Interviewing

Interviewing is a commonly used research method throughout the social sciences. Approaches vary, with some types of interviews conducted in an informal and open-ended manner and other types of interviews designed to be much more strictly structured and controlled. Regardless of the approach, interviews by definition always involve one person asking questions of another. The researchers (or staff members working for the researcher) seek information through conversation with their research participants. Although political scientists often use interviews to collect information about their topics, interviewing methods have been developed primarily within other disciplines—including anthropology, sociology, and journalism. Political scientists have taken these methods and adapted them to their own purposes. This entry provides an overview of the types of interviews most commonly used in political science and reviews some of the most important methodological issues associated with interviews as data sources for political scientists.

In the early 20th century, the study of political science was restricted mainly to the library, with analysis of legal rulings and of the structures of government that the primary methods used. The shift to a behavioral approach to politics—looking at what actually happens in government rather than simply what the laws say should happen—meant that political scientists would need to observe and collect information about the activities of government officials and the interactions of government officials and the public. Interviewing was one of the first ways in which this new information was collected, and in the 1920s, political scientists like Pendleton Herring and Elmer Eric [Page 1338]Schattschneider began conducting fieldwork in Washington, D.C., interviewing government officials and representatives from groups and businesses to be able to better describe the workings of government and how it interacted with organized interests. Today, interviewing remains a common data collection technique, especially for scholars who study political elites.

Types of Interviews There are several styles of interviewing, each appropriate for different informational needs. These styles exist along a continuum: At one end are interviewing techniques that use extremely directed, closed-ended questions, such as those in a survey, and at the other are interpretive techniques in which questions are extremely open-ended and subject to change depending on the guidance of those being interviewed.

When researchers do not know very much about the topic at hand, or when they want to capture an insider perspective on the topic, they often turn to an ethnographic style of interviewing. This approach, borrowed from anthropology, involves long interviews in which the interview subject (sometimes referred to as the interview consultant) helps direct the interviewer. The questions are open-ended. Rather than requiring the respondent to select an answer from a list written ahead of time and requiring the respondent to limit the answer to those options, an open-ended question may be answered in whatever way the respondent chooses. This often provides the researcher with an opportunity to learn about previously unknown aspects of a topic. The interview consultant is treated as the expert, as the guide, in this process. The goal of the interviewer is to guide the interview subject as little as possible, so as to elicit the unbiased views of the interview subject. Such unstructured interviewing techniques are often combined with participant observation, in which interviewers spend time in, and among those they wish to, study. Ethnographic interviews such as these often provide new and unexpected insights, but as a result of how open they are to new directions, they have a tendency to drift away from the researcher's original topic. Thus, they are not the best way to measure concepts reliably across multiple respondents or across multiple field settings, as each interview will be unique. This unique insight is both the advantage and the disadvantage of this type of interviewing.

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