Chapter 11: Introduction to Interviewing Techniques
Prepared for the Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division,
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
by James K. Doyle
Associate Professor
Department of Social Science and Policy Studies
Introduction
When researchers new to a subject area come across an important question that they don't know the answer to, their first reaction is often to interview people who (hopefully) do know the answers. Since these interviews seem like the everyday conversations that we are all familiar with, they are often conducted in a casual manner with little advance preparation. The results of such casual efforts, however, are almost always disappointing.
What these researchers fail to realize is that a research interview -- an interview that can provide reliable evidence to answer a research question or to help solve a social problem and that can be defended against skeptical critics -- bears little resemblance to an ordinary conversation. In fact, some of the best techniques for conducting valid, reliable interviews directly violate the conventions of everyday conversation. For example, in ordinary conversation it is considered impolite to remain silent after someone has finished speaking, yet an interviewer must at times do exactly this in order to encourage participants to elaborate on what they are saying. Also, in some interviews protocol requires the interviewer to ask questions that participants have already answered, which almost never happens outside of interview studies due to social norms that dictate that conversations should not be repetitive.
Because research interviews require the use of skills - for example, careful listening, noting nonverbal cues, monitoring the progress of a conversation while participating in it and taking notes - that aren't typically acquired from our experience with everyday conversations, they require careful planning and preparation. To conduct interviews that are useful for research purposes, researchers must, among other things, develop as much expertise in relevant topic areas as possible so that they can ask informed questions; consider very carefully such questions as who to interview, how many people to interview, what type of interview to conduct, and how the interview data will be analyzed; and learn established techniques for ensuring that the interview data are unbiased (even seemingly subtle factors like the interviewer's mood, personality, dress, and manner can alter participants' responses and bias the data!).
The aim of this paper is to introduce you to what social scientists know about how to design, implement, and analyze an interview study and to explain how these techniques can improve the quality and utility of IQPs that employ interviews as either the main focus of the project or as a complement to other methods of data collection or analysis. As is appropriate for an introductory monograph that is intended to be portable and therefore relatively brief, the scope is limited and only three main interviewing techniques -- in-depth qualitative interviews, focus groups, and standardized interviews -- out of a wide variety of available alternatives are discussed. It is therefore recommended that students use this paper as a starting point to a more detailed exploration of the literature on interviewing techniques. Suggestions for where to begin this process are included in Section IX.
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