to elicit information or expressions of opinion or belief from another person or persons” ( Maccoby & Maccoby, 1954 , p. 449). This definition can be used as a very general starting point, but we shall soon see that different schools of qualitative interviewing have interpreted, modified, and added to such a generic characterization in many different ways.

I begin this chapter by giving an introduction to the broader conversational world of human beings in which interviewing takes place. I then provide a brief history of qualitative interviewing before introducing a number of conceptual and analytical distinctions relevant for the central epistemological and theoretical questions in the field of qualitative interviewing. Particular attention is given to the complementary positions of experience-focused interviewing (phenomenological positions) and language-focused interviewing (discourse-oriented positions).

Qualitative Interviewing in a Conversational World

Human beings are conversational creatures who live a dialogical life. Humankind is, in the words of philosopher Stephen Mulhall, “a kind of enacted conversation” ( Mulhall, 2007 , p. 58). From the earliest days of our lives, we are able to enter into proto-conversations with caregivers in ways that involve subtle forms of turn-taking and emotional communication. The dyads in which our earliest conversations occur are known to be prior to the child’s own sense of self. We are therefore communicating, and indeed conversational, creatures before we become subjective and monological ones ( Trevarthen, 1993 ).

Of course, we do learn to talk privately to ourselves and hide our emotional lives from others, but this is possible only because there was first an intersubjective communicative process with others. Our relationships with other people—and also with ourselves—are thus conversational. To understand ourselves, we must use a language that was first acquired conversationally, and we try out our interpretations in dialogue with others and the world. The human self exists only within what philosopher Charles Taylor has called “webs of interlocution” ( Taylor, 1989 , p. 36). Our very inquiring and interpreting selves are conversational at their core; they are constituted by the numerous relationships we have and have had with other people ( Brinkmann, 2012 ).

Unsurprisingly, conversations are therefore a rich and indispensable source of knowledge about personal and social aspects of our lives. In a philosophical sense, all human research is conversational because we are linguistic creatures and language is best understood in terms of the figure of conversation ( Mulhall, 2007 ). Since the late nineteenth century (in journalism) and the early twentieth century (in the social sciences), the conversational process of knowing has been conceptualized under the name of interviewing . The term itself testifies to the dialogical and interactional nature of human life. An interview is literally an inter-view , an interchange of views between two persons (or more) conversing about a theme of mutual interest ( Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008 ). Conversation in its Latin root means “dwelling with someone” or “wandering together with.” Similarly, the root meaning of dialogue is that of talk ( logos ) that goes back and forth ( dia- ) between persons ( Mannheim & Tedlock, 1995 , p. 4).

Thus conceived, the concept of conversation in the human and social sciences should be thought of in very broad terms and not just as a specific research method. Certainly, conversations in the form of interviewing have been refined into a set of techniques—to be explicated later—but they are also a mode of knowing and a fundamental ontology of persons. As philosopher Rom Harré has put it: “The primary human reality is persons in conversation” ( Harré, 1983 , p. 58). Cultures are constantly produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues among their members ( Mannheim & Tedlock, 1995 , p. 2). Thus conceived, our everyday lives are conversational to their core. This also goes for the cultural investigation of cultural phenomena, or what we call social science. It is fruitful to see language, culture, and human self-understanding as emergent properties of conversations rather than the other way around. Dialogues are not several monologues that are added together but the basic, primordial form of associated human life. In the words of psychologist John Shotter:

[W]e live our daily social lives within an ambience of conversation, discussion, argumentation, negotiation, criticism and justification; much of it to do with problems of intelligibility and the legitimation of claims to truth. ( Shotter, 1993 , p. 29)

The pervasiveness of the figure of conversation in human life is both a burden and a blessing for qualitative interviewers. On the one hand, it means that qualitative interviewing becomes a very significant tool with which to understand central features of our conversational world. In response to widespread critiques of qualitative research that it is too subjective, one should say—given the picture of the conversational world painted here—that qualitative interviewing is, in fact, the most objective method of inquiry when one is interested in qualitative features of human experience, talk, and interaction because qualitative interviews are uniquely capable of grasping these features and thus of being adequate to their subject matters (which is one definition of objectivity).

On the other hand, it is also a burden for qualitative interviewers that they employ conversations to study a world that is already saturated with conversation. If Mulhall is right that humankind is a kind of enacted conversation, then the process of studying humans by the use of interviewing is analogous to fish wanting to study water. Fish surely “know” what water is in a practical, embodied sense, but it can be a great challenge to see and understand the obvious, that with which we are so familiar ( Brinkmann, 2012 ). In the same way, some interview researchers might think that interviewing others for research purposes is easy and simple to do because it employs a set of techniques that everyone masters by virtue of being capable of asking questions and recording the answers. This, however, is clearly an illusory simplicity, and many qualitative interviewers, even experienced ones, will recognize the frustrating experience of having conducted a large number of interviews (which is often the fun and seemingly simple part of a research project) but ending up with a huge amount of data, in the form of perhaps hundreds or even thousand pages of transcripts, and not knowing how to transform all this material into a solid, relevant, and thought-provoking analysis. Too much time is often spent on interviewing, whereas too little time is devoted to preparing for the interviews and subsequently analyzing the empirical materials. And, to continue on this note, too little time is normally used to reflect on the role of interviewing as a knowledge-producing social practice in itself. Due to its closeness to everyday conversations, interviewing, in short, is often simply taken for granted.

A further burden for today’s qualitative interviewers concerns the fact that interviewees are often almost too familiar with their role in the conversation. As Atkinson and Silverman argued some years ago, we live in an interview society , where the self is continually produced in confessional settings ranging from talk shows to research interviews ( Atkinson & Silverman, 1997 ). Because most of us, at least in the imagined hemisphere we call the West, are acquainted with interviews and their more or less standardized choreographies, qualitative interviews sometimes become a rather easy and regular affair, with few breaks and cracks in its conventions and norms, even though such breaks and cracks are often the most interesting aspects of conversational episodes ( Roulston, 2010 ; Tanggaard, 2007 ).

On the side of interviewers, Atkinson and Silverman find that “in promoting a particular view of narratives of personal experience, researchers too often recapitulate, in an uncritical fashion, features of the contemporary interview society” in which “the interview becomes a personal confessional” ( Atkinson & Silverman, 1997 , p. 305). Although the conversation in a broad sense is a human universal, qualitative interviewers often forget that the social practice of research interviewing in a narrower sense is a historically and culturally specific mode of interacting, and they too often construe “face-to-face interaction” as “the primordial, natural setting for communication,” as anthropologist Charles Briggs has pointed out ( Briggs, 2007 , p. 554).

As a consequence, the analysis of interviews is generally limited to what takes place during the concrete interaction phase with its questions and responses. In contrast to this, there is reason to believe that excellent interview research does not simply communicate a number of answers to an interviewer’s questions (with the researcher’s interpretive interjections added on), but includes an analytic focus on what Briggs has called “the larger set of practices of knowledge production that makes up the research from beginning to end” ( Briggs, 2007 , p. 566). Just as it is crucial in quantitative and experimental research to have an adequate understanding of the technologies of experimentation, it is similarly crucial in qualitative interviewing to understand the intricacies of this quite specific knowledge-producing practice, and interviewers should be particularly careful not to naturalize the form of human relationship that is a qualitative research interview and simply gloss it over as an unproblematic, direct, and universal source of knowledge. This, at least, is a basic assumption of the present chapter.

The History of Qualitative Interviewing

This takes us directly to the history of qualitative interviewing because only by tracking the history of how the current practices came to be can we fully understand their contingent natures and reflect on their roles in how we produce conversational knowledge through interviews today.

In one obvious sense, the use of conversations for knowledge-producing purposes is likely as old as human language and communication. The fact that we can pose questions to others about things that we are unknowledgeable about is a core capability of the human species. It expands our intellectual powers enormously because it enables us to share and distribute knowledge between us. Without this fundamental capability, it would be hard to imagine what human life would be like. It is furthermore a capacity that has developed into many different forms and ramifications in human societies. Already in 1924 could Emory Bogardus, an early American sociologist and founder of one of the first US sociology departments (at the University of Southern California) declare that interviewing “is as old as the human race” ( Bogardus, 1924 , p. 456). Bogardus discussed similarities and differences between the ways that physicians, lawyers, priests, journalists, detectives, social workers, and psychiatrists conduct interviews, with a remarkable sensitivity to the details of such different conversational practices.

Ancient Roots

In a more specific sense, and more essentially related to qualitative interviewing as a scientific human enterprise, conversations were used by Thucydides in ancient Greece as he interviewed participants from the Peloponnesian Wars to write the history of the wars. At roughly the same time, Socrates famously questioned—or we might say interviewed —his fellow citizens in ancient Athens and used the dialogues to develop knowledge about perennial human questions related to justice, truth, beauty, and the virtues. In recent years, some interview scholars have sought to rehabilitate a Socratic practice of interviewing, not least as an alternative to the often long monologues of phenomenological and narrative approaches to interviewing (see Dinkins, 2005 , who unites Socrates with a hermeneutic approach to dialogical knowledge) and also in an attempt to think of interviews as practices that can create a knowledgeable citizenry and not merely chart common opinions and attitudes ( Brinkmann, 2007 a ). Such varieties of interviewing have come to be known as dialogic and confrontational ( Roulston, 2010 , p. 26), and I return to these later.

Psychoanalysis

If we jump to more recent times, interviewing notably entered the human sciences with the advent of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, emerging around 1900. Freud is famous for his psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious, but it is significant that he developed this revolutionary theory (which, in many ways, changed the Western conceptions of humanity) through therapeutic conversations, or what he referred to as the talking cure . Freud conducted several hundred interviews with patients that used the patients’ free associations as a conversational engine. The therapist/interviewer should display what Freud called an “even-hovering attention” and catch on to anything that emerged as important ( Freud, 1963 ).

Freud made clear that research and treatment go hand in hand in psychoanalysis, and scholars have more recently pointed to the rich potentials of psychoanalytic conversations for qualitative interviewing today (see Kvale, 2003 ). For example, Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson have developed a more specific notion of the interview that is based on the psychoanalytic idea of “the defended subject” ( Hollway & Jefferson, 2000 ). In their eyes, interviewees “are motivated not to know certain aspects of themselves and... they produce biographical accounts which avoid such knowledge” (p. 169). This, obviously, has implications for how interviewers should proceed with analysis and interpretation of the biographical statements of interviewees and is a quite different approach to interviewing compared to more humanistic forms, as we shall see.

Many human and social scientists from the first half of the twentieth century were well versed in psychoanalytic theory, including those who pioneered qualitative interviewing. Jean Piaget, the famous developmental researcher, had even received training as a psychoanalyst himself, but his approach to interviewing is also worth mentioning in its own right. Piaget’s (1930) theory of child development was based on his interviews with children (often his own) in natural settings, frequently in combination with different experimental tasks. He would typically let the children talk freely about the weight and size of objects, or, in relation to his research on moral development, about different moral problems ( Piaget, 1932/1975 ), and he would notice the manner in which their thoughts unfolded.

Jumping from psychology to industrial research, Raymond Lee, one of the few historians of interviewing, has charted in detail how Piaget’s so-called clinical method of interviewing became an inspiration for Elton Mayo, who was responsible for one of the largest interview studies in history at the Hawthorne plant in Chicago in the 1920s ( Lee, 2011 ). This study arose from a need to interpret the curious results of a number of practical experiments on the effects of changes in illumination on production at the plant: it seemed that work output improved when the lighting of the production rooms was increased but also when it was decreased. This instigated an interview study, with more than 21,000 workers being interviewed for more than an hour each. The study was reported by Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939) , but it was Mayo who laid out the methodological procedures in the 1930s, including careful—and surprisingly contemporary—advice to interviewers that is worth quoting at length:

Give your whole attention to the person interviewed, and make it evident that you are doing so.

Listen—don’t talk.

Never argue; never give advice.

what he wants to say

what he does not want to say

what he cannot say without help

As you listen, plot out tentatively and for subsequent correction the pattern (personal) that is being set before you. To test this, from time to time summarize what has been said and present for comment (e.g., “is this what you are telling me?”). Always do this with the greatest caution, that is, clarify in ways that do not add or distort.

Remember that everything said must be considered a personal confidence and not divulged to anyone. ( Mayo, 1933 , p. 65)

Many approaches to and textbooks on interviewing still follow such guidelines today, often forgetting, however, the specific historical circumstances under which this practice emerged.

Nondirective Interviewing

Not just Piaget, but also the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers had influenced Mayo and others concerned with interviewing in the first half of the twentieth century. Like Freud, Rogers developed a conversational technique that was useful both in therapeutic contexts (so-called client-centered therapy), but also in research interviews, which he referred to as the “non-directive method as a technique for social research” ( Rogers, 1945 ). As he explained, the goal of this kind of research was to sample the respondent’s attitudes toward herself: “Through the non-directive interview we have an unbiased method by which we may plumb these private thoughts and perceptions of the individual.” (p. 282). In contrast to psychoanalysis, the respondent in client-centered research (and therapy) is a client rather than a patient, and the client is the expert (and hardly a “defended subject”). Although often framed in different terms, many contemporary interview researchers conceptualize the research interview in line with Rogers’s humanistic, nondirective approach, valorizing the respondents’ private experiences, narratives, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes.

As Lee recounts, the methods of interviewing developed at Hawthorne in the 1930s aroused interest among sociologists at the University of Chicago, who made it part of their methodological repertoire ( Lee, 2011 , p. 132). Rogers himself moved to Chicago in 1945 and was involved in different interdisciplinary projects. As is well known, the so-called Chicago School of sociology was highly influential in using and promoting a range of qualitative methods, not least ethnography, and it also spawned some of the most innovative theoretical developments in the social sciences, such as symbolic interactionism (e.g., Blumer, 1969 ).

As the Rogerian nondirective approach to interviewing gained in popularity, early critiques of this technique also emerged. In the 1950s, the famous sociologist David Riesman and his colleague Mark Benney criticized it for its lack of interviewer involvement (the nondirective aspects), and they warned against the tendency to use the level of “rapport” (much emphasized by interviewers inspired by therapy) in an interview to judge its qualities concerning knowledge. They thought it was a prejudice “to assume the more rapport-filled and intimate the relation, the more ‘truth’ the respondent will vouchsafe” ( Riesman & Benney, 1956 , p. 10). In their eyes, rapport-filled interviews would often spill over with “the flow of legend and cliché” (p. 11), since interviewees are likely to adapt their responses to what they assume the interviewer expects from them (see also Lee, 2008 , for an account of Riesman’s surprisingly contemporary discussion of interviewing). Issues such as these, originally raised more than fifty years ago, continue to be pertinent and largely unresolved in today’s interview research.

