How to do interviews

Interviews, in their various forms, are certainly among the most widely adopted methods of qualitative data collection. This is hardly surprising – although observing, recording, inferring, etc. are all effective ways of obtaining rich (and in some cases – more relevant) data, there is nothing like face-to-face interaction. We are so used to oral communication that it just feels like our “natural” method of enquiry – if you want to know something about someone, you ask them.

This is not to say, however, that interviewing is something that can, and should be done without professional training and/or experience. Like any other research method, a good interview needs to be carefully planned, and “failure to recognise the special requirements of a qualitative research interview can result in the elicitation of data that have serious limitations for a study” (King and Horrocks, 2010: 1). A good interview may provide in-depth insights into the participants’ beliefs, feelings, experiences and opinions. A bad interview may not only be a waste of both the interviewer and the interviewee’s time but may also result in collecting data that is biased and not reflecting the participant’s honest opinions, and, in extreme cases, may even cause mental harm to the participants. Therefore, it is crucial that you enter the interview very well prepared. Below are some points you need to consider before, during and after the interview.

Before the interview

Regardless of how “structured” your interview is going to be (i.e. structured, unstructured or semi-structured), carefully plan the interview guide. Start with general topics you want to discuss and, then, design some questions that may help you answer your research questions. Organise the topics and questions in a logical sequence, so that they are grouped into similar topics and develop from each other. Also, if possible, try to start with earlier, and move towards more recent events, as well as start with simpler and more concrete topics and move on to more complex and abstract ones. If you plan to ask any questions that are “sensitive”, you may also want to ask them a bit later, as you develop rapport and make the interviewees feel comfortable and relaxed.

Next, add follow-up questions (i.e. questions that encourage the interviewees to expand on their responses) to each question, trying to predict a range of potential responses you may get:

Question: “Have you ever had any negative experiences with police officers?”

Follow-up questions: When? Why do you think it happened? Why do you think you never have? How did it make you feel? How do you think this would make you feel? What did you do?

Some additional things to keep in mind when developing your interview guide

• Introducing questions: ‘Why did you…?’ or ‘Can you tell me about…?’ Through these questions you introduce the topic.
• Follow up questions: Through these you can elaborate on their initial answer. Questions may include: ‘What did you mean…?’ or ‘Can you give more detail…?’
• Probing questions: You can employ direct questioning to follow up what has been said and to get more detail. ‘Do you have any examples?’ or ‘Could you say more about…?’
• Specifying questions: Such as ‘What happened when you said that?’ or ‘What did he say next?’
• Direct questions: Questions with a yes or no answer are direct questions. You might want to leave these questions until the end so you don’t lead the interviewee to answer a certain way.
• Indirect questions: You can ask these to get the interviewee’s true opinion.
• Structuring questions: These move the interview on to the next subject. For example, ‘Moving on to…’
• Silence: Through pauses you can suggest to the interviewee that you want them to answer the question!
• Interpreting questions: ‘Do you mean that…?’ or ‘Is it correct that…?’

• Questions that are too long (the interviewee may forget what the question was about)
• Double-barrelled questions, or questions that actually include more than one question (e.g. “Do you like going abroad and relaxing on the beach?” – they may like going abroad, but not relaxing on the beach, or vice versa)
• Questions that include words that the participants may not understand
• Leading questions and biased questions – questions that suggest a particular response, or suggest that you may expect them to respond in a certain way (“What are the reasons football is a great sport to watch?”, “You don’t think that Ben Stiller is a good actor, do you?”)

When you have your interview guide ready, you still need to address all the remaining organisational and technical issues. Set up time, date and place, prepare consent forms, etc. Determine how the interview will be recorded, make sure the equipment works and take some additional recording device, as well as a pen and paper (in the event when all the equipment fails, you really don’t want to ask your interviewee to “come again tomorrow”).

