Interviews, Recording and Transcribing

Interviewing

Interviewing as a social-scientific research method is a process whereby researchers gain information and/or co-construct a view of something through interactions with participants. These guided conversations allow researchers to elicit participants’ experiences, perceptions, and narratives in their own words. Interviews may occur between one researcher and one participant, one researcher and several participants, or more than one researcher and one or more participants. Regardless of the configuration, interviews are typically designed to obtain information that cannot be accessed through other research methods (i.e., their thoughts and language use about some social phenomena, or social behavior that would be difficult or impossible to observe).

Interviewing is typically approached from one of two frameworks. The most traditional approach is to conceptualize the interviewing process as a means for obtaining data directly from the participants. In this approach, researchers develop a structured interview guide that asks the “right” questions pertaining to the desired information. The interviewer tries not to bias the participants’ answers by remaining open and neutral throughout the interview. This approach to interviewing views the interview as a space outside of “reality” where the participants report on their experiences and perceptions of the real world. A second approach to interviewing views the process as a [Page 801]joint conversation between the researcher and participant where they are both active in the production of meaning. This approach gives significance to both the substance of conversation as well as the potential influence of outside contextual factors (e.g., where the conversation is held, personal attributes of the interviewer or interviewee).

Researchers conduct interviews for a variety of purposes. First, interviews are often used to understand a particular experience or perspective by having participants tell their stories and/or offer their accounts or explanations for their behaviors. Second, researchers might want to understand how participants talk about a phenomenon in a way that transparently illuminates their communicative style (i.e., the language they use to describe something). Third, researchers cannot always get access to certain events (e.g., private moments between spouses or organizational meetings between coworkers) or events may have already transpired, and they use interviews to ask about the details of those experiences. Finally, researchers might use interviews to confirm and/or expand upon information gathered through other means, such as surveys or observational research conducted in a lab setting or during fieldwork.

Interviews range from formal/structured to informal/unstructured. Formal/structured interviews involve the researcher developing a set of questions (i.e., an interview protocol) that is followed exactly with each subsequent interview. The order and delivery of questions remains stable across data collection. Informal/unstructured interviews are very flexible; the researcher’s questions evolve from the participant’s responses. This type of interview is often used for ethnographic studies and participant observation research. In between these two extremes is the semi-structured interview, which involves developing an interview guide, or set of talking points, that may be adapted during the conversation. The latter two types of interviews are designed to spark discussion between the interviewer and interviewee whereas highly structured interviews are akin to oral surveys where the researcher asks predetermined questions to participants.

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