Classic Studies on Authoritarianism, Sexuality, and Consumerism

The mid-twentieth century witnessed a number of other large interview studies that remain classics in the field and that have also shaped public opinion about different social issues. I mention three examples here of such influential interview studies to show the variety of themes that have been studied through interviews: on authoritarianism, sexuality, and consumerism.

After World War II, there was a pressing need to understand the roots of anti-Semitism, and The Authoritarian Personality by the well-known critical theorist Adorno and co-workers controversially traced these roots to an authoritarian upbringing ( Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950 ). Their study was based on interviews and employed a combination of open qualitative interviews and much more structured questionnaires to produce the data. Although important knowledge of societal value may have been produced, the study has nonetheless been criticized on ethical grounds for using therapeutic techniques to get around the defenses of the interviewees in order to learn about their prejudices and authoritarian personality traits ( Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008 , p. 313).

Another famous interview study from the same period was Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ( Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948 ). The research group interviewed about 6,000 men for an hour or more about their sexual behaviors, which generated results that were shocking to the public. In addition to the fascinating results, the book contains many interesting reflections on interviewing, and the authors discuss in great detail how to put the interviewees at ease, assure privacy, and how to frame the sequencing of sensitive topics (the contributions of Adorno and Kinsey are also described in Platt, 2002 ). As Kinsey put it in the book:

The interview has become an opportunity for him [the participant] to develop his own thinking, to express to himself his disappointments and hopes, to bring into the open things that he has previously been afraid to admit to himself, to work out solutions to his difficulties. He quickly comes to realize that a full and complete confession will serve his own interests. ( Kinsey et al., 1948 , p. 42)

The movie Kinsey , from 2004, starring Liam Neeson, is worth seeing from an interviewer’s point of view because it shows these early interviewers in action.

As a third example, it can be mentioned that qualitative interviewing quickly entered market research in the course of the twentieth century, which is hardly surprising as a consumer society developed ( Brinkmann & Kvale, 2005 ). A pioneer was Ernest Dichter, whose The Strategy of Desire (1960) communicates the results of an interview study about consumer motivation for buying a car. Interestingly, Dichter describes his interview technique as a “depth interview,” inspired both by psychoanalysis and also by the nondirective approach of Rogers. Market and consumer research continue to be among the largest areas of qualitative interviewing in contemporary consumer society, particularly in the form of focus groups, and, according to one estimate, as many as 5 percent of all adults in Great Britain have taken part in focus groups for marketing purposes, which certainly lends very concrete support to the thesis that we live in an “interview society” ( Brinkmann & Kvale, 2005 ).

Contemporary Conceptions of Qualitative Interviewing

Along with the different empirical studies, academics in the Western world have produced an enormous number of books on qualitative interviewing as a method, both in the form of “how to” books, but also in the form of more theoretical discussions. Spradley’s The Ethnographic Interview (1979) and Mishler’s Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative (1986) were two important early books, the former being full of concrete advice about how to ask questions and the latter being a thorough theoretical analysis of interviews as speech events involving a joint construction of meaning.

Also following from the postmodern philosophies of social science that emerged in the 1980s (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ; Lyotard, 1984 ), in the past couple of decades there has been a veritable creative explosion in the kinds of interviews offered to researchers (see Fontana & Prokos, 2007 ), many of which question both the idea of psychoanalysis as being able to dig out truths from the psyche of the interviewee and that the nondirective approach to interviews can be “an unbiased method,” as Rogers had originally conceived it.

Roulston (2010) makes a comprehensive list of some of the most recent postmodern varieties of interviewing and also of more traditional ones (I have here shortened and adapted Roulston’s longer list):

Neo-positivist conceptions of the interview are still widespread and emphasize how the conversation can be used to reveal “the true self” of the interviewee (or the essence of her experiences), ideally resulting in solid, trustworthy data that are only accessible through interviews if the interviewer assumes a noninterfering role.

Romantic conceptions stress that the goal of interviewing is to obtain revelations and confessions from the interviewee facilitated by intimacy and rapport. These conceptions are somewhat close to neo-positivist ones, but put much more weight on the interviewer as an active and authentic midwife who assists in “giving birth” to revelations from the interviewee’s inner psyche.

Constructionist conceptions reject the romantic idea of authenticity and favor an idea of a subject that is locally produced within the situation. Thus, the focus is on the situational practice of interviewing and a distrust toward the discourse of data as permanent “nuggets” to be “mined” by the interviewer. Instead, the interviewer is often portrayed as a “traveler” together with the interviewee, with both involved in the co-construction of whatever happens in the conversation ( Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008 ).

Postmodern and transformative conceptions stage interviews as dialogic and performative events that aim to bring new kinds of people and new worlds into being. The interview is depicted as a chance for people to get together and create new possibilities for action. Some transformative conceptions focus on potential decolonizing aspects of interviewing, seeking to subvert the colonizing tendencies that some see in standard interviewing ( Smith, 1999 ). In addition, we can mention feminist ( Reinharz & Chase, 2002 ) and collaborative forms of interviewing ( Ellis & Berger, 2003 ) that aim to practice an engaged form of interviewing that focuses more on the researchers’ experience than in standard procedures, sometimes expressed through autoethnography, an approach that seeks to unite ethnographical and autobiographical intentions ( Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011 ).

It goes without saying that the overarching line of historical development laid out here, beginning in the earliest years of recorded human history and ending with postmodern, transformative, and co-constructed interviewing, is highly selective, and it could have been presented in countless other ways. I have made no attempt to divide up the history of qualitative interviewing into historical phases because I believe this would betray the criss-crossing lines of inspiration from different knowledge-producing practices. Socrates as an active interviewer inspires some of today’s constructionist and postmodern interviewers (as we shall see), whereas Freud and Rogers—as clinical interviewers—in different ways became important to people who use interviewing for purposes related to marketing and the industry. Thus, it seems that the only general rule is that no approach is never completely left behind and that everything can be—and often is—recycled in new clothes. This should not surprise us, because the richness and historical variability of the human conversational world demand that researchers use different conversational means of knowledge production for different purposes.

An Example of Qualitative Interviewing

Before moving on, here I introduce an example of what a typical qualitative interview may look like, taken from my own research, to illustrate more concretely what we are talking about when we use the term “qualitative interviewing.”

The following excerpt is from an interview I conducted about ten years ago. It was part of a research project in which I studied ethical dilemmas and moral reasoning in psychotherapeutic practice. The project was exploratory and sought an understanding of clinical psychologists’ own experiences of ethical problems in their work. The excerpt in Box 14.1 is not meant to represent an ideal interview, but rather to illustrate a common choreography that is inherent in much qualitative interviewing across the different varieties.

These few exchanges of questions and answers follow a certain conversational flow common in qualitative interviews. This flow can be divided into (1) question , (2) negotiation of meaning concerning the question raised and the themes addressed, (3) concrete description from the interviewee, (4) the interviewer’s interpretation of the description, and (5) coda . Then the cycle can start over with a new question, or else—as in this case—further questions about the same description can be posed.

The sequence begins when I pose a question (1) that calls for a concrete description, a question that seems to make sense to the interviewee. However, she cannot immediately think of or articulate an episode, and she expresses doubt concerning the meaning of one of the central concepts of the opening question (an “ethical dilemma”). This happens very often, and it can be quite difficult for interviewees (as for all of us) to describe concretely what one has experienced; we often resort to speaking in general terms (this characterizes professionals in particular, who have many general scripts at their disposal to articulate). There is some negotiation and attunement between us (2), before she decides to talk about a specific situation, but even though this is interesting and well described by the interviewee (3), she ends by returning (in what I call the coda) to a doubt about the appropriateness of the example. Before this, I summarize and rephrase her description (4), which she validates before she herself provides a kind of evaluation (5). After this, I have a number of follow-up questions that ask the interviewee to tell me more about the situation before a new question is introduced, and a similar conversational flow begins again.

The uncertainty of the interviewee about her own example around (2) illustrates the importance of assuring the interviewee that he or she is the expert concerning personal experience. The interviewer should make clear that, in general, there are no right or wrong answers or examples in qualitative interviewing and that the interviewer is interested in anything the interviewee comes up with. It is very common to find that participants are eager to be “good interviewees,” wanting to give the researcher something valuable, and this can paradoxically block the production of interesting stories and descriptions (although it did not in the present case).

In this case, a key point of the study became the term “ethical dilemma” itself; a term that is currently a nodal point in a huge number of different discourses with many different meanings, and it was thus interesting to hear the respondents’ immediate understandings of the term. Their widespread uncertainty concerning the referents of the term (which was shared by the interviewer!) was not only understandable, but actually conducive to developing my ideas further about (professional) ethics as something occurring in a zone of doubt rather than certainty (as otherwise stressed by some of the standard procedural approaches to ethics).

At the time of the interview, the interviewee was in her early fifties and had been a practicing psychologist for about twenty-five years. The interview was conducted in Danish, and I have translated it into English myself.

After some introductory remarks and an initial briefing, I, the interviewer (SB), go straight to a question that I had prepared in advance and ask the interviewee (IE) for a description of a concrete ethical dilemma (the numbers in square brackets refer to elements of the conversation that are addressed in the text):

SB: ( 1 ) First, I’d like to ask you to think back and describe a situation from your work as a psychologist in which you experienced an ethical dilemma... or a situation that in some way demanded special ethical considerations from you. IE: ( 2 ) Actually, I believe I experience those all the time. Well... I believe that the very fact that therapeutic work with other people demands that you keep... I don’t know if it is a dilemma—that’s what you asked about, right?—well, I don’t know if it’s a dilemma, but I think I have ethical considerations all the time. Considerations about how best to treat this human being with respect are demanded all the time... with the respect that is required, and I believe that there are many ethical considerations there. Ahm... When you work therapeutically you become very personal, get very close to another human being, and I think that is something you have to bear in mind constantly: How far are you allowed to go? How much can you enter into someone else’s universe? But that is not a dilemma, is it? SB: I guess it can be. Can you think of a concrete situation in which you faced this question about how close you can go, for example? IE: ( 3 ) Yes, I can. I just had a... a woman, whose husband has a mental disorder, or he has had a severe personality disorder, so their family life is much affected by this. And she comes to me to process this situation of hers, having two small children and a husband, and a system of treatment, which sometimes helps out and sometimes doesn’t. And it is very difficult for her to accept that someone close to her has a mental disorder or is fragile, it’s actually a long process. She is a nurse and family life has more or less been idyllic before he... before the personality disorder really emerged. So it is extremely difficult for her to accept that this family, which she had imagined would be the place for her children to grow up, is not going to be like that. It is actually going to be very, very different. And she tries to fight it all the time: “It just might be... if only... I guess it will be...” And it is never going to be any different! And there lies a dilemma, I think: How much is it going to be: “This is something you have to face, it is never going to be different!” So I have to work to make her pose the question herself: “What do you think? How long time... What are your thoughts? Do you think it will be different? What do they tell you at the psychiatric hospital? What is your experience?” And right now she is getting closer to seeing... I might fear that it ends in a divorce; I am not sure that she can cope with it. But no one can know this. I think there is a dilemma here, or some considerations about how much to push and press forward. SB: ( 4 ) Yes, the dilemma is perhaps that you—with your experience and knowledge about these matters—can see that the situation is not going to change much from its current state? IE: It certainly won’t. SB: And the question is... IE: ... how much I should push, for she does actually know this intellectually. ( 5 ) We have talked about it lots of times. But emotionally she hasn’t... she doesn’t have the power to face it. One day I told her: “I don’t think you develop, I don’t think anything happens to you, before you accept emotionally that he is not going to change.” I put her on the spot and she kept evading it and so on, but it...“You don’t accept it; I can tell that you don’t accept it. You understand it intellectually, but you still hope that it passes.” I pushed her a lot then. But I don’t know if this is an ethical dilemma, I am not sure...

When I first set out to conduct this study, I had something like a neo-positivist conception of interviewing in mind, in Roulston’s sense, believing that there were certain essential features connected to the experience of ethically difficult situations. When working further with the theme, and after learning from my interviewees, I gradually grew suspicious of this idea, and I also came to appreciate a more constructionist conception of interviewing, according to which the interview situation itself—including the interviewer—plays an important role in the production of talk.

Other things to note about the example in Box 14.1 include the asymmetrical distribution of talk that can be observed between the two conversationalists: the interviewer poses rather short questions, and the interviewee gives long and elaborated answers. This is not always so (some respondents are more reluctant or simply less talkative), but this asymmetry has been highlighted as a sign of quality in the literature on qualitative interviewing (e.g., Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008 ). There is also quite a bit of dramatization in the interviewee’s talk in the excerpt; for example, when she uses reported speech to stage a dialogue between herself and her client, which signals that she is capable with words and a good storyteller. On the side of the interviewer, we see that no attempts are made to contradict or question the interviewee’s account, and the part of the interview quoted here thus looks quite a bit like that recommended by Mayo in the 1930s and by later nondirective interviewers: the interviewer listens a lot and does not talk much, he does not argue or give advice, and he plots out tentatively (in [4]) what the interviewee is saying, which is commented on and verified (cf. Mayo, 1933 , p. 65).

Different Forms of Qualitative Research Interviews

The semistructured, face-to-face interview in Box 14.1 is probably very typical, but it merely represents one form an interview may take, and there is a huge variety of other forms. Each form has certain advantages and disadvantages that researchers and recipients of research alike should be aware of. I here describe how qualitative interviews may differ in terms of structure, the number of participants in each interview, different media, and also different interviewer styles.

It is common to draw a distinction between structured, semistructured, and unstructured interviews. This distinction, however, should be thought of as a continuum ranging from relatively structured to relatively unstructured formats. I use the word “relatively” because, on the one end of the continuum, as Parker (2005) argues, there really is no such thing as a completely structured interview “because people always say things that spill beyond the structure, before the interview starts and when the recorder has been turned off” (p. 53). Utterances that “spill beyond the structure” are often important and are even sometimes the key to understanding the interviewee’s answers to the structured questions. One line of criticism against standardized survey interviewing actually concerns the fact that meanings and interpretive frames that go beyond the predetermined structure are left out, with the risk that the researcher cannot understand what actually goes on in the interaction.

We might add to Parker’s argument that there is also no such thing as a completely unstructured interview because the interviewer always has an idea about what should take place in the conversation. Even some of the least structured interviews, such as life history interviews that only have one question prepared in advance (e.g., “I would like you to tell me the story of your life. Please begin as far back as you remember and include as many details as possible”), provide structure to the conversation by framing it in accordance with certain specific conversational norms rather than others. Another way to put this is to say that there are no such things as nonleading questions. All questions lead the interviewee in certain directions, but it is generally preferably to lead participants only to talk about certain themes , rather than to specific opinions about these themes.

