Interview as a Research Tool

Interviewing is an age-old technique, for people have long asked questions to find out information. As Andrea Fontana and James H. Frey noted in 1994, population censuses in ancient Egypt, followed more recently by clinical analyses and by World War I psychological evaluations, employed interviewing techniques. Opinion polls have long relied on interview responses, and today interviewing is a common research tool in public relations, marketing, therapy, and academic inquiry. Further, although interviewing is used in quantitative research (e.g., survey interviews), it is more common as a qualitative technique.

According to Thomas R. Lindlof (1995),

Interviews may take place in dyads or groups and can be conducted in person, over the telephone, or more recently, on the Internet. Most often, interviews are conducted in face-to-face, individual sessions. They can be very brief or quite lengthy, sometimes including multiple meetings. Typically, interviews are conducted based on an interview schedule or guide—a list of planned questions.

Various types of interviews are used in research. Three of these are structured, semistructured, and unstructured. In structured interviews, the interviewer adheres to the interview guide, typically asking the same questions in the same order of all interviewees. These interviews may have predetermined response categories into which answers are recorded; however, practices vary. In semistructured formats, the interviewer has specific questions to ask but is free to vary the order and use probes to elicit more information. In unstructured (sometimes labeled depth or in-depth) interviews, broad, openended questions are employed to understand the interviewee's views and behaviors; there are no predetermined response categories, and questions and probes can take various directions.

Interviewing has both strengths and weaknesses as a research tool. The strengths include comprehensive questions, probing for additional information, flexibility in dealing with interviewees, rich data, and unanticipated information. The weaknesses include time required (in collecting, transcribing, and analyzing data), potential interviewer influence on responses, answers containing unimportant information, and low anonymity. Although interviews may reduce error because interviewees can speak in their own words and not select answers from predetermined categories, the potential for bias still exists (e.g., interpreting responses). Thus, trained interviewers and careful analysis are required.