Eight Challenges for Interview Researchers

Eight Challenges for Interview Researchers

There is little need to provide further evidence here of the ubiquity of the open-ended research interview across the range of contemporary social sciences. Chapters in this volume and its predecessor (Gubrium & Holstein, 2002) make this point very effectively, as does a survey of the content of contemporary qualitative methods handbooks such as Denzin and Lincoln (2005) and Willig and Stainton-Rogers (2008). In some cases, the term interview is not even mentioned, as this method of eliciting material from participants has become hardwired into the commonplaces of social science. A diligent reader need only read through the content of the past full year of mainstream journals in sociology, social psychology, geography, and anthropology to see that where qualitative research is conducted, it is overwhelmingly done using some forms of interviews. Cutting things up another way, the open-ended interview is the preeminent data generation technique in methodological traditions as disparate as ethnography, phenomenology (in its different forms), psychoanalysis, narrative psychology, grounded theory, and (much) discourse analysis.

Our aim in this chapter is to make the case that interviewing has been too easy, too obvious, too little studied, and too open to providing a convenient launching pad for poor research. We will argue that interview research will be made better if it faces up to a series of eight challenges that arise in the design, conduct, analysis, and reporting of qualitative interviews. Some research studies already face up to some of these challenges; few studies face up to all of them. We will make our case strongly and bluntly with the aim of provoking debate where not enough has taken place. These challenges are overlapping, but we have separated them in the way we have for clarity. It is important to emphasize that our aim is not to criticize interviews but to make them better.

There are two contexts for this chapter for us. First, the past 20 years have seen an extraordinary [Page 556]development of our understanding of what might be called the central motor of interviews, the question-and-answer pair. Profound work in the tradition of conversation analysis (Schegloff, 2007) has been done on the organization of questions and answers in institutional settings such as television news interviews (e.g., Clayman & Heritage, 2002), courtrooms (e.g., Atkinson & Drew, 1979), police interrogations (e.g., Stokoe & Edwards, 2008), help lines (e.g., Hepburn & Potter, 2010), and medical examinations (e.g., Boyd & Heritage, 2006), as well as in mundane settings such as everyday phone calls and family mealtimes (Heritage & Raymond, in press; Stivers & Hayashi, 2010). Such work has started to unpack some of the basic design features of questions, such as how they embody preferences, manage neutralism, build presuppositions, and work to constrain the actions of the recipient in different ways (Clayman & Heritage, 2002; Raymond, 2003). Researchers are starting to turn the analytic searchlight from this tradition onto the operation of social science methods (Antaki & Rapley, 1996; Houtkoop-Steenstra, 2000; Maynard, Houtkoop-Steenstra, Schaeffer, & van der Zouwen, 2002; Puchta & Potter, 1999). In this chapter, we will draw on this tradition and shine a bit of its light on the qualitative research interview.

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