So, it is not possible to avoid structure entirely nor would it be desirable, but it is possible to provide a structure that it flexible enough for interviewees to be able to raise questions and concerns in their own words and from their own perspectives. Anthropologist Bruno Latour has argued that this is one definition of objectivity that human and social science can work with, in the sense of “allowing the object to object” ( Latour, 2000 ). Latour pinpoints a problem in the human and social sciences related to the fact that, for these sciences and unlike in the natural sciences “nothing is more difficult than to find a way to render objects able to object to the utterances that we make about them” (p. 115). He finds that human beings behave too easily as if they had been mastered by the researcher’s agenda, which often results in trivial and predictable research that tells us nothing new. What should be done instead is to allow research participants to be “interested, active, disobedient, fully involved in what is said about themselves by others” (p. 116). This does not imply a total elimination of structure, but it demands careful preparation and reflection on how to involve interviewees actively, how to avoid flooding the conversation with social science categories, and how to provoke interviewees in a respectful way to bring contrasting perspectives to light ( Parker, 2005 , p. 63).

In spite of this caveat—that neither completely structured nor completely unstructured interviews are possible—it may still be worthwhile to distinguish between more or less structure, with semistructured interviews somewhere in the middle as the standard approach to qualitative interviewing.

Structured Interviews

Structured interviews are employed in surveys and are typically based on the same research logic as questionnaires: standardized ways of asking questions are thought to lead to answers that can be compared across participants and possibly quantified. Interviewers are supposed to “read questions exactly as worded to every respondent and are trained never to provide information beyond what is scripted in the questionnaire” ( Conrad & Schober, 2008 , p. 173). Although structured interviews are useful for some purposes, they do not take advantage of the dialogical potentials for knowledge production inherent in human conversations. They are passive recordings of people’s opinions and attitudes and often reveal more about the cultural conventions of how one should answer specific questions than about the conversational production of social life itself. I do not address these structured forms in greater detail in this chapter.

Unstructured Interviews

At the other end of the continuum lie interviews that have little preset structure. These are, for example, the life story interview seeking to highlight “the most important influences, experiences, circumstances, issues, themes, and lessons of a lifetime” ( Atkinson, 2002 , p. 125). What these aspects are for an individual cannot be known in advance but emerge in the course of spending time with the interviewee, which means that the interviewer cannot prepare for a life story interview by devising a lot of specific questions but must instead think about how to facilitate the telling of the life story. After the opening request for a narrative, the main role of the interviewer is to remain a listener, withholding desires to interrupt and sporadically asking questions that may clarify the story. The life story interview is a variant of the more general genre of narrative interviewing about which Wengraf’s (2001)   Qualitative Research Interviewing gives a particularly thorough account, focusing on biographical-narrative depth interviews. These need not concern the life story as a whole, but may address other, more specific storied aspects of human lives, building on the narratological insight that humans experience and act in the world through narratives. Narratives, in this light, are a root metaphor for psychological processes ( Sarbin, 1986 ). With the more focused narrative interviews, we get nearer to semistructured interviews as the middle ground between structured and unstructured interviews.

Semistructured Interviews

Interviews in the semistructured format are sometimes equated with qualitative interviewing as such ( Warren, 2002 ). They are probably also the most widespread form of interviews in the human and social sciences and are sometimes the only format given attention to in textbooks on qualitative research (e.g., Flick, 2002 ). Compared to structured interviews, semistructured interviews can make better use of the knowledge-producing potentials of dialogues by allowing much more leeway for following up on whatever angles are deemed important by the interviewee; as well, the interviewer has a greater chance of becoming visible as a knowledge-producing participant in the process itself, rather than hiding behind a preset interview guide. And, compared to unstructured interviews, the interviewer has a greater say in focusing the conversation on issues that he or she deems important in relation to the research project.

One definition of the qualitative research interview (in a generic form, but tending toward the semistructured format) reads: “It is defined as an interview with the purpose of obtaining descriptions of the life world of the interviewee in order to interpret the meaning of the described phenomena” ( Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008 , p. 3). The key words here are purpose, descriptions, life world , and interpretation of meaning :

Purpose : Unlike everyday conversations with friends or family members, qualitative interviews are not conducted for their own sake; they are not a goal in themselves, but are staged and conducted to serve the researcher’s goal of producing knowledge (and there may be other, ulterior goals like obtaining a degree, furthering one’s career, positioning oneself in the field, etc.). All sorts of motives may play a role in the staging of interviews, and good interview reports often contain a reflexive account and a discussion of both individual and social aspects of such motives (does it matter, for example, if the interviewer is a woman, perhaps identifying as a feminist, interviewing other women?). Clearly, the fact that interviews are conversations conducted for a purpose, which sets the agenda, raises a number of issues having to do with power and control that are important to reflect on for epistemic as well as ethical reasons ( Brinkmann, 2007 b ).

Descriptions : In most interview studies, the goal is to obtain the interviewee’s descriptions rather than reflections or theorizations. In line with a widespread phenomenological perspective (explained more fully later), interviewers are normally seeking descriptions of how interviewees experience the world, its episodes and events, rather than speculations about why they have certain experiences. Good interview questions thus invite interviewees to give descriptions; for example, “Could you please describe a situation for me in which you became angry?,” “What happened?,” “How did you experience anger?,” “How did it feel?” (of course, only one of these questions should be posed at a time), and good interviewers tend to avoid more abstract and reflective questions such as “What does anger mean to you?,” “If I say ‘anger,’ what do you think of then?,” “Why do you think that you tend to feel angry?” Such questions may be productive in the conversation, but interviewers will normally defer them until more descriptive aspects have been covered.

Life world : The concept of the life world goes back to the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, who introduced it in 1936, in his book The Crisis of the European Sciences to refer to the intersubjectively shared and meaningful world in which humans conduct their lives and experience significant phenomena ( Husserl, 1954 ). It is a prereflective and pretheorized world in which anger, for example, is a meaningful human expression in response to having one’s rights violated (or something similar) before it is a process occurring in the neurophysiological and endocrinological systems (“before” should here be taken in a logical, rather than temporal, sense). If anger did not appear to human beings as a meaningful experienced phenomenon in their life world, there would be no reason to investigate it scientifically because there would, in a sense, be nothing to investigate (since anger is primarily identified as a life world phenomenon). In qualitative research in general, as in qualitative interviewing in particular, there is a primacy of the life world as experienced, as something prior to the scientific theories we may formulate about it. This was well expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another famous phenomenologist, who built on the work of Husserl:

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced [i.e., the life world], and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by re-awakening the basic experiences of the world of which science is the second order expression. ( Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002 , p. ix)

Objectifying sciences give us second-order understandings of the world, but qualitative research is meant to provide a first-order understanding through concrete description. Whether interview researchers express themselves in the idiom of phenomenology, or use the language of some other qualitative paradigm (discourse analysis, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, etc.), they most often decide to use interviews to elicit descriptions of the life world—or whatever term the given paradigm employs: the interaction order (to speak with Erving Goffman, an exponent of symbolic interactionism), the immortal ordinary society (to speak with Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology), or the set of interpretative repertoires that make something meaningful (to speak with Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, significant discursive psychologists). 2

Interpret the meaning : Even if interviewers are generally interested in how people experience and act in the world prior to abstract theorizations, they must nonetheless often engage in interpretations of people’s experiences and actions as described in interviews. One reason for this is that life world phenomena are rarely transparent and “monovocal” but are rather “polyvocal” and sometimes even contradictory, permitting multiple readings and interpretations. Who is to say what someone’s description of anger signifies? Obviously, the person having experienced the anger should be listened to, but if there is one lesson to learn from twentieth-century human science (ranging from psychoanalysis to poststructuralism) it is that we, as human subjects, do not have full authority concerning how to understand our lives because we do not have—and can never have—full insight into the forces that have created us ( Butler, 2005 ). We are, as Judith Butler has argued, authored by what precedes and exceeds us (p. 82), even when we are considered—as in qualitative interviews—to be authors of our own utterances. The interpretation of the meanings of the phenomena described by the interviewee can favorably be built into the conversation itself (as I tried to do at point (4) in the excerpt in Box 14.1 ) because this will at least give the interviewee a chance to object to a certain interpretation, but it is a process that goes on throughout an interview project.

In my opinion, too rarely do interview researchers allow themselves to follow the different, polyvocal, and sometimes contradictory meanings that emerge through different voices in interviewee accounts. Analysts of interviews are generally looking for the voice of the interviewee, thereby ignoring internal conflicts in narratives and descriptions. Stephen Frosh has raised this concern from a discursive and psychoanalytic perspective, and he criticizes the narrativist tendency among qualitative researchers to present human experience in ways that set up coherent themes that constitute integrated wholes ( Frosh, 2007 ). Often, it is the case that the stories people tell are ambiguous and full of gaps, especially for people “on the margins of hegemonic discourses” (p. 637). Like Butler, Frosh finds that the human subject is never a whole, “is always riven with partial drives, social discourses that frame available modes of experience, ways of being that are contradictory and reflect the shifting allegiances of power as they play across the body and the mind” (p. 638). If this is so, it is important to be open to multiple interpretations of what is said and done in an interview. Fortunately, some qualitative approaches do have an eye to this and have designed ways to comprehend complexity; for example, the so-called listening guide developed by Carol Gilligan and co-workers and designed to listen for multiple voices in interviewee accounts (for a recent version of this approach, see Sorsoli & Tolman, 2008 ).

To sum up, the “meanings” that qualitative interviewers are commonly looking for are often multiple, perspectival, and contradictory and thus demand careful interpretation. And there is much controversy in the qualitative communities concerning whether meanings are essentially “there” to be articulated by the interviewee and interpreted by the interviewer (emphasized in particular by phenomenological approaches) or whether meanings are constructed locally (i.e., arise dialogically in a process that centrally involves the interviewer as co-constructor, as stressed by discursive and constructionist approaches). Regardless of one’s epistemological standpoint, it remains important for interviewers to make clear, when they design, conduct, and communicate their research, how they approach this thorny issue because this will make it much easier for readers of interview reports to understand and assess what is communicated.

I have now introduced a working definition of the relatively unstructured and semistructured qualitative research interview and emphasized four vital aspects: such interviews are structured by the interviewer’s purpose of obtaining knowledge; they revolve around descriptions provided by the interviewee; such descriptions are commonly about life world phenomena as experienced; and understanding the meaning of the descriptions involves some kind of interpretation . Although these aspects capture what is essential to a large number of qualitative interview studies now and in the past (and likely many in the future as well), it is important to stress that all these aspects can be and have been challenged in the methodological literature.

In relation to qualitative interviewing, as in qualitative research in general, there is never one correct way to understand or practice a method or a technique because everything depends on concrete circumstances and on the researcher’s intentions when conducting a particular research project. This does not mean that “anything goes” and that nothing is never better than something else, but it does mean that what is “better” is always relative to what one is interested in doing or knowing. The answer to the question “What’s the proper definition of and approach to qualitative interviewing?” must thus be: “It depends on what you wish to achieve by interviewing people for research purposes!” Unfortunately, too many interview researchers simply take one or another approach to interviewing for granted as the only correct one and forget to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of their favored approach (sometimes they are not even aware that other approaches exist). These researchers thus proceed without properly theorizing their means of knowledge production.

Individual and Group Interviews

It is not only the interviewer’s agenda and research interests that structure the interaction in an interview. Unsurprisingly, the number of participants also plays an important role. As the history of interviewing testifies, the standard format of qualitative interviewing is with one person interviewing another person. This format was illustrated in the example in Box 14.1 , and although this chapter is not about group interviews, I briefly mention these to illustrate how they differ from conventional forms of qualitative interviewing.

Group Interviews

There is an increasing use of group interviews. These have been in use since the 1920s but became standard practice only after the 1950s, when market researchers in particular developed what they termed “focus group interviews” to study consumer preferences. Today, focus groups dominate consumer research and are also often used in health, education, and evaluation research; they are in fact becoming increasingly common across many disciplines in the social sciences.

In focus groups, the interviewer is conceived as a “moderator” who focuses the group discussion on specific themes of interest, and she or he will often use the group dynamic instrumentally to include a number of different perspectives on the give themes ( Morgan, 2002 ). Often, group interviews are more dynamic and flexible in comparison with individual interviews, and they may be closer to everyday discussions. They can be used, for example, when the researcher is not so much interested in people’s descriptions of their experiences as in how participants discuss, argue, and justify their opinions and attitudes.

The standard size for a focus group is between six to ten participants, led by a moderator ( Chrzanowska, 2002 ). Recently, qualitative researchers have also experimented with groups of only two participants (sometimes referred to as “the two-person interview,” although there are literally three people if one counts the interviewer), mainly because it makes the research process easier to handle than with larger groups, where people will often not show up. The moderator introduces the topics for discussion and facilitates the interchange. The point is not to reach consensus about the issues discussed but to have different viewpoints articulated about an issue. Focus group interviews are well suited for exploratory studies in little-known domains or about newly emerging social phenomena because the dynamic social interaction that results may provide more spontaneous expressions than occur in individual interviews.

Individual Interviews

Individual interviews with one interviewer and one interviewee may sometimes be less lively than group interviews, but they have a couple of other advantages: First, it is often easier for the interviewer in one-on-one interviews to lead the conversation in a direction that is useful in relation to the interviewer’s research interests. Second, when studying aspects of people’s lives that are personal, sensitive, or even taboo, it is preferable to use individual interviews that allow for more confidentiality and often make it easier for the interviewer to create an atmosphere of trust and discretion. It is very doubtful, to take a rather extreme example, that Kinsey and his colleagues could have achieved the honest descriptions of sexual behaviors from their respondents had they conducted group rather than individual interviews. And there are obviously also certain themes that simply demand one person telling a story without being interrupted or gainsaid by other participants, such as in biographical research.

Although late-modern Western culture now looks on the individual, face-to-face interview as a completely common and natural occurrence, we should be very careful not to naturalize this particular form of human relationship, as I emphasized earlier. Briggs (2007) has argued that this form of relationship implies a certain “field of communicability,” referring to a socially situated construction of communicative processes (p. 556). This construction is an artefact of cultural-historical practices and is placed within organized social fields that produce different roles, positions, relations, and forms of agency that are frequently taken for granted. There are thus certain rights, duties, and a repertoire of acts that open up when entering the field of communicability of qualitative interviewing—and others that close down. Much about this field of communicability may seem trivial—that the interviewer asks questions and the interviewee answers, that the interviewee conveys personal information that he or she would not normally tell a stranger, that the interviewee is positioned as the expert on that person’s own life, and so on—but the role of this field in the process of knowledge production is very rarely addressed by interview researchers. We too seldom stop and consider the “magic” of interviewing—that a stranger is willing to tell an interviewer so many things about her life simply because the interviewer presents herself as a researcher. Rather than naturalize this practice, we should defamiliarize ourselves with it—like ethnographers visiting a strange “interview culture”—in order to understand and appreciate its role in scientific knowledge production.

