Interviewing in Qualitative Research

INTERVIEWING is one of the most frequently used research methods in the social sciences, used in both quantitative SURVEY research and in QUALITATIVE RESEARCH. Qualitative interviewing involves a special kind of conversation, one in which an interviewer (or more than one) asks questions of a respondent or subject (or more than one), on a particular topic or topics, and carefully listens to and records the answers. Some interviews take place over the telephone, and some in person; some are videotaped, whereas most are audiotaped and then transcribed. This discussion of the qualitative interview is based on what is probably the most common form: a single interviewer interviewing a single respondent using an audiotape recorder.

Interviews have been used in the social sciences since the 19th century, when scholars and practitioners began to seek answers to large-scale questions about the human condition. In America, interviews were used as part of the case study method in the social sciences at the University of Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, together with fieldwork, documentary analysis, and statistical methods (Platt, 2002). After World War II, interviews began to be used extensively in survey research; from that point onward, the quantifiable CLOSED-ENDED QUESTION survey interview became more common than the open-ended qualitative interview.

However, qualitative interviewing remained as a key method in anthropology and is used today in all the social sciences. The purpose of qualitative interviewing in social science research today, as of qualitative research in general, is to understand the meanings of the topic of the interview to the respondent. As Kvale (1996) puts it, the qualitative interview has as its purpose “to obtain descriptions of the life world of the interviewee with respect to interpreting the meaning of the described phenomena” (pp. 5–6). For the sake of simplicity, I illustrate this point mainly with reference to my own qualitative interview-based book on Madwives (Warren, 1987).

In interviews with female psychiatric patients in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Warren, 1987), the eight interviewers wanted to know about the experiences of mental hospitalization from the perspective of the female patients as well as the psychiatrists. They interviewed these women at weekly intervals during and after hospitalization, in some cases for several years. One of the topics they asked about was electroshock or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). From the point of view of the medical model, ECT is a psychiatric treatment intended to relieve the symptoms of depression, schizophrenia, or other disorders, with side effects that include short-term memory loss. To the women undergoing ECT in the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, [Page 522]the meanings of the treatment were both different (from the medical model) and variable (from one another, and sometimes from one day to another). Some of the women saw it as a form of punishment, whereas others believed that it was a medical treatment, but that its purpose was to erase their troubles from their memories.

Social scientists interview people because they have questions about the life worlds of their respondents. How do mental patients interpret the treatments they are given? What do single women involved in affairs with married men think about their situation (Richardson, 1985)? In order to use the qualitative interview method, these RESEARCH QUESTIONS have to be translated into actual questions for the researcher to ask the respondent. These questions are developed in two contexts: the overall RESEARCH DESIGN, and governmental and institutional guidelines for protection of human subjects.

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