Skip to Main Content
Steps in Designing an Interview
- Design interview questions
- Consider who will be interviewed
- Consider the kind of information you want from the interviews
- Consider why you want to get in-depth information on your research topic
- Make sure your questions are clear and understandable
- Do not ask leading questions
- Develop an interview guide
- Introduce the interviewer and the goals of the interview
- Create an order for the questions grouped by themes
- Make sure one can easily move between questions
- Plan logistics
- How will you train your interviewer to control the quality?
- Do you want a second interviewer?
- Do you want a notetaker?
- Do you want to record the interviews? If so, do you have time to transcribe the recordings?
- Where will the interview occur?
- How long will each interview take?
- How will you address terms of confidentiality?
Interview Resources
Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond by Anne Galletta; William E. Cross (Foreword by)
Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond offers an in-depth and captivating step-by-step guide to the use of semi-structured interviews in qualitative research. By tracing the life of an actual research project-an exploration of a school district's effort over 40 years to address racial equality-as a consistent example threaded across the volume, Anne Galletta shows in concrete terms how readers can approach the planning and execution of their own new research endeavor, and illuminates unexpected real-life challenges they may confront and how to address them. The volume offers a close look at the inductive nature of qualitative research, the use of researcher reflexivity, and the systematic and iterative steps involved in data collection, analysis, and interpretation. It offers guidance on how to develop an interview protocol, including the arrangement of questions and ways to evoke analytically rich data. Particularly useful for those who may be familiar with qualitative research but have not yet conducted a qualitative study, Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond will serve both undergraduate and graduate students as well as more advanced scholars seeking to incorporate this key methodological approach into their repertoire.
Call Number: eBook
Pub. date: 2013
Qualitative Interviewing by Svend Brinkmann
Qualitative interviewing has become one of the most common research methods across the human and social sciences, if not the most prevalent approach. Qualitative Interviewing, Second Edition help readers conduct, write, represent, understand, and critique qualitative interview research in its many forms as currently practiced. It discusses excellent exemplars of qualitative interview research.The book begins with a theoretically informed introduction to qualitative interviewing by presenting a variegated landscape of how conversations have been used for knowledge producing purposes. Particular attention is given to the complementary positions of experience focused interviewing (phenomenological positions) and language focused interviewing (discourse oriented positions), which concentrate on interview talk as reports (of the experiences of interviewees) and accounts (occasioned by the situation of interviewing) respectively. The second edition has a new chapter on conducting interviews in practice and is updated with new sections on research ethics and the relevance of small-scale studies in a world of "big data", many updated references, recent examples of interview studies, and reflections on similarities and differences between research interviews, journalism, and the arts.
Call Number: eBook
Pub. date: 2022
Research Interviewing by Bill Gillham
* The most comprehensive book available on methods in research interviewing! * What is research interviewing? * What techniques are used? Exactly what do you do in each technique? * How is interview data analysed and written up? The robust, real-world approach makes this book appropriate for practitioner researchers and postgraduate students up to PhD level. Covers distance and face-to-face interviewing, from the un-structured and naturalistic to the highly structured, focused and time-efficient. Emphasis is placed on using the most appropriate methods for the research purpose and how to identify which method is practicable. Based on over thirty years of teaching and supervising research and postgraduate students, the author anticipates questions and difficulties at a level of practical detail. Practical and easy to use, this book is essential for anyone doing research interviewing.
Call Number: eBook
Pub. date: 2005
The Science and Art of Interviewing by Kathleen Gerson; Sarah Damaske
Qualitative interviewing is among the most widely used methods in the social sciences, but it is arguably the least understood. In The Science and Art of Interviewing, Kathleen Gerson and Sarah Damaske offer clear, theoretically informed and empirically rich strategies for conducting interview studies. They present both a rationale and guide to the science-and art-of in-depth interviewing to take readers through all the steps in the research process, from the initial stage of formulating a question to the final one of presenting the results. Gerson and Damaske show readers how to develop a research design for interviewing, decide on and find an appropriate sample, construct a questionnaire, conduct probing interviews, and analyze the data they collect. At each stage, they also provide practical tips about how to address the ever-present, but rarely discussed challenges that qualitative researchers routinely encounter, particularly emphasizing the relationship between conducting well-crafted research and building powerful social theories. With an engaging, accessible style, The Science and Art of Interviewing targets a wide range of audiences, from upper-level undergraduates and graduate methods courses to students embarking on their dissertations to seasoned researchers at all stages of their careers.
Call Number: eBook
Pub. date: 2020