Interviewing Using Different Media

Following from Briggs’s analysis of the communicability of interviewing, it is noteworthy that the otherwise standardized format of “face-to-face interaction” was named as late as the early twentieth century by the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley but was since constructed as “primordial, authentic, quintessentially human, and necessary” ( Briggs, 2007 , p. 553). It is sometimes forgotten that the face-to-face interview, as a kind of interaction mediated by this particular social arrangement, also has a history. Other well-known media employed in qualitative interviewing include the telephone and the internet, and here we briefly look at differences among face-to-face, telephone, and internet interviews.

Face-to-Face Interviews

In face-to-face interviews, people are present not only as conversing minds, but as flesh-and-blood creatures who may laugh, cry, smile, tremble, and otherwise give away much information in terms of gestures, body language, and facial expressions. Interviewers thus have the richest source of knowledge available here, but the challenge concerns how to use it productively. In most cases, how people look and act is forgotten once the transcript is made, and the researcher carries out her analyses using the stack of transcripts rather than the embodied interaction that took place. This is a problem especially when a research assistant or someone other than the interviewer transcribes the interview because, in that case, it is not possible to note all the nonverbal signs and gestures that occurred. If possible, it is therefore preferable for the interviewer herself to transcribe the conversations, and it is optimal to do so relatively soon after the conversations are over (e.g., within a couple of days) because this guarantees better recollection of the body language, the atmosphere, and other nontranscribable features of the interaction.

Telephone Interviews

According to Shuy (2002) , the telephone interview has “swept the polling and survey industry in recent years and is now the dominant approach” (p. 539). It often follows a very structured format. In a research context, the use of telephone conversations was pioneered by conversation analysts, who were able to identify a number of common conversational mechanisms (related to turn-taking, adjacency pairs such as questions–answers, etc.) from the rather constricted format that is possible over the telephone. The constricted format may in itself have been productive in throwing light on certain core features of human talk.

Shuy emphasizes a number of advantages of telephone interviewing, such as reduced interviewer effects (important in structured polling interviews, for example), better interviewer uniformity, greater standardization of questions, greater cost-efficiency, increased researcher safety ( Shuy, 2002 , p. 540), and—we might add—better opportunities for interviewing people who live far from the interviewer. In qualitative interviewing, however, it is not possible (nor desirable) to avoid these “interviewer effects” because the interviewer herself is the research instrument, so only the latter couple of points are relevant in this context. However, Shuy also highlights some advantages of in-person interviewing versus telephone interviewing, such as more accurate responses due to contextual naturalness, greater likelihood of self-generated answers, more symmetrical distribution of interactive power, greater effectiveness with complex issues, more thoughtful responses, and the fact that such interviews are better in relation to sensitive questions (pp. 541–544). The large majority of interviews characterized as “qualitative” are conducted face-to-face, mainly because of the advantages listed by Shuy.

Internet Interviews

E-mail and chat interviews are varieties of internet interviewing, with e-mail interviewing normally implying an asynchronous interaction in time, with the interviewer writing a question and then waiting for a response, and chat interviews being synchronous or occurring in “real time” ( Mann & Stewart, 2002 ). The latter can approach a conversational format that resembles face-to-face interviews, with its quick turn takings. When doing online ethnographies (e.g., in virtual realities on the internet), chat interviews are important (see Markham, 2005 , on online ethnography). One advantage of e-mail and chat interviews is that they are “self-transcribing” in the sense that the written text itself is the medium through which researcher and respondents express themselves, and the text is thus basically ready for analysis the minute it has been typed ( Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008 , p. 149).

Disadvantages of such interview forms are related to the demanded skills of written communication. Not everyone is sufficiently skilled at writing to be able to express themselves in rich and detailed ways. Most research participants are also more comfortable when talking, rather than writing, about their lives and experiences. However, as the psychiatrist Finn Skårderud has pointed out, there are some exceptions here, and Skårderud emphasizes in particular that internet conversations can be useful when communicating with people who have problematic relationships to their bodies (e.g., eating disorders). For such people, the physical presence of a problematic body can represent an unwanted disturbance ( Skårderud, 2003 ).

In concluding on the different media of interviewing, it should be emphasized that all interviews are mediated, even if only by the spoken words and the historical arrangement of questioning through face-to-face interaction, and there is no universally correct medium that will always guarantee success. Interviewers should choose their medium according to their knowledge interests and should minimally reflect on the effects of communicating through one medium rather than another. That said, most of the themes that qualitative interviewers are interested in lend themselves more easily to face-to-face interviewing because of the trust, confidentiality, and contextual richness that this format enables.

Different Styles of Interviewing

We have now seen how interviews may differ in terms of structure, number of participants, and media. Another crucial factor is the style of interviewing; that is, the way the interviewer acts and positions herself in the conversation. In relation to this, Wengraf (2001) has introduced a general distinction between “receptive” interviewer styles and assertive styles (or strategies, as he calls them), with the former being close to Carl Rogers’s model of psychotherapy and the latter being more in line with active and Socratic approaches to interviewing (both of which were addressed earlier). Here, I describe these in greater detail as two ends on a continuum.

Receptive Interviewing

According to Wengraf, a receptive style empowers informants and enables them to have “a large measure of control in the way in which they answer the relatively few and relatively open questions they are asked” ( Wengraf, 2001 , p. 155). Much of what was said earlier on the historical contributions of Elton Mayo and Carl Rogers and on semistructured life world interviewing addressed the receptive style in a broad sense; this is often thought of as self-evidently correct, so that no alternatives are considered. Therefore, I devote more space to articulate the somewhat more unusual assertive style, which is attracting more and more attention today.

Assertive Interviewing

Wengraf states that an assertive style may come close to a legal interrogation and enables the interviewer “to control the responses, provoke and illuminate self-contradiction, absences, provoke self-reflexivity and development” (2001, p. 155), perhaps approaching transformative conceptions of interviewing to use Roulston’s terminology mentioned earlier.

A well-known and more positive exposition of the assertive style was developed by Holstein and Gubrium in their book on The Active Interview ( Holstein & Gubrium, 1995 ). They argued that, in reality, there is not much of a choice because interviews are unavoidably interpretively active, meaning-making practices, and this would apply even when interviewers attempt a more receptive style. In this case, however, their role in meaning-making would simply be more elusive and more difficult to take into account when analyzing interview talk. A consequence of this line of argument is that it is preferable for interviewers to take their inevitable role as co-constructors of meaning into account rather than trying to downplay it.

Discourse analysts such as Potter and Wetherell (1987) have also developed an active, assertive practice of interviewing. In a classic text, they describe the constructive role of the interview researcher and summarize discourse analytic interviewing as follows:

First, variation in response is as important as consistency. Second, techniques, which allow diversity rather than those which eliminate it are emphasized, resulting in more informal conversational exchanges and third, interviewers are seen as active participants rather than like speaking questionnaires. ( Potter & Wetherell, 1987 , p. 165)

Variation, diversity, informality, and an active interviewer are key, and the interview process, for Potter and Wetherell, is meant to lead to articulations of the “interpretative repertoires” of the interviewees, but without the interviewer investigating the legitimacy of these repertoires in the interview situation or the respondent’s ways of justifying them. This is in contrast to Socratic and other confronting variants of active interviews, which are designed not just to map participants’ understandings and beliefs, but also to study how participants justify their understandings and beliefs.

To illustrate concretely what a confrontative assertive style looks like, we turn to a simple and very short example from Plato’s The Republic , with Socrates as interviewer (discussed in Brinkmann, 2007 a ). The passage very elegantly demonstrates that no moral rules are self-applying or self-interpreting but must always be understood contextually. Socrates is in a conversation with Cephalus, who believes that justice ( dikaiosune )—here “doing right”—can be stated in universal rules, such as “tell the truth” and “return borrowed items”:

“That’s fair enough, Cephalus,” I [Socrates] said. “But are we really to say that doing right consists simply and solely in truthfulness and returning anything we have borrowed? Are those not actions that can be sometimes right and sometimes wrong? For instance, if one borrowed a weapon from a friend who subsequently went out of his mind and then asked for it back, surely it would be generally agreed that one ought not to return it, and that it would not be right to do so, not to consent to tell the strict truth to a madman?” “That is true,” he [Cephalus] replied. “Well then,” I [Socrates] said, “telling the truth and returning what we have borrowed is not the definition of doing right.” ( Plato, 1987 , pp. 65–66)

Here, the conversation is interrupted by Polemarchus who disagrees with Socrates’ preliminary conclusion, and Cephalus quickly leaves to go to a sacrifice. Then Polemarchus takes Cephalus’s position as Socrates’ discussion partner and the conversation continues as if no substitution had happened.

The passage is instructive because it shows us what qualitative interviewing normally is not . Socrates violates almost every standard principle of qualitative research interviewing, and we can see that the conversation is a great contrast to my own interview excerpt in Box 14.1 . Socrates talks much more than his respondent, he has not asked Cephalus to “describe a situation in which he has experienced justice” or “tell a story about doing right from his own experience” or a similar concretely descriptive question probing for “lived experience.” Instead, they are talking about the definition of an important general concept. Socrates contradicts and challenges his respondent’s view. There is no debriefing or attempt to make sure that the interaction was a pleasant experience for Cephalus, the interview is conducted in public rather than private, and the topic is not private experiences or biographical details, but justice, a theme of common human interest, at least of interest to all citizens of Athens.

Sometimes, the conversation partners in the Platonic dialogues settle on a shared definition, but more often the dialogue ends without any final, unarguable definition of the central concept (e.g., justice, virtue, love). This lack of resolution— aporia in Greek—can be interpreted as illustrating the open-ended character of our conversational reality, including the open-ended character of the discursively produced knowledge of human social and historical life. If humankind is a kind of enacted conversation, to return to my opening remarks in this chapter, the goal of social science is perhaps not to arrive at “fixed knowledge” once and for all, but to help human beings improve the quality of their conversational reality, to help them know their own society and social practices, and debate the goals and values that are important in their lives ( Flyvbjerg, 2001 ).

Interviews can be intentionally assertive, active, and confronting (good examples are found in Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985 , who explicitly acknowledge a debt to Socrates), but the assertive approach can also be employed post hoc as a more analytic perspective. Consider, for example, the excerpt in Box 14.2 from a study by Shweder and Much (1987) , discussed in detail by Valsiner (2007 , pp. 385–386). The interview is set in India and was part of a research project studying moral reasoning in a cross-cultural research design. Earlier in the interview, Babaji (the interviewee) has been presented with a variant of the famous Heinz dilemma (here called the Ashok dilemma), invented by moral developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg to assess people’s moral capabilities ( Kohlberg, 1981 ): a man (Heinz/Ashok) has a wife who is ill and will die if he does not steal some medicine from a pharmacist (who refuses to sell the medicine at a price that the man can afford). According to Babaji’s Hinduism, stealing is not permitted, and the interview unfolds from there (see Box 14.2 ).

According to Valsiner (2007) , we see in the interview how the interviewer (Richard Shweder), in a very active or assertive way, does everything he can to persuade Babaji to accept the Western framing of the dilemma and see the tension between stealing for a moral reason and stealing as an immoral act. But Babaji fails to, or refuses to, see the situation as a dilemma and first attempts to articulate other possibilities in addition to stealing/not stealing (viz. give shamanistic instructions) before finally suggesting that Ashok sells himself in order to raise the money. As such, the interview flow is best understood as an active and confrontational encounter between two quite different worldviews that are revealed exactly because the interviewer acts in a confronting, although not disrespectful, way. 3

Furthermore, the excerpt illustrates how cross-cultural interviewing can be quite difficult—but also extremely interesting—not least when conducted in “noninterview societies” ( Ryen, 2002 , p. 337); that is, in societies where interviewing is not common or recognized as a knowledge-producing instrument. All qualitative interviewing is a collaborative accomplishment, but this becomes exceedingly visible when collaborating cross-culturally.

Analytic Approaches to Interviewing

Before closing this chapter, I give a very brief introduction to different perspectives on how to analyze interviews. Obviously, I cannot here cover the immense variety of phenomenological, discursive, conversation analytic, feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic perspectives, so instead I present a simplified dichotomy that should really be thought of as a continuum. The dichotomy has already played an implicit role earlier because it implies a distinction between interview talk as primarily descriptive (phenomenological) reports (concentrating on the “what” of communication) and interview talk as primarily (discursive) accounts (chiefly concerned with the “how” of talk). Phenomenological approaches to interviewing in a broad sense (exemplified in my exposition of semistructured life world interviewing) try to get as close as possible to precise descriptions of what people have experienced, whereas other analytical approaches (found, e.g., in certain schools of discourse analysis and conversation analysis) focus on how people express themselves and give accounts occasioned by the situation in which they find themselves. The two approaches are contrasted in Table 14.1 , with “what” approaches on the left-hand side and “how” approaches on the right-hand side.

Interviewer: Why doesn’t Hindu dharma permit stealing? Babaji: If he steals, it is a sin—so what virtue is there in saving a life. Hindu dharma keeps man from sinning. Interviewer: Why would it be a sin? Isn’t there a saying “On must jump into fire for others”? Babaji: That is there in our dharma—sacrifice, but not stealing. Interviewer: But if he doesn’t provide the medicine for his wife, she will die. Wouldn’t it be a sin to let her die? Babaji: That’s why, according to the capacities and powers which God has given him, he should try to give her shamanistic instructions and advice. Then she can be cured. Interviewer: But, that particular medicine is the only way out. Babaji: There is no reason to necessarily think that that particular drug will save her life. Interviewer: Let’s suppose she can only be saved by that drug, or else she will die. Won’t he face lots of difficulties if his wife dies? Babaji: No. Interviewer: But his family will break up. Babaji: He can marry other women. Interviewer: But he has no money. How can he remarry? Babaji: Do you think he should steal? If he steals, he will be sent to jail. Then what’s the use of saving her life to keep the family together. She has enjoyed the days destined for her. But stealing is bad. Our sacred scriptures tell that sometimes stealing is an act of dharma. If by stealing for you I can save your life, then it is an act of dharma. But one cannot steal for his wife or his offspring or for himself. If he does that, it is simply stealing. Interviewer: If I steal for myself, then it’s a sin? Babaji: Yes. Interviewer: But in this case I am stealing for my wife, not for me. Babaji: But your wife is yours. Interviewer: Doesn’t Ashok have a duty or obligation to steal the drug? Babaji: He may not get the medicine by stealing. He may sell himself. He may sell himself to someone for say 500 rupees for six months or one year. ( Shweder & Much, 1987 , p. 236)

My inspiration for slicing the cake of qualitative interviewing in this manner comes from Talmy (2010) and Rapley (2001) , who builds on a distinction from Clive Seale between interview-data-as-resource and interview-data-as-topic.