During the interview

Start with introducing yourself and your study. Explain the purposes of the study and remind the interviewee why you selected him or her for the interview. Also, explain the issues of confidentiality and how you will use the collected data. Explain that you will audio-record the interview…

The above are the “obvious” things to include, and the ones that are always discussed in interview literature. What is less obvious, and what I really want to stress the importance of, is that at this stage your main goal should be to develop good rapport with the interviewee and make him or her feel confident and relaxed. You want to convince them that:

• You are a genuinely nice person to be around, not just a stiff “academic” or an “interviewer”. Therefore,
• They can be completely honest with you. You are really interested in what they have to say, and your goal is to accurately represent their complex individuality in your writing, not to “reduce [them] to little more than paper stereotypes (…) so that their individuality is stripped away” (Brewis, 2014: 850)

Most people, for example, are quite nervous about being audio-recorded. Thus, rather than pretending that this problem does not exist, I like to draw attention to it and talk about it prior to the interview. I sympathize with them and explain that this is natural. I also laugh about how I am the one who will later need to listen to my own voice in that recording. I also like to switch the recording early and talk to them about something not necessarily related to the study itself before beginning the actual interview. Another thing I do is explain that this interview will be unlike a natural conversation that we would have in other circumstances – I will not be as talkative as I usually am, but this doesn’t mean that I either agree or disagree or evaluate – I am simply not supposed to talk too much! This later results in a sense that now that we know each other a little bit better, we are upfront about how we feel, we feel comfortable around each other, etc., we are ready to enter the interview together.

The actual interview structure should usually include an introduction (i.e. what I described in the first paragraph), a warm-up (see above), the actual body of interview (the discussion of the topics you wanted to discuss) and a closure (the “thank you for the interview”, etc.). I also like to leave the recording on after the interview, as I find that once the interview is “officially” over (that is, when I ask if they have anything else to add and, if they say “no”, thank them for the interview), the first thing the interviewees like to do is … start reflecting on the topic of the interview 🙂

Other things to consider during the interview:

• Listen more than you speak (Robson, 2002)

I actually have a problem with this, myself. I love talking to people, what I can do? Just be careful, and

• Try not to influence the interviewee’s responses by giving them cues (“You don’t like chocolate, do you?”, “Are you actually trying to say that you enjoy watching golf?”, etc. 🙂 ). This may lead to respondent bias.
• Enjoy the interview and show the interviewee that you are interested in what they have to say.
• Be flexible and responsive – if the interviewee talks about something that you wanted to cover in a later part of the interview – let him/her! Do all you can to make this feel (relatively) “natural”, as long as it is generally within the topic you want to discuss.
• If the interviewees go off topic completely, you may either gently remind them about it, or (as I like to do) just let them talk – again, if it makes them feel relaxed, why not? You don’t have to transcribe every single word they said afterwards, anyway (instead, I just summarize it or just note that this was not a relevant bit)
• Try to avoid language that would be difficult for your interviewees to understand.
• Try to keep your questions broad and open-ended, to give the interviewee an opportunity to go into detail and to remember the whole context of a given situation.
• Remember that silence is not a bad thing! The interviewees often need time to remember, if there are moments of silence either right after you asked the question, or the interviewees pause their story, give them some time and they will often come up with great and valuable insights.
• Try not to interrupt – if there is something that raised your interest and you really want them to elaborate, you may make a note and later say “when you described your first experience of study abroad, you said that… Could you tell me a bit more about it?”
• Check (several times!) if the recording is still on – the device may run out of space, the battery may die, etc.

After the interview

• After the interview, check if you recorded the whole interview, have a look at your notes (if you made any), and make some additional notes, recording how the interview went, etc.
• Go home and transcribe the interview 🙂
• If there is anything you are unsure about when transcribing (e.g. what the interviewee meant when she said that…), you may follow this up with the interviewee (ideally, after the interview, ask them if it’s ok to do that). Sometimes you may even want to send them the full transcript and ask them to provide comments – this may increase validity of your findings.

Brewis, J. (2014). The ethics of researching friends: On convenience sampling in qualitative management and organization studies. British Journal of Management, 25, 849-862.

King, N. & Horrocks, Ch. (2010). Interviews in Qualitative Research. London: Sage Publications.

Kvale S. (1996). Interviews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviews. Sage Publications, California.

Robson, C. (2002). Real world research: a resource for social scientists and practitioner-researchers. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.