Aims of the book

Interview research is a craft, which is learned through practising interviewing. This book prepares for learning interviewing in practice; it addresses hands-on issues of how to carry out an interview inquiry, from its inception to the final report, providing examples and guidelines along the way. Furthermore, it provides conceptual frames for understanding research interviewing and addresses epistemological and ethical issues raised by qualitative interview research.

A qualitative research interview attempts to understand the world from the subjects’ points of view, to unfold the meaning of peoples’ experiences, to uncover their lived world prior to scientific explanations. This book seeks to lay out the richness and the scope of qualitative interviews in social science research. There will be an emphasis on the pragmatic use-value of interview-produced knowledge and on the ethical issues that are raised by using interview conversations for research purposes.

The interview is a specific form of conversation where knowledge is produced through the interaction between an interviewer and an interviewee. Different types of research interviews are described in addition to the phenomenological life-world interview, such as narrative interviews, factual interviews, focus group interviews and confrontational interviews. The live interview conversation is one stage of a larger research process. An interview inquiry includes pre-interview stages of thematic clarification of the research topic and the designing of the research project. Furthermore, there are the post-interview stages of transcription, analysis, verification and reporting of the interview findings. In this book we follow the interview journey from beginning to end.

[Page xviii]Epistemological issues of using conversations for research purposes will be treated in relation to traditional and newer conceptions of knowledge. Throughout the book it will be pointed out how many of the practical issues to be decided throughout an interview inquiry are embedded in epistemological presuppositions and have ethical consequences. Such concerns range from the validity of leading questions to ethical concerns of interviewing about private issues for public reading.

Structure of the book

We believe that the craft of interviewing is best learned by practising interviewing and not by reading a book. However, accumulated experiences from research interviewing may be presented in a book form, with examples from interviews and with suggested guidelines as condensed summaries from interview practice. In this book we pass on experiences gained from interview practice and guidelines drawn out from these experiences – our own, our students’ and those of others reported in the interview literature. In lieu of actual practice with interviewing, examples are given from interviews to introduce some of the many practical and conceptual issues raised by using conversations for research purposes. The chapters will take issue with the apparently mystical skills of the interview craft, break them down into discrete steps, give examples, and point out the technical, conceptual and ethical issues involved.

The first chapter gives some examples from research interviews and provides a brief historical overview of the use of research interviews. The next two chapters address epistemological and ethical issues raised by using conversations for research purposes. The following chapters are more practical and take the reader through seven stages of an interview investigation – starting with the pre-interview stages of thematizing the research topic and formulating the purpose of the study, and thereafter the designing of the entire interview investigation. The interview situation is dealt with in three chapters on how to conduct a semi-structured life-world interview, on varieties of interview types and on interview quality. Thereafter the post-interview stages of transcribing, analyzing, validation and generalization, and reporting are treated.

Focus of the book

The main focus in this book will be on interviewing as such, and the pre- and post-interviewing stages are primarily treated with respect to implications for the interview situation. Throughout the book the interrelatedness of the different stages of an [Page xix]interview inquiry is emphasized. We repeatedly point out how decisions at one stage of an interview investigation open or close options at other stages; the researcher is thus recommended to have the entire research process in mind during the different stages of the interview journey.

In the following chapters we shall attempt to steer between the Scylla of rigid objective structures in an all-method approach and the Charybdis of free subjective spontaneity in a no-method approach, by focusing on the expertise, skills and craftsmanship of the interviewer. Interviewing is a craft to be learned through practising interviewing, ideally through apprenticeship within a community of practice with experienced interview researchers. The learning goal of the book is to prepare the reader for learning research interviewing by exercising interviewing, and to provide conceptual frameworks for reflecting upon interview practice and the knowledge it produces. After reading the book, students should be conceptually prepared to address questions about their interview study such as:

• How to conceive of epistemological issues of interview research (Chapter 2).
• How to address ethical issues of interviewing (Chapter 3).
• How to design an interview study (Chapter 4).
• How to plan and carry out a research interview (Chapter 5).
• How to choose among the varieties of interview types (Chapter 6).
• How to evaluate the quality of an interview (Chapter 7).
• How to transcribe an interview (Chapter 8).
• How to analyze an interview (Chapter 9).
• How to verify interview knowledge (Chapter 10).
• How to report an interview (Chapter 11).

Exercise for starting to learn interviewing

Readers who want to learn interviewing the way a craft is learned, should stop reading the book now, or at the latest after the first three introductory conceptual chapters, and perform the following task:

After this hands-on experience learners may start reading the practical how-to-do suggestions of this book. Most likely, they will then discover that through their own practice they have already learned much of what is written on the following pages. [Page xx]Some of the expected learning lessons are listed in Box 12.1, ‘Learning interviewing by transcribing interviews’, in the final chapter of this book.

Readers who choose to continue reading the book without doing the transcription exercise are strongly recommended to practice interviewing in pilot studies, and ideally through apprenticeship learning in interview projects of experienced researchers, before embarking on a full-size interview project of their own.