Interviews as Research Instrument

Researchers working from the former perspective (corresponding to the left-hand side of Table 14.1 ) believe that interview data can reflect the interviewees’ reality outside the interview and consequently seek to minimize the interviewer’s effects on coloring interviewees’ reports of their everyday reality. The interview becomes a research instrument in the hands of interviewers, who are supposed to act receptively and interfere as little as possible with the interviewee reporting. The validity of the interviewees’ reports becomes a prime issue when one approaches interviewing as a research instrument. And because interviews normally concern things experienced in the past, this significantly involves considerations about human memory and about how to enhance the trustworthiness of human recollections.

In one of the few publications to discuss the role of memory in interviewing, Thomsen and Brinkmann (2009) recommend that interviewers take the following points into account if they want to help interviewees’ improve the reporting and description of specific memories:

Allow time for recall and assure the interviewee that this is normal.

Provide concrete cues; for example, “the last time you were talking to a physician/nurse” rather than “a communication experience.”

Use typical content categories of specific memories to derive cues (i.e., ongoing activity, location, persons, other people’s affect and own affect).

Ask for recent specific memories.

Use relevant extended time line and landmark events as contextual cues; such as “when you were working at x” to aid the recall of older memories.

Ask the interviewee for a free and detailed narrative of the specific memory (adapted from Thomsen & Brinkmann, 2009 ).

Following such guidelines results in interviewee descriptions that are valid (they are about what the researcher intends them to be about) and close to the “lived experience” of something, or what was earlier referred to as “life world phenomena.” Although phenomenology is one typical paradigm to frame interviews analytically as research instruments, many other paradigms do so as well, for example grounded theory, developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) with the intent of developing theoretical understandings of phenomena grounded in empirical materials through meticulous coding of data.

A typical goal of qualitative analysis within a broad phenomenological perspective is to arrive at an understanding of the essential structures of conscious experience. Analysts can here apply an inductive form of analysis known as meaning condensation ( Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008 , p. 205). This refers to an abridgement of the meanings articulated by the interviewees into briefer formulations. Longer utterances are condensed into shorter statements in which the main sense of what is said is rephrased in a few words. This technique rests on the idea in phenomenology that there is a certain essential structure to the way we experience things in the life world, and this constitutes an experience as an experience of a given something (shame, anxiety, love, learning something new, etc.).

A specific approach to phenomenological analysis has been developed in a psychological context by Amedeo Giorgi (e.g., Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003 ). Giorgi breaks the analytic process down into four steps: (1) obtain a concrete description of a phenomenon (through an interview) as lived through by someone; read the description carefully and become familiar with it to get a sense of the whole, (2) establish meaning units in the description, (3) transform each meaning unit into expressions that communicate the psychological sense of the data, and (4) based on the transformed meaning units, articulate the general structure of the experience of the phenomenon (p. 170).

A large number of books exist on how to do a concrete analysis (e.g., Silverman, 2001 ), so I will refer the reader to these and also to relevant chapters of this handbook.

Interviewing as a Social Practice

In contrast to those approaches that see interviewing as a research instrument designed to capture the “what” of what is reported as accurately as possible, others working from more constructionist, localist, and situated perspectives have much greater analytic focus on the “how” of interviewing. They view interviewing as a social practice, as a site for a specific kind of situated interaction, which means that interview data primarily reflect “a reality constructed by the interviewee and interviewer” ( Rapley, 2001 , p. 304). The idea of obtaining valid reports that accurately reflect a reality outside the conversational situation is thus questioned, and the main challenge becomes instead how to explain the relevance of interview talk. That is, if what is said in an interview is a product of this social practice itself, why is it relevant to conduct interviewing? Postmodern interviews, emphasizing performative and transformative aspects of interviewing, attempt to meet this challenge by arguing that if interviews do not concern a reality outside themselves, they can instead be used to perform or facilitate social change.

People subscribing to the right-hand side of Table 14.1 believe that interview talk should be conceived of as accounts. Unlike reports, which refer to experiences from the interviewee’s past that can be articulated when prompted, accounts are answers that are “normatively oriented to and designed for the questions that occasion them” ( Talmy, 2010 , p. 136). If interviewee talk is best understood as accounts, it must be seen as a kind of social action that has effects and does something in the situation of which it is a part. This perspective on interviewing is shared by some discourse and conversation analysts who limit themselves to analyzing interview talk as situated interaction.

Readers may wonder if these approaches are mutually exclusive. My own pragmatic answer is that they are not, but that none of the approaches should be brought to an extreme: it is true that huge problems are associated with viewing the interview as a site for pure, “unpolluted” reports of the past (we know too much about the constructive role of human memory and of how the social practice of interviewing mediates what is said to take this seriously). But it is also true that there are problems associated with denying that we can use our communicative powers to refer more or less accurately to past experiences. Those who follow the right-hand side of Table 14.1 to the extreme and deny that data can be resources for understanding experiences of the past still believe that their own communicative practice, materialized in their texts, are about matters outside this specific text. So, taken to extremes, both approaches become absurd, and I believe that it is now time for the two (sometimes opposed) camps to learn from one another and realize that they need not exclude one another. In my view, some of the most interesting interview studies are those in which analyses of the “what” and the “how” fertilize each other in productive ways. I end this chapter with a brief illustration of this, taken (rather shamelessly!) from a paper co-authored by myself ( Musaeus & Brinkmann, 2011 ) that shows how an analytic look at interviews can employ perspectives from both sides at the same time. The two forms thus need not exclude each other, and some interviews can favorably be analyzed using a combination of the two broad analytic approaches.

First a little contextualization to render the example meaningful: my colleague, Peter Musaeus, conducted in their home a relatively unstructured group qualitative interview with four members of a family that was receiving family therapy. We were interested in understanding the effects of the therapeutic process on the everyday life of the family. In the excerpt in Box 14.3 , we meet Maren and Søren, a married couple, and Maren’s daughter Kirstina, who was thirteen years old at the time (and we also see the interviewer’s voice). 4 In the following extract, Maren (the mother) has just made a joke about the movie The Planet of the Apes (a science-fiction movie telling the story of how apes are in control of the earth and keep humans as pets or slaves), and they have talked about the scene where the apes jokingly remark that females are cute, just as long as you get rid of them before puberty.

Toward the end of this sequence Søren, the father of the family, denies—as he does throughout the interview—that Maren is hitting her daughter, and he uses what the family calls a “stop sign” (line 17), which they were taught to employ in their therapy sessions. The verbal sign “STOP” (said in a loud voice) is supposed to bring the conflict cycle to a halt before it accelerates. In the interview, however, the stop sign (like other similar signs from therapy that have been appropriated by the family members) sometimes function counter-productively to raise the conflict level because it is almost shouted by family members. The sudden question in line 20 is actually much more effective in defusing the conflict by diverting the participants’ attention from the problem.

I have here just provided a glimpse of our analysis, which tries to bring forth the role of semiotic mediation—the use of signs (like the stop sign and other therapeutic tools)—in regulating social interaction in a troubled family. The point is, however, that the interview both contains family members’ descriptions of their problems and challenges, thus giving us their reports of what they experience; but we also see the persons’ shared past being formative of the present in the interview situation itself, resulting in quite significant accounts occasioned by the social episode itself. In short, the two analytic perspectives on interviewing (both as a resource providing reports and also as a topic in its own right, i.e., a social practice providing accounts) are mutually reinforcing in this case and have given us what we (as authors of the paper) believe is a valid analysis. Rather than just hearing people describing their problems, the interviewer is in fact witnessing the family members’ problems as they play out in their interaction, in front of him so to speak, thus offering him a chance to validate his analysis. The “what” and the “how” here intersect very closely.

Maren: And the comment that followed was: “Get rid of it before... ha, ha = “

Interviewer: Before it becomes a teenager?

Maren: Because it simply is so hard.

Interviewer: Yes, right, but it =

Kirstina: Should you also simply get rid of me?

Interviewer: Ha, ha.

Maren: No, are you crazy, I love you more than anything. But it’s really hard

for all of us sometimes, I think.

Kirstina: Are you also in puberty when you hit me?

Maren: No, I am in the menopause, that is different.

Søren: You don’t hit, do you? You say “when you hit”? Your mother doesn’t

Kirstina: She has hit me today and yesterday.

Maren: I probably did hit her but well =

Kirstina: Yes, but still, you may say that it isn’t hitting, when you miss.

Søren: STOP Kirstina, it isn’t true. Your mother hasn’t hit you and you don’t

Kirstina: No, no let’s just say that.

Maren: Does anyone want a cream roll?

In this chapter, I have given a broad introduction to qualitative interviewing. I have tried to demonstrate that the human world is a conversational reality in which interviewing takes a privileged position as a research method, at least in relation to a number of significant research questions that human and social scientists want to ask. Qualitative interviewing can be both a useful and valid approach, resulting in analyses with a certain objectivity in the sense that I introduced earlier. Throughout the chapter, I have kept a focus on interviewing as a social practice that has a cultural history, and I have warned against unreflective naturalization of this kind of human interaction (i.e., viewing it as a particularly natural and unproblematic way of staging human relationships).

Furthermore, I introduced a number of distinctions that are relevant when mapping the field of qualitative interviewing (e.g., between different levels of structure, numbers of participants, media of interviewing, and also interviewer styles). I also provided a detailed presentation of semistructured life world interviewing as the standard form of qualitative interviewing today.

I finally gave particular attention to two broad analytic approaches to interviewing: on the one side, experience-focused interviewing that seek to elicit accurate reports of what interviewees have experienced (in broad terms, the phenomenological positions), and, on the other side, language- and interaction-focused interviewing (discourse-oriented positions) that focus on the nature of interview interaction in its own right. In my eyes, none of these is superior per se, but each enables researchers to pose different kinds of questions to their materials. Too often, however, interviewers forget to make clear what kinds of questions they are interested in and also forget to consider whether their practice of interviewing and their analytic focus enable them to answer their research questions satisfactorily.

Future Directions

In the future, the field of qualitative interviewing is likely to continue its expansion. It is now among the most popular research tools in the human and social sciences, and nothing indicates that this trend will stop. However, a number of issues confront qualitative interviewing as particularly pressing in my opinion:

Using conversations for research purposes is close to an everyday practice of oral communication. We talk to people to get to know them, which—in a trivial sense—is also the goal of qualitative research. Will the focus on interviewing as a “method” (that can be articulated and perhaps spelled out procedurally) be counterproductive when the goal is human communication and getting to know people? Are we witnessing a fetishization of methods in qualitative research that is blocking the road to knowledge? And are there other ways of thinking about interviews and other “qualitative methods” than in the idiom of “methods”?

Qualitative interviewers can now find publication channels for their work, but has the practice of interviewing become so unproblematic that people are forgetting to justify and theorize their means of knowledge production in concrete contexts? In my view, more work should be done to theorize interviewing as a social practice (the “how”), as essential to what goes on in interview interactions.

When reporting qualitative analyses, researchers too often decontextualize interviewee statements and utterances. What person A has said is juxtaposed with the statements of person B, without any contextual clues. If an interview is a form of situated interaction, then readers of interview reports need to be provided with temporal and situational context in order to be able to interpret the talk (What question was this statement an answer to? What happened before and what came after?).

Some qualitative researchers remain convinced that they are “on the good side” in relation to ethical questions. They “give voice” to individuals, listen to their “subjective accounts,” and are thus against the quantitative and “objectifying” approaches of other, more traditional researchers. However, qualitative interviewers should, in my view, be aware that very delicate ethical questions are an inherent part of interviewing. They should avoid the “qualitatative ethicism” that sometimes characterizes qualitative inquiry, viz. that “we are good because we are qualitative.” Especially in an “interview society,” there is a need to think about the ethical problems of interviewing others (often about intimate and personal matters), when people are often seduced by the warmth and interest of interviewers to say “too much.”

The first journalistic interviews appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century ( Silvester, 1993 ), and social science interviews emerged in the course of the twentieth century (see the history of interviewing recounted later in this chapter).

Obviously, these traditions are not identical, nor are their main concepts, but I believe that they here converge on the idea of a concretely lived and experienced social reality prior to scientific abstractions of it, which Husserl originally referred to as the life world and which remains central to most (if not all) paradigms in qualitative research.

Confronting interviews are sometimes misunderstood to imply a certain aggressive or disrespectful attitude, which, of course, is a misunderstanding. An interviewer can be actively and confrontingly curious and inquiring in a very respectful way, especially if she positions herself as not-knowing (ad modum Socrates in some of the dialogues) in order to avoid framing the interview as an oral examination.

Kirstina has an older sister, who no longer lives at home, and Søren is not the biological father of the girls. He has two children from a previous marriage. One of them has attempted suicide, which, however, is not the reason for the family’s referral to therapy. The reason, instead, is Maren’s violent behavior toward her daughter Kirstina.

Adorno, T. W. , Frenkel-Brunswik, E. , Levinson, D. J. , & Sanford, R. N. ( 1950 ). The authoritarian personality . New York: Norton.

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Atkinson, P. ( 2002 ). The life story interview. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context & method . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Atkinson, P. , & Silverman, D. ( 1997 ). Kundera’s immortality: The interview society and the invention of the self.   Qualitative Inquiry , 3 , 304–325.

Bellah, R. N. , Madsen, R. , Sullivan, W. M. , Swidler, A. , & Tipton, S. M. ( 1985 ). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Blumer, H. ( 1969 ). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bogardus, E. M. ( 1924 ). Methods of interviewing.   Journal of Applied Sociology , 9 , 456–467.

Briggs, C. ( 2007 ). Anthropology, interviewing and communicability in contemporary society.   Current Anthropology , 48 , 551–567.

Brinkmann, S. ( 2007 a ). Could interviews be epistemic? An alternative to qualitative opinion-polling.   Qualitative Inquiry , 13 , 1116–1138.

Brinkmann, S. ( 2007 b ). The good qualitative researcher.   Qualitative Research in Psychology , 4 , 127–144.

Brinkmann, S. ( 2012 ). Qualitative inquiry in everyday life: Working with everyday life materials . London: Sage.

Brinkmann, S. , & Kvale, S. ( 2005 ). Confronting the ethics of qualitative research.   Journal of Constructivist Psychology , 18 , 157–181.

Butler, J. ( 2005 ). Giving an account of oneself . New York: Fordham University Press.

Chrzanowska, J. ( 2002 ). Interviewing groups and individuals in qualitative market research . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Clifford, J. , & Marcus, G. ( 1986 ). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Conrad, R. G. , & Schober, M. ( 2008 ). New frontiers in standardized survey interviewing. In S. N. Hesse-Biber & P. Leavy (Eds.), Handbook of emergent methods . (pp. 173–188). London: Guilford Press.

Dichter, E. ( 1960 ). The strategy of desire . Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Dinkins, C. S. ( 2005 ). Shared inquiry: Socratic-Hermeneutic interpre-viewing. In P. Ironside (Ed.), Beyond method: Philosophical conversations in healthcare research and scholarship . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Ellis, C. , Adams, T. E. , & Bochner, A. P. ( 2011 ). Autoethography: An overview.   Forum: Qualitative Social Research , 12 , Article 10- http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/viewArticle/1589/3095 .

Ellis, C. , & Berger, L. ( 2003 ). Their story/my story/our story: Including the researcher’s experience in interview research. In J. A. Holstein & J. F. Gubrium (Eds.), Inside interviewing: New lenses, new concerns . (pp. 467–493). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Flick, U. ( 2002 ). An introduction to qualitative research (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Flyvbjerg, B. ( 2001 ). Making social science matter—Why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fontana, A. , & Prokos, A. H. ( 2007 ). The interview: From formal to postmodern . Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Freud, S. ( 1963 ). Therapy and technique . New York: Collier.

Frosh, S. ( 2007 ). Disintegrating qualitative research.   Theory & Psychology , 17 , 635–653.

Giorgi, A. , & Giorgi, B. ( 2003 ). The descriptive phenomenological psychological method. In P. M. Camic , J. E. Rhodes , & L. Yardley (Eds.), Qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design . (pp. 243–273). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Glaser, B. G. , & Strauss, A. ( 1967 ). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research . New York: Aldine Publishing Company.

Harré, R. ( 1983 ). Personal being . Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hollway, W. , & Jefferson, T. ( 2000 ). Biography, anxiety and the experience of locality. In P. Chamberlayne , J. Bornat , & T. Wengraf (Eds.), The turn to biographical methods in social science . (pp. 167–180). London: Routledge.

Holstein, J. A. , & Gubrium, J. F. ( 1995 ). The Active Interview . London: Sage.

Husserl, E. ( 1954 ). Die krisis der europäischen wissenschaften und die tranzendentale phänomenologie . Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.

Kinsey, A. C. , Pomeroy, W. B. , & Martin, C. E. ( 1948 ). Sexual behavior in the human male . Philadelphia: Saunders.

Kohlberg, L. ( 1981 ). Essays on moral development Vol. 1—The philosophy of moral development . San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers.

Kvale, S. ( 2003 ). The psychoanalytical interview as inspiration for qualitative research. In P. M. Camic & J. E. Rhodes (Eds.), Qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design . (pp. 275–297). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Kvale, S. , & Brinkmann, S. ( 2008 ). InterViews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Latour, B. ( 2000 ). When things strike back: A possible contribution of “science studies” to the social sciences.   British Journal of Sociology , 50 , 107–123.

Lee, R. M. ( 2008 ). David Riesman and the sociology of the interview.   The Sociological Quarterly , 49 , 285–307.

Lee, R. M. ( 2011 ). “ The most important technique...”: Carl Rogers, Hawthorne, and the rise and fall of nondirective interviewing in sociology.   Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences , 47 , 123–146.

Lyotard, J. -F. ( 1984 ). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge . Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Maccoby, E. E. , & Maccoby, N. ( 1954 ). The interview: A tool of social science. In G. Lindzey (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology . (pp. 449–487). Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Mann, C. , & Stewart, F. ( 2002 ). Internet interviewing. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context & method . (pp. 603–628). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mannheim, B. , & Tedlock, B. ( 1995 ). Introduction. In B. Tedlock & B. Mannheim (Eds.), The dialogic emergence of culture . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Markham, A. ( 2005 ). The methods, politics, and ethics of representation in online ethnography. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). (pp. 247–284). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mayo, E. ( 1933 ). The social problems of an industrial civilization . New York: MacMillan.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/ 2002 ). Phenomenology of perception . London: Routledge.

Mishler, E. ( 1986 ). Research interviewing—Context and narrative . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morgan, D. L. ( 2002 ). Focus group interviewing. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context & method . (pp. 141–160). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mulhall, S. ( 2007 ). The conversation of humanity . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Musaeus, P. , & Brinkmann, S. ( 2011 ). The semiosis of family conflict: A case study of home-based psychotherapy.   Culture & Psychology , 17 , 47–63.

Parker, I. ( 2005 ). Qualitative psychology: Introducing radical research . Buckingham: Open University Press.

Piaget, J. ( 1930 ). The child’s conception of the world . New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Piaget, J. (1932/ 1975 ). The moral judgment of the child . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Plato ( 1987 ). The republic . London: Penguin.

Platt, J. ( 2002 ). The history of the interview. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context and method . (pp. 33–54). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Potter, J. , & Wetherell, M. ( 1987 ). Discourse and social psychology . London: Sage.

Rapley, T. J. ( 2001 ). The art(fulness) of open-ended interviewing: Some considerations on analysing interviews.   Qualitative Research , 1 , 303–323.

Reinharz, S. , & Chase, S. E. ( 2002 ). Interviewing women. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context & method . (pp. 221–238). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Riesman, D. M. , & Benney, M. ( 1956 ). The sociology of the interview.   Midwestern Sociologist , 18 , 3–15.

Roethlishberger, F. J. , & Dickson, W. J. ( 1939 ). Management and the worker . New York: Wiley.

Rogers, C. ( 1945 ). The Non-directive method as a technique for social research.   The American Journal of Sociology , 50 , 279–283.

Roulston, K. ( 2010 ). Reflective interviewing: A guide to theory and practice . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Ryen, A. ( 2002 ). Cross-cultural interviewing. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context & method . (pp. 335–354). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Sarbin, T. R. ( 1986 ). The narrative as a root metaphor for psychology. In T. R. Sarbin (Ed.), Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct . (pp. 3–21). New York: Praeger.

Shotter, J. ( 1993 ). Conversational realities: Constructing life through language . London: Sage.

Shuy, R. W. ( 2002 ). In-person versus telephone interviewing. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context & method . (pp. 537–555). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Shweder, R. A. , & Much, N. ( 1987 ). Determinations of meaning: Discourse and moral socialization. In W. M. Kurtines & J. L. Gewirtz (Eds.), Moral development through social interaction . New York: Wiley.

Silverman, D. ( 2001 ). Interpreting qualitative data: Methods for analysing talk, text and interaction (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Silvester, E. ( 1993 ). The penguin book of interviews . London: Penguin.

Skårderud, F. ( 2003 ). Sh@me in cyberspace. Relationships without faces: The e-media and eating disorders.   European Eating Disorders Review , 11 , 155–169.

Smith, L. T. ( 1999 ). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous people . London: Zed Books.

Sorsoli, L. & Tolman, D. L. ( 2008 ). Hearing voices: Listening for multiplicity and movement in interview data. In S. N. Hesse-Biber & P. Leavy (Eds.), Handbook of emergent methods . (pp. 495–515). London: Guilford Press.

Spradley, J. ( 1979 ). The ethnographic interview . New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Talmy, S. ( 2010 ). Qualitative interviews in applied linguistics: From research instrument to social practice.   Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , 30 , 128–148.

Tanggaard, L. ( 2007 ). The research interview as discourses crossing swords.   Qualitative Inquiry , 13 , 160–176.

Taylor, C. ( 1989 ). Sources of the self . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomsen, D. K. , & Brinkmann, S. ( 2009 ). An interviewer’s guide to autobiographical memory: Ways to elicit concrete experiences and to avoid pitfalls in interpreting them.   Qualitative Research in Psychology , 6 , 294–312.

Trevarthen, C. ( 1993 ). The self born in intersubjectivity: The psychology of an infant communicating. In U. Neisser (Ed.), The perceived self . (pp. 121–173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Valsiner, J. ( 2007 ). Culture in minds and societies: Foundations of cultural psychology . New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

Warren, C. A. B. ( 2002 ). Qualitative interviewing. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context & method . (pp. 83–101). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Wengraf, T. ( 2001 ). Qualitative research interviewing . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Europe PMC requires Javascript to function effectively.

Either your web browser doesn't support Javascript or it is currently turned off. In the latter case, please turn on Javascript support in your web browser and reload this page.

Search life-sciences literature (44,036,098 articles, preprints and more)

• Available from publisher site using DOI. A subscription may be required. Full text
• Citations & impact
• Similar Articles

Semi-structured interviewing in practice-close research.

Author information, affiliations.

• Baumbusch J 1

Journal for Specialists in Pediatric Nursing : JSPN , 01 Jul 2010 , 15(3): 255-258 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6155.2010.00243.x   PMID: 20618640 

Abstract 

Full text links .

Read article at publisher's site: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6155.2010.00243.x

References 

Articles referenced by this article (13)

Perceptions of the researcher: in-depth interviewing in the home.

Borbasi S , Gassner LA , Dunn S , Chapman Y , Read K

Contemp Nurse, (1):24-37 2002

MED: 16114191

Commentary: Interviewing

Nurse Researcher, (1) 2005

The unstructured interactive interview: Issues of reciprocity and risks when dealing with sensitive topics

Qualitative Inquiry, (3) 2003

The qualitative research interview.

Dicicco-Bloom B , Crabtree BF

Med Educ, (4):314-321 2006

MED: 16573666

Critical ethnographic methodology in nursing research: issues and solutions.

Groenkjaer M

Contemp Nurse, (1):49-55 2002

MED: 16114193

Combining individual interviews and focus groups to enhance data richness.

Lambert SD , Loiselle CG

J Adv Nurs, (2):228-237 2008

MED: 18394035

Participants' experiences of being interviewed about an emotive topic.

Lowes L , Paul G

J Adv Nurs, (5):587-595 2006

MED: 16907790

Methodological problems associated with practice-close research.

Lykkeslet E , Gjengedal E

Qual Health Res, (5):699-704 2007

MED: 17478651

The problems with interviews.

Nunkoosing K

Qual Health Res, (5):698-706 2005

MED: 15802544

Title not supplied

Citations & impact , impact metrics, citations of article over time, smart citations by scite.ai smart citations by scite.ai include citation statements extracted from the full text of the citing article. the number of the statements may be higher than the number of citations provided by europepmc if one paper cites another multiple times or lower if scite has not yet processed some of the citing articles. explore citation contexts and check if this article has been supported or disputed. https://scite.ai/reports/10.1111/j.1744-6155.2010.00243.x, article citations, 'it's more emotionally based': prince edward island horse owner perspectives of horse weight management..

Ross M , Proudfoot K , Campbell Nishimura E , Morabito E , Merkies K , Mitchell J , Ritter C

Anim Welf , 33:e14, 11 Mar 2024

Cited by: 0 articles | PMID: 38510426 | PMCID: PMC10951667

Decisional Regret Surrounding Dialysis Initiation: A Comparative Analysis.

Pawar AS , Thorsteinsdottir B , Whitman S , Pine K , Lee A , Espinoza Suarez NR , Organick Lee P , Thota A , Lorenz E , Beck A , Albright R , Feely M , Williams A , Behnken E , Boehmer KR

Kidney Med , 6(3):100785, 20 Dec 2023

Cited by: 0 articles | PMID: 38435065 | PMCID: PMC10907211

Males' Lived Experience with Self-Perceived Pornography Addiction: A Qualitative Study of Problematic Porn Use.

Hanseder S , Dantas JAR

Int J Environ Res Public Health , 20(2):1497, 13 Jan 2023

Cited by: 1 article | PMID: 36674250 | PMCID: PMC9861829

What are tutors' perceptions of an online tutoring project-Digital Learning Companion-During the COVID-19 pandemic? A case study in Taiwan.

Tran KNP , Weng C , Tran-Nguyen PL , Astatke M , Tran NP

Univers Access Inf Soc , 1-17, 08 Mar 2023

Cited by: 0 articles | PMID: 37361675 | PMCID: PMC9992914

Collegiate Athletic Trainers' Experiences Implementing Return-to-Sport Policies and Procedures During COVID-19: A Qualitative Research Study.

Root HJ , Abdenour TE , Eason CM , DiSanti JS , Post EG

J Athl Train , 57(11-12):1100-1110, 01 Nov 2022

Cited by: 1 article | PMID: 35728264 | PMCID: PMC9875706

Free full text in Europe PMC

Similar Articles 

To arrive at the top five similar articles we use a word-weighted algorithm to compare words from the Title and Abstract of each citation.

The joys and challenges of semi-structured interviewing.

Community Pract , 83(7):18-21, 01 Jul 2010

Cited by: 6 articles | PMID: 20701187

Qualitative interviewing: preparation for practice.

Can J Cardiovasc Nurs , 20(3):27-34, 01 Jan 2010

Cited by: 1 article | PMID: 20718237

Conceptual, holistic, and pragmatic considerations for interviewing research participants.

Holist Nurs Pract , 24(3):148-157, 01 May 2010

Cited by: 1 article | PMID: 20421755

Using puppetry to elicit children's talk for research.

Epstein I , Stevens B , McKeever P , Baruchel S , Jones H

Nurs Inq , 15(1):49-56, 01 Mar 2008

Cited by: 10 articles | PMID: 18271790

Using participant observation in pediatric health care settings: ethical challenges and solutions.

Carnevale FA , Macdonald ME , Bluebond-Langner M , McKeever P

J Child Health Care , 12(1):18-32, 01 Mar 2008

Cited by: 27 articles | PMID: 18287182

Europe PMC is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, automatically generate references for free.

• Knowledge Base
• Methodology
• Semi-Structured Interview | Definition, Guide & Examples

Semi-Structured Interview | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on 4 May 2022 by Tegan George . Revised on 30 August 2022.

A semi-structured interview is a data collection method that relies on asking questions within a predetermined thematic framework. However, the questions are not set in order or in phrasing.

In research, semi-structured interviews are often qualitative in nature. They are generally used as an exploratory tool in marketing, social science, survey methodology, and other research fields.

They are also common in field research with many interviewers, giving everyone the same theoretical framework, but allowing them to investigate different facets of the research question .

• Structured interviews : The questions are predetermined in both topic and order.
• Unstructured interviews : None of the questions are predetermined.
• Focus group interviews : The questions are presented to a group instead of one individual.

Table of contents

What is a semi-structured interview, when to use a semi-structured interview, advantages of semi-structured interviews, disadvantages of semi-structured interviews, semi-structured interview questions, how to conduct a semi-structured interview, how to analyse a semi-structured interview, presenting your results (with example), frequently asked questions about semi-structured interviews.

Semi-structured interviews are a blend of structured and unstructured types of interviews.

• Unlike in an unstructured interview, the interviewer has an idea of what questions they will ask.
• Unlike in a structured interview, the phrasing and order of the questions is not set.

Semi-structured interviews are often open-ended, allowing for flexibility. Asking set questions in a set order allows for easy comparison between respondents, but it can be limiting. Having less structure can help you see patterns, while still allowing for comparisons between respondents.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

Semi-structured interviews are best used when:

• You have prior interview experience. Spontaneous questions are deceptively challenging, and it’s easy to accidentally ask a leading question or make a participant uneasy.
• Your research question is exploratory in nature. Participant answers can guide future research questions and help you develop a more robust knowledge base for future research.

Just like in structured interviews, it is critical that you remain organised and develop a system for keeping track of participant responses. However, since the questions are less set than in a structured interview, the data collection and analysis become a bit more complex.

Differences between different types of interviews

Make sure to choose the type of interview that suits your research best. This table shows the most important differences between the four types.

Semi-structured interviews come with many advantages.

Best of both worlds

No distractions, detail and richness.

However, semi-structured interviews also have their downsides.

Low validity

High risk of bias, difficult to develop good semi-structured interview questions.

Since they are often open-ended in style, it can be challenging to write semi-structured interview questions that get you the information you’re looking for without biasing your responses. Here are a few tips:

• Define what areas or topics you will be focusing on prior to the interview. This will help you write a framework of questions that zero in on the information you seek.
• Write yourself a guide to refer to during the interview, so you stay focused. It can help to start with the simpler questions first, moving into the more complex ones after you have established a comfortable rapport.
• Be as clear and concise as possible, avoiding jargon and compound sentences.
• How often per week do you go to the gym? a) 1 time; b) 2 times; c) 3 times; d) 4 or more times
• If yes: What feelings does going to the gym bring out in you?
• If no: What do you prefer to do instead?
• If yes: How did this membership affect your job performance? Did you stay longer in the role than you would have if there were no membership?

Once you’ve determined that a semi-structured interview is the right fit for your research topic , you can proceed with the following steps.

Step 1: Set your goals and objectives

You can use guiding questions as you conceptualise your research question, such as:

• What are you trying to learn or achieve from a semi-structured interview?
• Why are you choosing a semi-structured interview as opposed to a different type of interview, or another research method?

If you want to proceed with a semi-structured interview, you can start designing your questions.

Step 2: Design your questions

Try to stay simple and concise, and phrase your questions clearly. If your topic is sensitive or could cause an emotional response, be mindful of your word choices.

One of the most challenging parts of a semi-structured interview is knowing when to ask follow-up or spontaneous related questions. For this reason, having a guide to refer back to is critical. Hypothesising what other questions could arise from your participants’ answers may also be helpful.

Step 3: Assemble your participants

There are a few sampling methods you can use to recruit your interview participants, such as:

• Voluntary response sampling : For example, sending an email to a campus mailing list and sourcing participants from responses
• Stratified sampling of a particular characteristic trait of interest to your research, such as age, race, ethnicity, or gender identity

Step 4: Decide on your medium

It’s important to determine ahead of time how you will be conducting your interview. You should decide whether you’ll be conducting it live or with a pen-and-paper format. If conducted in real time, you also need to decide whether in person, over the phone, or via videoconferencing is the best option for you.

Note that each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages:

• Pen-and-paper may be easier for you to organise and analyse, but you will receive more prepared answers, which may affect the reliability of your data.
• In-person interviews can lead to nervousness or interviewer effects, where the respondent feels pressured to respond in a manner they believe will please you or incentivise you to like them.

Step 5: Conduct your interviews

As you conduct your interviews, keep environmental conditions as constant as you can to avoid research bias . Pay attention to your body language (e.g., nodding, raising eyebrows), and moderate your tone of voice.

Relatedly, one of the biggest challenges with semi-structured interviews is ensuring that your questions remain unbiased. This can be especially challenging with any spontaneous questions or unscripted follow-ups that you ask your participants.

After you’re finished conducting your interviews, it’s time to analyse your results. First, assign each of your participants a number or pseudonym for organisational purposes.

The next step in your analysis is to transcribe the audio or video recordings. You can then conduct a content or thematic analysis to determine your categories, looking for patterns of responses that stand out to you and test your hypotheses .

Transcribing interviews

Before you get started with transcription, decide whether to conduct verbatim transcription or intelligent verbatim transcription.

• If pauses, laughter, or filler words like ‘umm’ or ‘like’ affect your analysis and research conclusions, conduct verbatim transcription and include them.
• If not, you can conduct intelligent verbatim transcription, which excludes fillers, fixes any grammatical issues, and is usually easier to analyse.

Transcribing presents a great opportunity for you to cleanse your data . Here, you can identify and address any inconsistencies or questions that come up as you listen.

Your supervisor might ask you to add the transcriptions to the appendix of your paper.

Coding semi-structured interviews

Next, it’s time to conduct your thematic or content analysis . This often involves ‘coding’ words, patterns, or recurring responses, separating them into labels or categories for more robust analysis.

Due to the open-ended nature of many semi-structured interviews, you will most likely be conducting thematic analysis, rather than content analysis.

• You closely examine your data to identify common topics, ideas, or patterns. This can help you draw preliminary conclusions about your participants’ views, knowledge or experiences.
• After you have been through your responses a few times, you can collect the data into groups identified by their ‘code’. These codes give you a condensed overview of the main points and patterns identified by your data.
• Next, it’s time to organise these codes into themes. Themes are generally broader than codes, and you’ll often combine a few codes under one theme. After identifying your themes, make sure that these themes appropriately represent patterns in responses.

Analysing semi-structured interviews

Once you’re confident in your themes, you can take either an inductive or a deductive approach.

• An inductive approach is more open-ended, allowing your data to determine your themes.
• A deductive approach is the opposite. It involves investigating whether your data confirm preconceived themes or ideas.

After your data analysis, the next step is to report your findings in a research paper .

• Your methodology section describes how you collected the data (in this case, describing your semi-structured interview process) and explains how you justify or conceptualise your analysis.
• Your discussion and results sections usually address each of your coded categories.
• You can then conclude with the main takeaways and avenues for further research.

Example of interview methodology for a research paper

Let’s say you are interested in vegan students on your campus. You have noticed that the number of vegan students seems to have increased since your first year, and you are curious what caused this shift.

You identify a few potential options based on literature:

• Perceptions about personal health or the perceived ‘healthiness’ of a vegan diet
• Concerns about animal welfare and the meat industry
• Increased climate awareness, especially in regards to animal products
• Availability of more vegan options, making the lifestyle change easier

Anecdotally, you hypothesise that students are more aware of the impact of animal products on the ongoing climate crisis, and this has influenced many to go vegan. However, you cannot rule out the possibility of the other options, such as the new vegan bar in the dining hall.

Since your topic is exploratory in nature and you have a lot of experience conducting interviews in your work-study role as a research assistant, you decide to conduct semi-structured interviews.

You have a friend who is a member of a campus club for vegans and vegetarians, so you send a message to the club to ask for volunteers. You also spend some time at the campus dining hall, approaching students at the vegan bar asking if they’d like to participate.

Here are some questions you could ask:

• Do you find vegan options on campus to be: excellent; good; fair; average; poor?
• How long have you been a vegan?
• Follow-up questions can probe the strength of this decision (i.e., was it overwhelmingly one reason, or more of a mix?).

Depending on your participants’ answers to these questions, ask follow-ups as needed for clarification, further information, or elaboration.

• Do you think consuming animal products contributes to climate change? → The phrasing implies that you, the interviewer, do think so. This could bias your respondents, incentivising them to answer affirmatively as well.
• What do you think is the biggest effect of animal product consumption? → This phrasing ensures the participant is giving their own opinion, and may even yield some surprising responses that enrich your analysis.

After conducting your interviews and transcribing your data, you can then conduct thematic analysis, coding responses into different categories. Since you began your research with several theories about campus veganism that you found equally compelling, you would use the inductive approach.

Once you’ve identified themes and patterns from your data, you can draw inferences and conclusions. Your results section usually addresses each theme or pattern you found, describing each in turn, as well as how often you came across them in your analysis. Feel free to include lots of (properly anonymised) examples from the data as evidence, too.

A semi-structured interview is a blend of structured and unstructured types of interviews. Semi-structured interviews are best used when:

• You have prior interview experience. Spontaneous questions are deceptively challenging, and it’s easy to accidentally ask a leading question or make a participant uncomfortable.

The four most common types of interviews are:

• Semi-structured interviews : A few questions are predetermined, but other questions aren’t planned.

The interviewer effect is a type of bias that emerges when a characteristic of an interviewer (race, age, gender identity, etc.) influences the responses given by the interviewee.

There is a risk of an interviewer effect in all types of interviews , but it can be mitigated by writing really high-quality interview questions.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

George, T. (2022, August 30). Semi-Structured Interview | Definition, Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 6 May 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/research-methods/semi-structured-interviews/

Is this article helpful?

Tegan George

Other students also liked, types of interviews in research | guide & examples, structured interview | definition, guide & examples, qualitative vs quantitative research | examples & methods.

Log in using your username and password

• Search More Search for this keyword Advanced search
• Latest content
• Call for Papers
• BMJ Journals More You are viewing from: Google Indexer

You are here

• Volume 7, Issue 2
• Semistructured interviewing in primary care research: a balance of relationship and rigour
• Article Text
• Article info
• Citation Tools
• Rapid Responses
• Article metrics

• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2660-3358 Melissa DeJonckheere 1 and
• Lisa M Vaughn 2 , 3
• 1 Department of Family Medicine , University of Michigan , Ann Arbor , Michigan , USA
• 2 Department of Pediatrics , University of Cincinnati College of Medicine , Cincinnati , Ohio , USA
• 3 Division of Emergency Medicine , Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center , Cincinnati , Ohio , USA
• Correspondence to Dr Melissa DeJonckheere; mdejonck{at}med.umich.edu

Semistructured in-depth interviews are commonly used in qualitative research and are the most frequent qualitative data source in health services research. This method typically consists of a dialogue between researcher and participant, guided by a flexible interview protocol and supplemented by follow-up questions, probes and comments. The method allows the researcher to collect open-ended data, to explore participant thoughts, feelings and beliefs about a particular topic and to delve deeply into personal and sometimes sensitive issues. The purpose of this article was to identify and describe the essential skills to designing and conducting semistructured interviews in family medicine and primary care research settings. We reviewed the literature on semistructured interviewing to identify key skills and components for using this method in family medicine and primary care research settings. Overall, semistructured interviewing requires both a relational focus and practice in the skills of facilitation. Skills include: (1) determining the purpose and scope of the study; (2) identifying participants; (3) considering ethical issues; (4) planning logistical aspects; (5) developing the interview guide; (6) establishing trust and rapport; (7) conducting the interview; (8) memoing and reflection; (9) analysing the data; (10) demonstrating the trustworthiness of the research; and (11) presenting findings in a paper or report. Semistructured interviews provide an effective and feasible research method for family physicians to conduct in primary care research settings. Researchers using semistructured interviews for data collection should take on a relational focus and consider the skills of interviewing to ensure quality. Semistructured interviewing can be a powerful tool for family physicians, primary care providers and other health services researchers to use to understand the thoughts, beliefs and experiences of individuals. Despite the utility, semistructured interviews can be intimidating and challenging for researchers not familiar with qualitative approaches. In order to elucidate this method, we provide practical guidance for researchers, including novice researchers and those with few resources, to use semistructured interviewing as a data collection strategy. We provide recommendations for the essential steps to follow in order to best implement semistructured interviews in family medicine and primary care research settings.

• qualitative research

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0

https://doi.org/10.1136/fmch-2018-000057

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request permissions.

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Introduction

Semistructured interviews can be used by family medicine researchers in clinical settings or academic settings even with few resources. In contrast to large-scale epidemiological studies, or even surveys, a family medicine researcher can conduct a highly meaningful project with interviews with as few as 8–12 participants. For example, Chang and her colleagues, all family physicians, conducted semistructured interviews with 10 providers to understand their perspectives on weight gain in pregnant patients. 1 The interviewers asked questions about providers’ overall perceptions on weight gain, their clinical approach to weight gain during pregnancy and challenges when managing weight gain among pregnant patients. Additional examples conducted by or with family physicians or in primary care settings are summarised in table 1 . 1–6

• View inline

Examples of research articles using semistructured interviews in primary care research

From our perspective as seasoned qualitative researchers, conducting effective semistructured interviews requires: (1) a relational focus, including active engagement and curiosity, and (2) practice in the skills of interviewing. First, a relational focus emphasises the unique relationship between interviewer and interviewee. To obtain quality data, interviews should not be conducted with a transactional question-answer approach but rather should be unfolding, iterative interactions between the interviewer and interviewee. Second, interview skills can be learnt. Some of us will naturally be more comfortable and skilful at conducting interviews but all aspects of interviews are learnable and through practice and feedback will improve. Throughout this article, we highlight strategies to balance relationship and rigour when conducting semistructured interviews in primary care and the healthcare setting.

Qualitative research interviews are ‘attempts to understand the world from the subjects’ point of view, to unfold the meaning of peoples’ experiences, to uncover their lived world prior to scientific explanations’ (p 1). 7 Qualitative research interviews unfold as an interviewer asks questions of the interviewee in order to gather subjective information about a particular topic or experience. Though the definitions and purposes of qualitative research interviews vary slightly in the literature, there is common emphasis on the experiences of interviewees and the ways in which the interviewee perceives the world (see table 2 for summary of definitions from seminal texts).

Definitions of qualitative interviews

The most common type of interview used in qualitative research and the healthcare context is semistructured interview. 8 Figure 1 highlights the key features of this data collection method, which is guided by a list of topics or questions with follow-up questions, probes and comments. Typically, the sequencing and wording of the questions are modified by the interviewer to best fit the interviewee and interview context. Semistructured interviews can be conducted in multiple ways (ie, face to face, telephone, text/email, individual, group, brief, in-depth), each of which have advantages and disadvantages. We will focus on the most common form of semistructured interviews within qualitative research—individual, face-to-face, in-depth interviews.

• Download figure
• Open in new tab
• Download powerpoint

Key characteristics of semistructured interviews.

Purpose of semistructured interviews

The overall purpose of using semistructured interviews for data collection is to gather information from key informants who have personal experiences, attitudes, perceptions and beliefs related to the topic of interest. Researchers can use semistructured interviews to collect new, exploratory data related to a research topic, triangulate other data sources or validate findings through member checking (respondent feedback about research results). 9 If using a mixed methods approach, semistructured interviews can also be used in a qualitative phase to explore new concepts to generate hypotheses or explain results from a quantitative phase that tests hypotheses. Semistructured interviews are an effective method for data collection when the researcher wants: (1) to collect qualitative, open-ended data; (2) to explore participant thoughts, feelings and beliefs about a particular topic; and (3) to delve deeply into personal and sometimes sensitive issues.

Designing and conducting semistructured interviews

In the following section, we provide recommendations for the steps required to carefully design and conduct semistructured interviews with emphasis on applications in family medicine and primary care research (see table 3 ).

Steps to designing and conducting semistructured interviews

Steps for designing and conducting semistructured interviews

Step 1: determining the purpose and scope of the study.

The purpose of the study is the primary objective of your project and may be based on an anecdotal experience, a review of the literature or previous research finding. The purpose is developed in response to an identified gap or problem that needs to be addressed.

Research questions are the driving force of a study because they are associated with every other aspect of the design. They should be succinct and clearly indicate that you are using a qualitative approach. Qualitative research questions typically start with ‘What’, ‘How’ or ‘Why’ and focus on the exploration of a single concept based on participant perspectives. 10

Step 2: identifying participants

After deciding on the purpose of the study and research question(s), the next step is to determine who will provide the best information to answer the research question. Good interviewees are those who are available, willing to be interviewed and have lived experiences and knowledge about the topic of interest. 11 12 Working with gatekeepers or informants to get access to potential participants can be extremely helpful as they are trusted sources that control access to the target sample.

Sampling strategies are influenced by the research question and the purpose of the study. Unlike quantitative studies, statistical representativeness is not the goal of qualitative research. There is no calculation of statistical power and the goal is not a large sample size. Instead, qualitative approaches seek an in-depth and detailed understanding and typically use purposeful sampling. See the study of Hatch for a summary of various types of purposeful sampling that can be used for interview studies. 12

‘How many participants are needed?’ The most common answer is, ‘it depends’—it depends on the purpose of the study, what kind of study is planned and what questions the study is trying to answer. 12–14 One common standard in qualitative sample sizes is reaching thematic saturation, which refers to the point at which no new thematic information is gathered from participants. Malterud and colleagues discuss the concept of information power , or a qualitative equivalent to statistical power, to determine how many interviews should be collected in a study. They suggest that the size of a sample should depend on the aim, homogeneity of the sample, theory, interview quality and analytic strategy. 14

Step 3: considering ethical issues

An ethical attitude should be present from the very beginning of the research project even before you decide who to interview. 15 This ethical attitude should incorporate respect, sensitivity and tact towards participants throughout the research process. Because semistructured interviewing often requires the participant to reveal sensitive and personal information directly to the interviewer, it is important to consider the power imbalance between the researcher and the participant. In healthcare settings, the interviewer or researcher may be a part of the patient’s healthcare team or have contact with the healthcare team. The researchers should ensure the interviewee that their participation and answers will not influence the care they receive or their relationship with their providers. Other issues to consider include: reducing the risk of harm; protecting the interviewee’s information; adequately informing interviewees about the study purpose and format; and reducing the risk of exploitation. 10

Step 4: planning logistical aspects

Careful planning particularly around the technical aspects of interviews can be the difference between a great interview and a not so great interview. During the preparation phase, the researcher will need to plan and make decisions about the best ways to contact potential interviewees, obtain informed consent, arrange interview times and locations convenient for both participant and researcher, and test recording equipment. Although many experienced researchers have found themselves conducting interviews in less than ideal locations, the interview location should avoid (or at least minimise) interruptions and be appropriate for the interview (quiet, private and able to get a clear recording). 16 For some research projects, the participants’ homes may make sense as the best interview location. 16

Initial contacts can be made through telephone or email and followed up with more details so the individual can make an informed decision about whether they wish to be interviewed. Potential participants should know what to expect in terms of length of time, purpose of the study, why they have been selected and who will be there. In addition, participants should be informed that they can refuse to answer questions or can withdraw from the study at any time, including during the interview itself.

Audio recording the interview is recommended so that the interviewer can concentrate on the interview and build rapport rather than being distracted with extensive note taking 16 (see table 4 for audio-recording tips). Participants should be informed that audio recording is used for data collection and that they can refuse to be audio recorded should they prefer.

Suggestions for successful audio recording of interviews

Most researchers will want to have interviews transcribed verbatim from the audio recording. This allows you to refer to the exact words of participants during the analysis. Although it is possible to conduct analyses from the audio recordings themselves or from notes, it is not ideal. However, transcription can be extremely time consuming and, if not done yourself, can be costly.

In the planning phase of research, you will want to consider whether qualitative research software (eg, NVivo, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, Dedoose, and so on) will be used to assist with organising, managing and analysis. While these tools are helpful in the management of qualitative data, it is important to consider your research budget, the cost of the software and the learning curve associated with using a new system.

Step 5: developing the interview guide

Semistructured interviews include a short list of ‘guiding’ questions that are supplemented by follow-up and probing questions that are dependent on the interviewee’s responses. 8 17 All questions should be open ended, neutral, clear and avoid leading language. In addition, questions should use familiar language and avoid jargon.

Most interviews will start with an easy, context-setting question before moving to more difficult or in-depth questions. 17 Table 5 gives details of the types of guiding questions including ‘grand tour’ questions, 18 core questions and planned and unplanned follow-up questions.

Questions and prompts in semistructured interviewing

To illustrate, online supplementary appendix A presents a sample interview guide from our study of weight gain during pregnancy among young women. We start with the prompt, ‘Tell me about how your pregnancy has been so far’ to initiate conversation about their thoughts and feelings during pregnancy. The subsequent questions will elicit responses to help answer our research question about young women’s perspectives related to weight gain during pregnancy.

Supplemental material

After developing the guiding questions, it is important to pilot test the interview. Having a good sense of the guide helps you to pace the interview (and not run out of time), use a conversational tone and make necessary adjustments to the questions.

Like all qualitative research, interviewing is iterative in nature—data collection and analysis occur simultaneously, which may result in changes to the guiding questions as the study progresses. Questions that are not effective may be replaced with other questions and additional probes can be added to explore new topics that are introduced by participants in previous interviews. 10

Step 6: establishing trust and rapport

Interviews are a special form of relationship, where the interviewer and interviewee converse about important and often personal topics. The interviewer must build rapport quickly by listening attentively and respectfully to the information shared by the interviewee. 19 As the interview progresses, the interviewer must continue to demonstrate respect, encourage the interviewee to share their perspectives and acknowledge the sensitive nature of the conversation. 20

To establish rapport, it is important to be authentic and open to the interviewee’s point of view. It is possible that the participants you recruit for your study will have preconceived notions about research, which may include mistrust. As a result, it is important to describe why you are conducting the research and how their participation is meaningful. In an interview relationship, the interviewee is the expert and should be treated as such—you are relying on the interviewee to enhance your understanding and add to your research. Small behaviours that can enhance rapport include: dressing professionally but not overly formal; avoiding jargon or slang; and using a normal conversational tone. Because interviewees will be discussing their experience, having some awareness of contextual or cultural factors that may influence their perspectives may be helpful as background knowledge.

Step 7: conducting the interview

Location and set-up.

The interview should have already been scheduled at a convenient time and location for the interviewee. The location should be private, ideally with a closed door, rather than a public place. It is helpful if there is a room where you can speak privately without interruption, and where it is quiet enough to hear and audio record the interview. Within the interview space, Josselson 15 suggests an arrangement with a comfortable distance between the interviewer and interviewee with a low table in between for the recorder and any materials (consent forms, questionnaires, water, and so on).

Beginning the interview

Many interviewers start with chatting to break the ice and attempt to establish commonalities, rapport and trust. Most interviews will need to begin with a brief explanation of the research study, consent/assent procedures, rationale for talking to that particular interviewee and description of the interview format and agenda. 11 It can also be helpful if the interviewer shares a little about who they are and why they are interested in the topic. The recording equipment should have already been tested thoroughly but interviewers may want to double-check that the audio equipment is working and remind participants about the reason for recording.

Interviewer stance

During the interview, the interviewer should adopt a friendly and non-judgemental attitude. You will want to maintain a warm and conversational tone, rather than a rote, question-answer approach. It is important to recognise the potential power differential as a researcher. Conveying a sense of being in the interview together and that you as the interviewer are a person just like the interviewee can help ease any discomfort. 15

Active listening

During a face-to-face interview, there is an opportunity to observe social and non-verbal cues of the interviewee. These cues may come in the form of voice, body language, gestures and intonation, and can supplement the interviewee’s verbal response and can give clues to the interviewer about the process of the interview. 21 Listening is the key to successful interviewing. 22 Listening should be ‘attentive, empathic, nonjudgmental, listening in order to invite, and engender talk’ 15 15 (p 66). Silence, nods, smiles and utterances can also encourage further elaboration from the interviewee.

Continuing the interview

As the interview progresses, the interviewer can repeat the words used by the interviewee, use planned and unplanned follow-up questions that invite further clarification, exploration or elaboration. As DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree 10 explain: ‘Throughout the interview, the goal of the interviewer is to encourage the interviewee to share as much information as possible, unselfconsciously and in his or her own words’ (p 317). Some interviewees are more forthcoming and will offer many details of their experiences without much probing required. Others will require prompting and follow-up to elicit sufficient detail.

As a result, follow-up questions are equally important to the core questions in a semistructured interview. Prompts encourage people to continue talking and they can elicit more details needed to understand the topic. Examples of verbal probes are repeating the participant’s words, summarising the main idea or expressing interest with verbal agreement. 8 11 See table 6 for probing techniques and example probes we have used in our own interviewing.

Probing techniques for semistructured interviews (modified from Bernard 30 )

Step 8: memoing and reflection

After an interview, it is essential for the interviewer to begin to reflect on both the process and the content of the interview. During the actual interview, it can be difficult to take notes or begin reflecting. Even if you think you will remember a particular moment, you likely will not be able to recall each moment with sufficient detail. Therefore, interviewers should always record memos —notes about what you are learning from the data. 23 24 There are different approaches to recording memos: you can reflect on several specific ideas, or create a running list of thoughts. Memos are also useful for improving the quality of subsequent interviews.

Step 9: analysing the data

The data analysis strategy should also be developed during planning stages because analysis occurs concurrently with data collection. 25 The researcher will take notes, modify the data collection procedures and write reflective memos throughout the data collection process. This begins the process of data analysis.

The data analysis strategy used in your study will depend on your research question and qualitative design—see the study of Creswell for an overview of major qualitative approaches. 26 The general process for analysing and interpreting most interviews involves reviewing the data (in the form of transcripts, audio recordings or detailed notes), applying descriptive codes to the data and condensing and categorising codes to look for patterns. 24 27 These patterns can exist within a single interview or across multiple interviews depending on the research question and design. Qualitative computer software programs can be used to help organise and manage interview data.

Step 10: demonstrating the trustworthiness of the research

Similar to validity and reliability, qualitative research can be assessed on trustworthiness. 9 28 There are several criteria used to establish trustworthiness: credibility (whether the findings accurately and fairly represent the data), transferability (whether the findings can be applied to other settings and contexts), confirmability (whether the findings are biased by the researcher) and dependability (whether the findings are consistent and sustainable over time).

Step 11: presenting findings in a paper or report

When presenting the results of interview analysis, researchers will often report themes or narratives that describe the broad range of experiences evidenced in the data. This involves providing an in-depth description of participant perspectives and being sure to include multiple perspectives. 12 In interview research, the participant words are your data. Presenting findings in a report requires the integration of quotes into a more traditional written format.

Conclusions

Though semistructured interviews are often an effective way to collect open-ended data, there are some disadvantages as well. One common problem with interviewing is that not all interviewees make great participants. 12 29 Some individuals are hard to engage in conversation or may be reluctant to share about sensitive or personal topics. Difficulty interviewing some participants can affect experienced and novice interviewers. Some common problems include not doing a good job of probing or asking for follow-up questions, failure to actively listen, not having a well-developed interview guide with open-ended questions and asking questions in an insensitive way. Outside of pitfalls during the actual interview, other problems with semistructured interviewing may be underestimating the resources required to recruit participants, interview, transcribe and analyse the data.

Despite their limitations, semistructured interviews can be a productive way to collect open-ended data from participants. In our research, we have interviewed children and adolescents about their stress experiences and coping behaviours, young women about their thoughts and behaviours during pregnancy, practitioners about the care they provide to patients and countless other key informants about health-related topics. Because the intent is to understand participant experiences, the possible research topics are endless.

Due to the close relationships family physicians have with their patients, the unique settings in which they work, and in their advocacy, semistructured interviews are an attractive approach for family medicine researchers, even if working in a setting with limited research resources. When seeking to balance both the relational focus of interviewing and the necessary rigour of research, we recommend: prioritising listening over talking; using clear language and avoiding jargon; and deeply engaging in the interview process by actively listening, expressing empathy, demonstrating openness to the participant’s worldview and thanking the participant for helping you to understand their experience.

Further Reading

Edwards R, & Holland J. (2013). What is qualitative interviewing?: A&C Black.

Josselson R. Interviewing for qualitative inquiry: A relational approach. Guilford Press, 2013.

Kvale S. InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. SAGE, London, 1996.

Pope C, & Mays N. (Eds). (2006). Qualitative research in health care.

• Gold KJ , et al
• Croxson CH ,
• Ashdown HF ,
• DeJonckheere M ,
• Robinson CH ,
• Evans L , et al
• Griffiths F ,
• Boardman F , et al
• Takemura Y ,
• Nishiue T , et al
• Schoenborn NL ,
• Pollack CE , et al
• Pietilä A-M ,
• Johnson M , et al
• Lincoln YS ,
• DiCicco-Bloom B ,
• Crabtree BF
• Malterud K ,
• Siersma VD ,
• Guassora AD
• Josselson R
• Edwards R ,
• Spradley JP
• Opdenakker R
• Anderson K ,
• Huberman AM
• Huberman AM ,
• Creswell JW
• Damschroder L

Contributors Both authors contributed equally to this work.

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests None declared.

Patient consent for publication Not required.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

Read the full text or download the PDF: