how to use an interview in a research paper

Using an interview in a research paper

Consultant contributor: Viviane Ugalde

Using an interview can be an effective primary source for some papers and research projects. Finding an expert in the field or some other person who has knowledge of your topic can allow for you to gather unique information not available elsewhere.

There are four steps to using an interview as a source for your research.

• Know where and how to start.
• Know how to write a good question.
• Know how to conduct an interview.
• Know how to incorporate the interview into your document or project.

Step one: Where to start

First, you should determine your goals and ask yourself these questions:

• Who are the local experts on topic?
• How can I contact these people?
• Does anyone know them to help me setup the interviews?
• Are their phone numbers in the phone book or can I find them on the Internet?

Once you answer these questions and pick your interviewee, get their basic information such as their name, title, and other general details. If you reach out and your interview does not participate, don’t be discouraged. Keep looking for other interview contacts.

Step two: How to write a good question

When you have confirmed an interview, it is not time to come up with questions.

• Learning as much as you can about the person before the interview can help you create questions specific to your interview subject.
• Doing research about your interviewee’s past experience in your topic, or any texts that they have written would be great background research.

When you start to think of questions, write down more questions than you think you’ll need, and prioritize them as you go. Any good questions will answer the 5W and H questions. Asking Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions that you need answered for your paper, will help you form a question to ask your interviewee.

When writing a good question, try thinking of something that will help your argument.

• Is your interviewee an advocate for you position?
• Are they in any programs that are related to your research?
• How much experience do they have?

From broad questions like these, you can begin to narrow down to more specific and open-ended questions.

Step three: The interview

If at all possible, arrange to conduct the interview at the subject’s workplace. It will make them more comfortable, and you can write about their surroundings.

• Begin the interview with some small talk in order to give both of you the chance to get comfortable with one another
• Develop rapport that will make the interview easier for both of you.
• Ask open-ended questions
• Keep the conversation moving
• Stay on topic
• The more silence in the room, the more honest the answer.
• If an interesting subject comes up that is related to your research, ask a follow-up or an additional question about it.
• Ask if you can stay in contact with your interview subject in case there are any additional questions you have.

Step four: Incorporating the interview

When picking the material out of your interview, remember that people rarely speak perfectly. There will be many slang words and pauses that you can take out, as long as it does not change the meaning of the material you are using.

As you introduce your interview in the paper, start with a transition such as “according to” or other attributions. You should also be specific to the type of interview you are working with. This way, you will build a stronger ethos in your paper .

The body of your essay should clearly set up the quote or paraphrase you use from the interview responses,. Be careful not to stick a quote from the interview into the body of your essay because it sounds good. When deciding what to quote in your paper, think about what dialogue from the interview would add the most color to your interview. Quotes that illustrate what your interviewer sounded like, or what their personality is are always the best quotes to choose from.

Once you have done that, proofread your essay. Make sure the quotes you used don’t make up the majority of your paper. The interview quotes are supposed to support your argument; you are not supposed to support the interview.

For example, let’s say that you are arguing that free education is better than not. For your argument, you interview a local politician who is on your side of the argument. Rather than using a large quote that explains the stance of both sides, and why the politician chose this side, your quote is there to support the information you’ve already given. Whatever the politician says should prove what you argue, and not give new information.

Step five: Examples of citing your interviews 

Smith, Jane. Personal interview. 19 May 2018.

(E. Robbins, personal communication, January 4, 2018).

Smith also claimed that many of her students had difficulties with APA style (personal communication, November 3, 2018).

Reference list

Daly, C. & Leighton W. (2017). Interviewing a Source: Tips. Journalists Resource.

Driscoll, D. (2018 ). Interviewing. Purdue University

Hayden, K. (2012). How to Conduct an Interview to Write a Paper . Bright Hub Education, Bright Hub Inc.

Hose, C. (2017). How to Incorporate Interviews into Essays. Leaf Group Education.

Magnesi, J. (2017). How to Interview Someone for an Article or Research Paper. Career Trend, Leaf group Media.

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How To Write An Interiew Paper: Ultimate Guide

While you’re in school and studying different subjects, it can be tricky to understand each assignment’s needs and depths, especially long-form research papers that might count for a large percentage of your total grade. Writing an interview paper can involve a lot of research, require a lot of time and effort to find and schedule interviews with the right people, and write an engaging and easy-to-read piece. So here’s your ultimate blueprint on how to write an interview paper!

What Is An Interview Paper?

How to write an interview paper, the step-by-step guide on writing an interview paper, how to start an interview paper, how to write a conclusion for an interview paper, how to format an interview paper, checklist of essentials for an impressive interview paper, topics for an interview paper.

An interview paper is an intriguing but complex assignment to write about a topic that incorporates interviews and perspectives of different people on the issue. These interviews are usually with people who are stakeholders in a problem or the general public that has been inevitably affected by a country’s policy or about a particular case that caused havoc. In addition, it can also be a descriptive piece elaborating on the personal experience or anecdote of one person.

It’s definitely a learned skill and requires a lot of effort into cultivating precise questions networking to find the best people to interview (they can range from being your family members who were involved in a particular issue or have stark opinions on your topic to policymakers and governors who contributed to either passing or striking a specific act), and finally putting it all together to communicate the varying perspectives effectively without bias.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview paper example :

With the recent upsurge in mental health and psychology, many experts in the field are celebrating the increased awareness but also worry about the dissipation of false information. Especially with social media, information is communicated from one part of the world to another within seconds. It can lead to the misuse of terms and psychological context, leading to severe harm and damage. Dr. Rosen Luis, a professor of abnormal psychology at the University of Georgia, elaborated upon the issue of false information being spread on social media in a personal interview conducted last year. “As social media penetrates the global world at a more rapid rate than anything else in the world, sensitive information like that regarding mental health can easily be misused or leveraged in incorrect circumstances due to the lack of supervision on growing platforms. Social media also creates unrealistic expectations about how a mental illness should look. There’s no one distinct way a disorder manifests in everybody and can lead to different lifestyle changes for different people.” (R. Luis, Phone Interview, Jun 22, 2021)

So you might be thinking about how to write a paper based on an interview and what are the different components of such a paper? Well, a lot goes into an article of this kind, so it’s essential to break it down into separate elements so you can tackle each with great effort and accuracy to cultivate a solid assignment and fetch a top grade!

If you have the freedom to choose your topic for the assignment, it is essential that you pick up a contentious concept that is the center of debate and leads to some civil discourse. An interview paper needs to be backed with air-tight research and credible interviews taken ethically and incorporate direct, in-depth questioning and sources.

Now you may be wondering how to include an interview in a research paper, mainly because interviews often look like scripts instead of concrete research material, so it’s important to note that while your discussions will be long-form and extensive, you’ll have to pick and choose responses from your different interviews to use as quotes or credible backing for your statements within the content of the paper.

If you have no desire to get all those knowledge or experience a long tiring writing process, you can use an opportunity to buy cheap dissertation online .

To make the writing process easier, you should be absolutely sure in what to do in each step. Here is a list of steps you need to take to get a perfect interview paper.

• Step 1 – Selecting the ideal topic for your paper : The topic you end up choosing for your interview paper can genuinely make or break your grade. It’s best not to look at generalized ideas or concepts that have been established as facts, as it’s unlikely that such topics will have a large-scale difference of opinion. Searching for a good case could begin with looking for issues that cause healthy discussion, differ within groups of different cultural, political, social, or economic backgrounds, and are essential conversations to have. It’s vital to ensure that the topic doesn’t cause a threat to someone’s rights, identity, or existence.
• Step 2 – Ideation and Research : Now that you’ve established your topic and a basic crux of your thesis statement, you can begin ideating the direction you want to take your paper. For instance, you choose capital punishment and its use to decrease long-term crime patterns in Singapore (known to have one of the highest percentages of the executed population via capital punishment), you’ll think about whether you want to talk about its history, grassroots change, crime statistics and also decide who all you’ll want to interview. A big part of writing an interview paper is finding people from diverse backgrounds with conflicting opinions to give your readers a 360-degree view on the issue.
• Step 3 – Crafting your interview questions : After having decided your topic and doing in-depth research about the same, it’s time to curate a set of interview questions that are brief, to-the-point, and extract the information you require for your assignment. Crafting good open-ended questions is a learned skill and will improve with the number of interviews you prep for. Ensure that all your questions are about the topic, fact-checked, and easy to understand for the interviewee.
• Step 4 – Taking the interviews : Once the interview blueprint is ready, you’ve to schedule and conduct interviews with the people you’re choosing to talk to (it is preferred that you conduct interviews in-person, so it is as personal and direct as possible). Be sure to ask your questions clearly and record the interviewee’s responses using a recording device so you can precisely transcribe the answers afterward. It’s crucial that your interviewee feels comfortable talking to you about the topic, especially if it is something very sensitive and personal. Good interview ethics also involve letting your respondent know they can communicate if they want something they spoke about to be scratched out of the interview.If you’re planning on using published interviews, you can skip the third and fourth steps and pick up essential quotes from the already published interviews. Remember to cite the quotes in the correct format so that you don’t get into any unnecessary plagiarism issues.
• Step 5 – Creating an outline : With regards to the obtained interview responses, you’ll create a very detailed skeleton for the interview paper, so you know precisely which idea goes where. This will help you when you finally get down to writing the actual essay, as you’ll be able to keep track of your different ideas, quotes, and sources and establish an engaging flow. You can also spend some time writing transitionary sentences that you’ll use when you move from one paragraph to the next.
• Step 6 – Writing the paper : Now that you’re done with all the back-end research, interviewing, and outlining, you’ve to sit down and fill in the gaps to produce a stellar essay. You have all the elements you need to decrease your distractions, be charged up, and just write it out. Contrary to popular belief, writing is actually a learned skill. Even if you don’t believe you’re as good with words as others, learning a few tips and tricks can easily elevate your writing to a notch above. Using precise and appropriate vocabulary, leveraging analogies, metaphors, and other language elements to convey your ideas, and having perfect grammar and syntax are some of the ways you can better your writing.

The basics of any paper are a thesis statement, introduction, body, and conclusion. You would’ve formulated your thesis statement while ideating the direction you wanted to take your paper in, and through the outline, you’ve hopefully followed the one-idea, one paragraph to give rise to a well-constructed body. Here’s some guidance on the two components that determine the first impression and last impression your reader has of the paper:

The introduction of your interview paper is the first thing that the reader looks at, so it’s crucial to hook the reader to keep them engaged to follow through with reading the paper. You can include:

Your thesis statement Intriguing data about your topic A quote from one of your interviewees Citing any information that’s been in the news with regards to your topic

The purpose of a catchy introduction is to connect the idea at hand to the reader’s life and intrigue them enough to learn more about the issue.

For example , if you’re writing on the capital punishment topic, beginning with an alarming statistic to depict the dire need to start a serious conversation about its effectiveness or ineffectiveness could hook the reader very well:

“ Juxtaposing the modern ideals of reformation and change, over 400 individuals have been giving the death penalty in Singapore since 1991″

Like any research paper, a firm conclusion is a must in a well-written interview paper. Since your paper will deal with some contrasting ideas, summarizing all the perspectives while shedding more light on the thesis statement will hook your reader to think about the information and views brought up in your essay long after they finish reading. Though this is one of the many assignments you’ve to write for school, interview papers dealing with conflicting real-life issues also contribute to social change via beginning civil discourse and fact-oriented discussion on important causes.

• Step 7 – Citing the sources : It’s vital that after you finish the contents of your essay, you spend time formatting your interview paper in the correct format and cite all of your sources in the needed manner (e.g., MLA, APA, etc.). It’ll help provide credibility to your arguments, show that you delved into air-tight research for your topic, and protect you from any coincidental issues in plagiarism checkers.
• Step 8 – Revision : It’s believed that looking at your paper, especially one you’ve spent hours on, with a fresh set of eyes, gives you a better perspective on things to change and helps you spot any missed grammar and style errors. You can finish your draft, take a nap, get back to the assignment and make the changes, read it aloud to make any mistakes more noticeable, or even ask a friend to have a read-through.

It’s essential that you know the interview paper format to be able to present a well-written, researched, and formatted assignment for an excellent grade. So here are some steps on how to write an interview paper in APA format –

If you’re citing a personal interview that you conducted in the course of writing the piece, here’s the format to follow:

Include the name of the interviewee and their qualifications, job description, and experience Mention the purpose of involving them in your research paper Incorporate a couple of quotes from their interview Cite the interview in the correct APA format

For, e.g., – (Interviewee first name initial & last name, interview format, date of interview)

If you’re citing an already published interview of someone in the field, the way you format the quotes in the paper and the bibliography should follow the format of the document in which you found the interview. Say you found an interview of a renowned politician in a social science journal that followed the MLA format; you must follow the same and cite the social science journal as your source.

To have peace of mind that you’ve done everything you needed for the perfect interview paper, here’s a short checklist you can quickly run through before submitting your assignment

Included all interviewees point’s of view Remained neutral while elaborating on others’ opinions even if you have a solid personal perspective on the subject Followed the one-idea, one-paragraph rule and included well-written transitory sentences Utilized precise and high-level vocabulary and sentence structure Proofread the essay to rid it of any grammar or syntax inconsistencies Used the correct format to cite sources within the paper and in the bibliography

• What role do you think your genetics play in your character compared to your upbringing?
• Are beauty standards unrealistic?
• Is social media connecting or disconnecting people?
• Should abortion be a topic of policy?
• Should age-old prisons be reconstructed to fit modern ideas of reformation and change?
• Do nursing homes contribute to the well-being of the older generation?
• Should marijuana be legalized?
• Should the same humanitarian and crime laws apply in times of war?
• Should gun rights be ubiquitous?
• Is capital punishment leading to grassroots change?
• Should society be capitalist, socialist, or an amalgamation of both?
• Should cloning be legal?
• Is the concept of marriage as idolized as it used to be?
• Is choosing to be child-free selfish?
• Should the rich pay more tax?
• Are our immigration policies outdated in a globalized world?
• Should celebrities be more accountable for their actions than the average person?
• Are companies doing enough to contribute to climate change effects?
• Should holistic therapies be considered certified medical treatments?
• Should upbringing be gendered?
• Is having kids in a time of such turmoil ethical?
• Should prostitution be legalized?
• How should racism or homophobia be combated on an individual level?
• College degrees and their relevance in the digital age
• Going vegan v/s consuming meat: What’s better for the climate?
• How important is your religion to you?
• Are money and happiness correlated?
• How much does early-child development affect one’s mental health into adulthood?
• Is stealing ever okay?
• Are arranged marriages still as popular?

Not Interested in Writing Paper by Yourself?

Getting started with an interview paper can feel intimidating, mainly since it entails so much work – in-depth research on the topic and the history of debate behind it, setting up and curating tailored interviews with people relevant to the topic, and so much more. While you juggle several courses and assignments and other extracurricular work at high school or college, it can be challenging to submit well-written papers that will put you at the top of your class.

Impressing your professor isn’t an easy task. Still, you can do it by hiring expert help that will assist you with your writing assignments and produce work that the accomplished writers will curate as per your needs, that too at highly affordable rates!

You’ll be able to buy and order a custom interview paper that will be ideated and written by thesis writing service for a cheap cost. It’s an efficient and cost-effective way to stay on top of your work, learn from experts in the field, and wow your teachers with a well-written interview paper!

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Incorporating Interview Data

Introduction

When you incorporate original interview data into your writing, you are developing new ideas by using quotations and often sources that no one else has accessed. Drawing from interviews can liven up your writing, ground your big concepts within the specific circumstances of particular individuals, and introduce you to insights you might never have considered on your own. Additionally, interviews are an exciting way for you to provide a larger audience for people who might not otherwise have opportunities to share their stories, perceptions, and experiences.

There are lots of good reasons to incorporate original interview data into your writing. But doing so also involves making many, specific writing decisions. On this page we explore some of those decisions by considering: 1) the process by which interview data is gathered; 2) models for interview incorporation; and 3) identification of ways that writing with interview data can be like writing with information from any other source (as well as some of the unique writerly considerations that interviews raise).

Contents       Before You Write       Different Models of Incorporating Interview Data       Summarizing, Paraphrasing, or Quoting       Referring to your Interviewees       Using Verbatim or Non-Verbatim

Before You Write

Of course, before you can incorporate interview data into your writing, you need to plan and conduct your interviews and begin to analyze your findings.

Interviewing is a common form of research and information gathering in many different fields and across many different genres. In order to develop and actualize a plan for why interviews will help you answer the questions you’re asking, whom you’ll interview, and what you’ll ask these subjects, you’ll want to consult a range of resources. Talk with your instructor, mentor, or advisor about common ways of approaching interviews for this assignment or in this discipline. Additionally, many undergraduate textbooks about research in the social sciences and humanities offer introductions to interviewing. We’ve listed a few great resources to help you learn more.

For comprehensive introductions to research methods used in the writing research that include some information about interviews, consider:

• Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s book Strategies for Writing Center Research —especially pages 55-69. While Grutsch McKinney’s is focused on writing center research, her close consideration of the different ways to structure interviews as well as how to plan and conduct them can be applied to all interview contexts. Additionally, her treatment of data analysis in chapter 8 provides a step-by-step guide for coding qualitative data—one of the approaches you might use to make sense of what your interview data means.
• Joyce Kinkead’s Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods —especially pages 37-39. This is a potential textbook for that could be used for a class specifically about the formal study of writing. However, its direct and specific information about interviewing is applicable for any social science researcher preparing to use interviews for research.

These resources focus more specifically on qualitative research methods in particular and interviewing in particular:

• Robert Bogdan and Sari Knopp Biklen’s Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theories and Methods —especially pages 103-109. Bogdan and Knopp Biklen’s treatment of interview practices provides a brief overview of how to approach and implement this research methodology.
• Irving Seidman’s Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences —especially pages 78-94. This entire book explores interview practices, logistics, and applications, but chapter six in particular usefully details particular interviewing techniques and provides transcripted examples of some of these strategic techniques in action.

The rest of the information on this page assumes that you have learned to develop and implement your interview plan, that you’ve analyzed the information you’ve gathered, and that you’re now ready to start weaving that information into your writing.

Different Models for Incorporating Interview Data

You can use interview data in many different ways. Most often, you will probably be making an argumentative or analytical point and illustrating and supporting it with evidence from your interviews. For example, in the following passage from the book Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines , Paul D. Hutchcroft, a political science professor at Australian National University, begins with an original claim, follows that with a quotation from an interview subject that exemplifies that claim, and then offers additional commentary on that issue. Note how the quotation from the interview both connects the concepts of banking and politics and introduces the prism metaphor that Hutchcroft continues into the next sentence.

The major focus of this [book] is two arenas that offer particular insights into the nature of relations between state and oligarchy in the banking system: bank supervision and selective credit allocation. “Banking,” observes one former bank president, “is a prism through which to understand power politics in the Philippines.” A study of the banking system highlights larger patterns at work within the political economy: how a predatory oligarchy extracts privilege from a patrimonial state, and how developmental policy objectives are continually choked out by a clamor of particularistic demands made by those who currently enjoy proximity to the political machinery. (7)

Generalizing about a Trend or Theme

Using information from an interview to support your claim is the primary purpose for incorporating interview data into your writing, but how you do this may change according to your specific intent. In what follows, we explore different models for weaving interview data into your writing and provide examples of what this looks like.

It is important to consider the politicization of the nationality responses in context. On the whole, the vast majority of republican executives did not try to influence the process, and the nationality question was a non-issue in the predominantly ethnically Russian regions. In my regional interviews I found that in the oblasts and krays, there were almost no reports of difficulty with the nationality question. Officials in those areas reported that respondents who were not ethnically Russian had no difficulty citing a different nationality. This finding corresponded with my observations of the enumeration process in Moscow. There were sporadic cases of respondents in ethnically mixed marriages registering one child as of one parent’s ethnic group and the other child as of the other parent’s ethnic group. However, this is a conceptual issue rather than a problem of politicization. ( 367-8 )

Quoting to Illustrate a Trend or Theme

Sometimes interviewees say things that are so strikingly similar that it is useful to draw attention to these complementary concepts and word choices by putting them together. In the following passage, Jane Calvert, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Joan Fujimura, a sociology professor at UW-Madison, use this strategy while writing about scientists’ responses to the new and developing field of systems biology. Note that these authors carefully tie quotations to specific anonymized interviewees through parenthetical citations.

In another US university, the decision to build an interdisciplinary research centre was top-down, initiated by university and funding administrators and initially opposed by most campus laboratory scientists. The building of new interdisciplinary structures is challenging for the existing disciplinary “fiefdoms” (Biologist19) and “silos” (Biologist9 and Biologist12) “where people feel protected and safe” (Biologist19) because they are not required to step outside of their “comfort zones” (Biologist7).

Putting Two Sources in Conversation with Each Other

Sometimes writers can use one interviewee to contribute to or complicate what another interviewee says. The following paragraph from Hutchcroft’s Booty Capitalism shows this practice at work. In addition to bringing two sources together, in this passage Hutchcroft also strategically incorporates paratextual insight gained from the interview process into his analysis. He uses the former governor’s laughter to showcase an attitude that directly contrasts with what the former bank supervisor says.

Even when the Central Bank has acted against those who milked their banks, former bank owners have been known to use personal connections, even up to the Supreme Court, to confound Central Bank discipline. Former Governor Jaime Laya noted that even martial law “didn’t seem to stop the lawsuits against Central Bank personnel.” He actually laughed as he told me how the Central Bank legal office has “never won a case.” But the former head of the bank supervision sector, who has herself been sued, doesn’t find it a laughing matter: “Why only in this country,” she exclaimed, “do the regulators go to the jail, and the bankers go scot-free?” (9)

Providing a Profile/Telling a Story

Sometimes your writing needs to focus on your interview subject as a full and complex individual. In order to analyze an issue, you need to write about this individual’s background, family, and previous experiences. In this situation, you’ll weave together information you gained from your interviews with quotations from this person. This kind of writing is common when you are using interviews to develop ethnographis case studies. In the following example of this technique, Kate Vieira, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UW-Madison, tells the story of Jocélia, an undocumented Brazilian immigrant living in Massachusetts:

Jocélia, a 22 year-old Brazilian woman who grew up in a favela (shanty town) in Brazil, came to the United States to study and to earn money. When her visa expired and the small sum she had borrowed from cousins ran out, she quit her ESL classes and began to work illegally. When I met her in 2008, she had been in the United States for 4 years, had managed to buy a house for her mother in Brazil, and had plans to buy another one for herself and a car. To earn money as an undocumented worker, she held down two jobs: one from 3 p.m. to midnight and another from 5 a.m. to afternoon. One evening, exhausted from having not slept in days, she nodded off as she drove home from work, resulting in a serious accident that led her to a friend’s house in South Mills and to a Catholic retreat. When I came here, I was not a youth who had fun. I only worked, and this made me a little frustrated, you know? Sad, lonely, understand? And nobody could change my mind. I had to work . . . But the Lord showed me something different, that I can’t live only for work . . . So I went there [to the retreat] and I really felt that the Lord touched us. It was a very good experience . . . (444)

Attending to Language

As explored in greater depth in the discussion about verbatim transcription , sometimes you want to analyze or consider the language an individual uses or the implications of certain kinds of words or even pauses. For example, in the following passage, Beth Godbee, a writing and rhetoric professor at Marquette University, meticulously considers the implications of her subjects’ specific words and phrasing. Although this example is taken from Godbee’s analysis of a conversation she recorded between a writer Susan and a writing center tutor Kim as opposed to a direct interview she conducted, the attention she pays to language could just as well be applied to information from an interview.

Kim reinforces Susan’s qualifications: “You’re gonna—you’re the specialist in this area. You know these kids; you see what know the effects are, and maybe where some change could be made” (lines 558-561). Here Kim revises her projection of Susan as a “specialist” in the future tense (“gonna,” as in “you’re going to be”) to a statement of her current position (“you’re,” or “you are now”). By repairing her speech mid-utterance, Kim emphasizes Susan’s current status and qualifications to write, thereby reframing her institutional power to assert her right to speak. (185)

Summarizing, Paraphrasing, or Quoting

As the above examples show, interview data is incorporated into writing through summaries, paraphrases, or quotations. In some ways this makes working with interviews just like working from any other kind of outside. As you choose between summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting, a guiding question for you to consider is: What is most important about this information?

• Is it the overall story it tells or the general perspective it provides? Then summarizing might be the best option.
• Is it the particular take on a complex issue? Then paraphrasing that idea in your own words to make it as understandable as possible might be best.
• Is it the memorability, specificity, or authenticity of the language the source used? Then probably go with a quote, but be sure to contextualize this quotation by providing necessary background and commentary.

Of course, in working with interview data, you might go with all three incorporation strategies by, for example, summarizing early in a paragraph to provide an overall sense of what this source is saying, paraphrasing a key idea or two, and then including a poignant quotation that exemplifies the argument you are making. For more information about quoting and paraphrasing outside sources in your writing, check out our resources on this issue .

Referring to your Interviewees

In certain writing situations, you are expected to identify the people you interviewed by using their real names. This is often the case in journalistic writing as well as when you have consulted with an expert on an issue. But, even in these writing contexts, you must receive permission from them to associate their words and insights with their names by clearly establishing whether or not they are talking with you “on the record.”

However, when you are conducting interviews for academic research, you are frequently expected to use pseudonyms so that your subjects’ responses are confidential. Protecting your subjects’ privacy should be your primary priority. They are giving you access to personal experiences and trusting you with their individual insights and observations; you must honor that trust by anonymizing their identities so that readers can’t figure out who your subjects were. Developing a research methodology that keeps all of your data confidential is an important part of the IRB (Internal Review Board) process, and in order to receive permission to do research at your institution you’ll need a plan that outlines how you’ll achieve confidentiality. Part of that plan will involve using different names for your subjects. But selecting pseudonyms is a bigger issue than just choosing different names at random.

Ruth Allen and Janine L. Wiles, Social and Community Health scholars at the University of Auckland, have closely considered the many issues surrounding pseudonym selection in connection to their original psychological and health-related research. They advocate that researchers think critically about this process and even bring their subjects into these discussions of identity and confidentiality. You need to be thoughtful about what aspects of your subjects’ true identities you are communicating or obscuring through the pseudonyms you use. The following questions are adapted from ones Allen and Wiles recommend researchers ask themselves when preparing to use pseudonyms for participants:

• Does the researcher or the participant choose the pseudonym? How does this issue get talked about with the participants?
• Is it important, valuable, or expected to use first name or also include last names and/or titles (i.e., Cara, Mr. Terrance, Dr. Jean Nichols)?
• Within the context of this writing, should the names to be associated with a specific gender, ethnicity, and/or culture? Should those nominal identity markers align with the participants’ actual identities?
• Do pseudonyms need to be selected for other people, places, activities, and organizations mentioned in the interview? And if so, who makes those choices?

How you answer these questions should be informed by your specific context. For example, in relation to that fourth question, if a participant is talking supportively about a small on-campus organization that you want to bring attention to through your writing, it might make sense to refer to this organization by name even though its size might make it harder to disguise your participant’s identity. However, if your interviewee is speaking critically about a large, multi-national corporation where she works, you might want to develop a pseudonym for that company in order to protect this individual as much as possible.

Using Verbatim or Non-Verbatim

When you are conducting interviews, you are engaging people in very focused conversation. But when we converse, we say “like” a lot and “um” and “ah.” We start sentences and then interrupt ourselves and never return to complete those earlier thoughts. Conversation is never as direct and naturally coherent as writing can be. As a result, when you’re representing other people’s speech, you need to decide if you’ll be employing what is called “verbatim transcription” or “non-verbatim transcription.”

In “verbatim transcriptions,” you write out what people say exactly as they say it. You include all the filler words, false starts, and grammatical inconsistencies. You may even choose to include coughs and laughs. Scholars have traditionally upheld verbatim accounts as being accurate depictions of the interview process, but as Blake Poland pointed out, “much of the emotional context of the interview as well as nonverbal communication are not captured at all well in audiotape records, so that the audiotape itself is not strictly a verbatim record of the interview” (291). “Non-verbatim transcriptions,” (sometimes called “intelligent transcription”) respond to this acknowledged gap between the complexities of real conversation and the limitations of writing by encouraging writers to focus on the primary substance of participants’ quotes. In “non-verbatim transcriptions, you eliminate the unnecessary utterances like “er,” “well,” and “you know” and just include the foundational meaning of the interviewees’ words.” For example:

Verbatim Transcription : Well, you see, I was [pause] the problem, as I saw it, was more of a, a matter of representation, you know? How can I, like, be the one that’s just out there just declaring the way things are when I’ve not even, like, you know, experiencing the whole process for myself? Non-verbatim Transcription : The problem, as I saw it, was more a matter of representation. How can I be the one that’s out there declaring the way things are when I’ve not even experienced the whole process for myself?

The choice to use verbatim or non-verbatim transcription in quoting your participants should be informed by intentional considerations you are making as a writer. There are good reasons to use either forms. As Mahesh Kumar has identified in a blog post for the Transcription Certification Institute, verbatim transcription is useful for showcasing the thought process by which interview participants develop their ideas. False starts and self-corrections track down how someone is thinking about an issue in real time, and some fillers can be useful expressions of personality. Additionally, some linguistics research and conversation analysis methodologies expect highly structured, verbatim transcriptions that even account for pauses and simultaneous dialogue. However, quotations presented through non-verbatim transcriptions are clearer and easier to read and enable you to present your interview subjects as articulate (Poland 292). Whether you go with verbatim or non-verbatim transcription, make sure that you are being consistent with this choice across your article, paper, report, or essay. Also, if it’s common in the genre you are writing to discuss your methodology choices, it may be useful to clarify which transcription form you have chosen to use and why this was an appropriate choice.

Works Cited

Allen, Ruth E.S., and Janine L. Wiles. “A Rose by Any Other Name: Participants Choosing Research Pseudonyms.” Qualitative Research in Psychology , Dec. 2015. Research Gate , doi: 10.1080/14780887.2015.1133746.

Bogdan, Robert C., and Sari Knopp Biklen. Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theories and Methods . 5 th ed., Pearson, 2007.

Calvert, Jane, and Joan H. Fujimura. “Calculating Life? Duelling Discourses in Interdisciplinary Systems Biology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences , vol. 42, no. 2l, 2011. Science Direct , https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2010.11.022 .

Godbee, Beth. “Toward Explaining the Transformative Power of Talk About, Around, and for Writing.” Research in the Teaching of English , vol. 47, no. 2, 2012, pp. 171-97.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Strategies for Writing Center Research . Parlor Press, 2016.

Herrera, Yoshiko M. “The 2002 Russian Census: Institutional Reform at Goskomstar.”  Post-Soviet Affairs , vol, 20, no. 4, 2004, pp. 350-86.

Hutchcroft, Paul D. Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines , Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998.

Kinkead, Joyce. Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods . University Press of Colorado, 2015.

Kumar, Mahesh. “Verbatim Vs Non-Verbatim Transcription: Differences, Requirements, & Jobs.” Transcription Certification Institute , 5 December 2017. Accessed online 19 June 2017. https://blog.transcriptioncertificationinstitute.org/verbatim-vs-non-verbatim-transcription-differences-requirements-jobs/.

Poland, Blake D. “Transcription Quality as an Aspect of Rigor in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry , no. 1, vol. 3, 1995, pp. 290-310.

Seidman, Irving. Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences . 3 rd ed., Teachers College Press, 2006.

Vieira, Kate. “Undocumented in a Documentary Society: Textual Borders and Transnational Religious Literacies.”  Written Communication , vol 28, no. 4, 2011, pp. 436-61.

Academic and Professional Writing

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Chapter 11. Interviewing

Introduction.

Interviewing people is at the heart of qualitative research. It is not merely a way to collect data but an intrinsically rewarding activity—an interaction between two people that holds the potential for greater understanding and interpersonal development. Unlike many of our daily interactions with others that are fairly shallow and mundane, sitting down with a person for an hour or two and really listening to what they have to say is a profound and deep enterprise, one that can provide not only “data” for you, the interviewer, but also self-understanding and a feeling of being heard for the interviewee. I always approach interviewing with a deep appreciation for the opportunity it gives me to understand how other people experience the world. That said, there is not one kind of interview but many, and some of these are shallower than others. This chapter will provide you with an overview of interview techniques but with a special focus on the in-depth semistructured interview guide approach, which is the approach most widely used in social science research.

An interview can be variously defined as “a conversation with a purpose” ( Lune and Berg 2018 ) and an attempt to understand the world from the point of view of the person being interviewed: “to unfold the meaning of peoples’ experiences, to uncover their lived world prior to scientific explanations” ( Kvale 2007 ). It is a form of active listening in which the interviewer steers the conversation to subjects and topics of interest to their research but also manages to leave enough space for those interviewed to say surprising things. Achieving that balance is a tricky thing, which is why most practitioners believe interviewing is both an art and a science. In my experience as a teacher, there are some students who are “natural” interviewers (often they are introverts), but anyone can learn to conduct interviews, and everyone, even those of us who have been doing this for years, can improve their interviewing skills. This might be a good time to highlight the fact that the interview is a product between interviewer and interviewee and that this product is only as good as the rapport established between the two participants. Active listening is the key to establishing this necessary rapport.

Patton ( 2002 ) makes the argument that we use interviews because there are certain things that are not observable. In particular, “we cannot observe feelings, thoughts, and intentions. We cannot observe behaviors that took place at some previous point in time. We cannot observe situations that preclude the presence of an observer. We cannot observe how people have organized the world and the meanings they attach to what goes on in the world. We have to ask people questions about those things” ( 341 ).

Types of Interviews

There are several distinct types of interviews. Imagine a continuum (figure 11.1). On one side are unstructured conversations—the kind you have with your friends. No one is in control of those conversations, and what you talk about is often random—whatever pops into your head. There is no secret, underlying purpose to your talking—if anything, the purpose is to talk to and engage with each other, and the words you use and the things you talk about are a little beside the point. An unstructured interview is a little like this informal conversation, except that one of the parties to the conversation (you, the researcher) does have an underlying purpose, and that is to understand the other person. You are not friends speaking for no purpose, but it might feel just as unstructured to the “interviewee” in this scenario. That is one side of the continuum. On the other side are fully structured and standardized survey-type questions asked face-to-face. Here it is very clear who is asking the questions and who is answering them. This doesn’t feel like a conversation at all! A lot of people new to interviewing have this ( erroneously !) in mind when they think about interviews as data collection. Somewhere in the middle of these two extreme cases is the “ semistructured” interview , in which the researcher uses an “interview guide” to gently move the conversation to certain topics and issues. This is the primary form of interviewing for qualitative social scientists and will be what I refer to as interviewing for the rest of this chapter, unless otherwise specified.

Informal (unstructured conversations). This is the most “open-ended” approach to interviewing. It is particularly useful in conjunction with observational methods (see chapters 13 and 14). There are no predetermined questions. Each interview will be different. Imagine you are researching the Oregon Country Fair, an annual event in Veneta, Oregon, that includes live music, artisan craft booths, face painting, and a lot of people walking through forest paths. It’s unlikely that you will be able to get a person to sit down with you and talk intensely about a set of questions for an hour and a half. But you might be able to sidle up to several people and engage with them about their experiences at the fair. You might have a general interest in what attracts people to these events, so you could start a conversation by asking strangers why they are here or why they come back every year. That’s it. Then you have a conversation that may lead you anywhere. Maybe one person tells a long story about how their parents brought them here when they were a kid. A second person talks about how this is better than Burning Man. A third person shares their favorite traveling band. And yet another enthuses about the public library in the woods. During your conversations, you also talk about a lot of other things—the weather, the utilikilts for sale, the fact that a favorite food booth has disappeared. It’s all good. You may not be able to record these conversations. Instead, you might jot down notes on the spot and then, when you have the time, write down as much as you can remember about the conversations in long fieldnotes. Later, you will have to sit down with these fieldnotes and try to make sense of all the information (see chapters 18 and 19).

Interview guide ( semistructured interview ). This is the primary type employed by social science qualitative researchers. The researcher creates an “interview guide” in advance, which she uses in every interview. In theory, every person interviewed is asked the same questions. In practice, every person interviewed is asked mostly the same topics but not always the same questions, as the whole point of a “guide” is that it guides the direction of the conversation but does not command it. The guide is typically between five and ten questions or question areas, sometimes with suggested follow-ups or prompts . For example, one question might be “What was it like growing up in Eastern Oregon?” with prompts such as “Did you live in a rural area? What kind of high school did you attend?” to help the conversation develop. These interviews generally take place in a quiet place (not a busy walkway during a festival) and are recorded. The recordings are transcribed, and those transcriptions then become the “data” that is analyzed (see chapters 18 and 19). The conventional length of one of these types of interviews is between one hour and two hours, optimally ninety minutes. Less than one hour doesn’t allow for much development of questions and thoughts, and two hours (or more) is a lot of time to ask someone to sit still and answer questions. If you have a lot of ground to cover, and the person is willing, I highly recommend two separate interview sessions, with the second session being slightly shorter than the first (e.g., ninety minutes the first day, sixty minutes the second). There are lots of good reasons for this, but the most compelling one is that this allows you to listen to the first day’s recording and catch anything interesting you might have missed in the moment and so develop follow-up questions that can probe further. This also allows the person being interviewed to have some time to think about the issues raised in the interview and go a little deeper with their answers.

Standardized questionnaire with open responses ( structured interview ). This is the type of interview a lot of people have in mind when they hear “interview”: a researcher comes to your door with a clipboard and proceeds to ask you a series of questions. These questions are all the same whoever answers the door; they are “standardized.” Both the wording and the exact order are important, as people’s responses may vary depending on how and when a question is asked. These are qualitative only in that the questions allow for “open-ended responses”: people can say whatever they want rather than select from a predetermined menu of responses. For example, a survey I collaborated on included this open-ended response question: “How does class affect one’s career success in sociology?” Some of the answers were simply one word long (e.g., “debt”), and others were long statements with stories and personal anecdotes. It is possible to be surprised by the responses. Although it’s a stretch to call this kind of questioning a conversation, it does allow the person answering the question some degree of freedom in how they answer.

Survey questionnaire with closed responses (not an interview!). Standardized survey questions with specific answer options (e.g., closed responses) are not really interviews at all, and they do not generate qualitative data. For example, if we included five options for the question “How does class affect one’s career success in sociology?”—(1) debt, (2) social networks, (3) alienation, (4) family doesn’t understand, (5) type of grad program—we leave no room for surprises at all. Instead, we would most likely look at patterns around these responses, thinking quantitatively rather than qualitatively (e.g., using regression analysis techniques, we might find that working-class sociologists were twice as likely to bring up alienation). It can sometimes be confusing for new students because the very same survey can include both closed-ended and open-ended questions. The key is to think about how these will be analyzed and to what level surprises are possible. If your plan is to turn all responses into a number and make predictions about correlations and relationships, you are no longer conducting qualitative research. This is true even if you are conducting this survey face-to-face with a real live human. Closed-response questions are not conversations of any kind, purposeful or not.

In summary, the semistructured interview guide approach is the predominant form of interviewing for social science qualitative researchers because it allows a high degree of freedom of responses from those interviewed (thus allowing for novel discoveries) while still maintaining some connection to a research question area or topic of interest. The rest of the chapter assumes the employment of this form.

Creating an Interview Guide

Your interview guide is the instrument used to bridge your research question(s) and what the people you are interviewing want to tell you. Unlike a standardized questionnaire, the questions actually asked do not need to be exactly what you have written down in your guide. The guide is meant to create space for those you are interviewing to talk about the phenomenon of interest, but sometimes you are not even sure what that phenomenon is until you start asking questions. A priority in creating an interview guide is to ensure it offers space. One of the worst mistakes is to create questions that are so specific that the person answering them will not stray. Relatedly, questions that sound “academic” will shut down a lot of respondents. A good interview guide invites respondents to talk about what is important to them, not feel like they are performing or being evaluated by you.

Good interview questions should not sound like your “research question” at all. For example, let’s say your research question is “How do patriarchal assumptions influence men’s understanding of climate change and responses to climate change?” It would be worse than unhelpful to ask a respondent, “How do your assumptions about the role of men affect your understanding of climate change?” You need to unpack this into manageable nuggets that pull your respondent into the area of interest without leading him anywhere. You could start by asking him what he thinks about climate change in general. Or, even better, whether he has any concerns about heatwaves or increased tornadoes or polar icecaps melting. Once he starts talking about that, you can ask follow-up questions that bring in issues around gendered roles, perhaps asking if he is married (to a woman) and whether his wife shares his thoughts and, if not, how they negotiate that difference. The fact is, you won’t really know the right questions to ask until he starts talking.

There are several distinct types of questions that can be used in your interview guide, either as main questions or as follow-up probes. If you remember that the point is to leave space for the respondent, you will craft a much more effective interview guide! You will also want to think about the place of time in both the questions themselves (past, present, future orientations) and the sequencing of the questions.

Researcher Note

Suggestion : As you read the next three sections (types of questions, temporality, question sequence), have in mind a particular research question, and try to draft questions and sequence them in a way that opens space for a discussion that helps you answer your research question.

Type of Questions

Experience and behavior questions ask about what a respondent does regularly (their behavior) or has done (their experience). These are relatively easy questions for people to answer because they appear more “factual” and less subjective. This makes them good opening questions. For the study on climate change above, you might ask, “Have you ever experienced an unusual weather event? What happened?” Or “You said you work outside? What is a typical summer workday like for you? How do you protect yourself from the heat?”

Opinion and values questions , in contrast, ask questions that get inside the minds of those you are interviewing. “Do you think climate change is real? Who or what is responsible for it?” are two such questions. Note that you don’t have to literally ask, “What is your opinion of X?” but you can find a way to ask the specific question relevant to the conversation you are having. These questions are a bit trickier to ask because the answers you get may depend in part on how your respondent perceives you and whether they want to please you or not. We’ve talked a fair amount about being reflective. Here is another place where this comes into play. You need to be aware of the effect your presence might have on the answers you are receiving and adjust accordingly. If you are a woman who is perceived as liberal asking a man who identifies as conservative about climate change, there is a lot of subtext that can be going on in the interview. There is no one right way to resolve this, but you must at least be aware of it.

Feeling questions are questions that ask respondents to draw on their emotional responses. It’s pretty common for academic researchers to forget that we have bodies and emotions, but people’s understandings of the world often operate at this affective level, sometimes unconsciously or barely consciously. It is a good idea to include questions that leave space for respondents to remember, imagine, or relive emotional responses to particular phenomena. “What was it like when you heard your cousin’s house burned down in that wildfire?” doesn’t explicitly use any emotion words, but it allows your respondent to remember what was probably a pretty emotional day. And if they respond emotionally neutral, that is pretty interesting data too. Note that asking someone “How do you feel about X” is not always going to evoke an emotional response, as they might simply turn around and respond with “I think that…” It is better to craft a question that actually pushes the respondent into the affective category. This might be a specific follow-up to an experience and behavior question —for example, “You just told me about your daily routine during the summer heat. Do you worry it is going to get worse?” or “Have you ever been afraid it will be too hot to get your work accomplished?”

Knowledge questions ask respondents what they actually know about something factual. We have to be careful when we ask these types of questions so that respondents do not feel like we are evaluating them (which would shut them down), but, for example, it is helpful to know when you are having a conversation about climate change that your respondent does in fact know that unusual weather events have increased and that these have been attributed to climate change! Asking these questions can set the stage for deeper questions and can ensure that the conversation makes the same kind of sense to both participants. For example, a conversation about political polarization can be put back on track once you realize that the respondent doesn’t really have a clear understanding that there are two parties in the US. Instead of asking a series of questions about Republicans and Democrats, you might shift your questions to talk more generally about political disagreements (e.g., “people against abortion”). And sometimes what you do want to know is the level of knowledge about a particular program or event (e.g., “Are you aware you can discharge your student loans through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program?”).

Sensory questions call on all senses of the respondent to capture deeper responses. These are particularly helpful in sparking memory. “Think back to your childhood in Eastern Oregon. Describe the smells, the sounds…” Or you could use these questions to help a person access the full experience of a setting they customarily inhabit: “When you walk through the doors to your office building, what do you see? Hear? Smell?” As with feeling questions , these questions often supplement experience and behavior questions . They are another way of allowing your respondent to report fully and deeply rather than remain on the surface.

Creative questions employ illustrative examples, suggested scenarios, or simulations to get respondents to think more deeply about an issue, topic, or experience. There are many options here. In The Trouble with Passion , Erin Cech ( 2021 ) provides a scenario in which “Joe” is trying to decide whether to stay at his decent but boring computer job or follow his passion by opening a restaurant. She asks respondents, “What should Joe do?” Their answers illuminate the attraction of “passion” in job selection. In my own work, I have used a news story about an upwardly mobile young man who no longer has time to see his mother and sisters to probe respondents’ feelings about the costs of social mobility. Jessi Streib and Betsy Leondar-Wright have used single-page cartoon “scenes” to elicit evaluations of potential racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and classism. Barbara Sutton ( 2010 ) has employed lists of words (“strong,” “mother,” “victim”) on notecards she fans out and asks her female respondents to select and discuss.

Background/Demographic Questions

You most definitely will want to know more about the person you are interviewing in terms of conventional demographic information, such as age, race, gender identity, occupation, and educational attainment. These are not questions that normally open up inquiry. [1] For this reason, my practice has been to include a separate “demographic questionnaire” sheet that I ask each respondent to fill out at the conclusion of the interview. Only include those aspects that are relevant to your study. For example, if you are not exploring religion or religious affiliation, do not include questions about a person’s religion on the demographic sheet. See the example provided at the end of this chapter.

Temporality

Any type of question can have a past, present, or future orientation. For example, if you are asking a behavior question about workplace routine, you might ask the respondent to talk about past work, present work, and ideal (future) work. Similarly, if you want to understand how people cope with natural disasters, you might ask your respondent how they felt then during the wildfire and now in retrospect and whether and to what extent they have concerns for future wildfire disasters. It’s a relatively simple suggestion—don’t forget to ask about past, present, and future—but it can have a big impact on the quality of the responses you receive.

Question Sequence

Having a list of good questions or good question areas is not enough to make a good interview guide. You will want to pay attention to the order in which you ask your questions. Even though any one respondent can derail this order (perhaps by jumping to answer a question you haven’t yet asked), a good advance plan is always helpful. When thinking about sequence, remember that your goal is to get your respondent to open up to you and to say things that might surprise you. To establish rapport, it is best to start with nonthreatening questions. Asking about the present is often the safest place to begin, followed by the past (they have to know you a little bit to get there), and lastly, the future (talking about hopes and fears requires the most rapport). To allow for surprises, it is best to move from very general questions to more particular questions only later in the interview. This ensures that respondents have the freedom to bring up the topics that are relevant to them rather than feel like they are constrained to answer you narrowly. For example, refrain from asking about particular emotions until these have come up previously—don’t lead with them. Often, your more particular questions will emerge only during the course of the interview, tailored to what is emerging in conversation.

Once you have a set of questions, read through them aloud and imagine you are being asked the same questions. Does the set of questions have a natural flow? Would you be willing to answer the very first question to a total stranger? Does your sequence establish facts and experiences before moving on to opinions and values? Did you include prefatory statements, where necessary; transitions; and other announcements? These can be as simple as “Hey, we talked a lot about your experiences as a barista while in college.… Now I am turning to something completely different: how you managed friendships in college.” That is an abrupt transition, but it has been softened by your acknowledgment of that.

Probes and Flexibility

Once you have the interview guide, you will also want to leave room for probes and follow-up questions. As in the sample probe included here, you can write out the obvious probes and follow-up questions in advance. You might not need them, as your respondent might anticipate them and include full responses to the original question. Or you might need to tailor them to how your respondent answered the question. Some common probes and follow-up questions include asking for more details (When did that happen? Who else was there?), asking for elaboration (Could you say more about that?), asking for clarification (Does that mean what I think it means or something else? I understand what you mean, but someone else reading the transcript might not), and asking for contrast or comparison (How did this experience compare with last year’s event?). “Probing is a skill that comes from knowing what to look for in the interview, listening carefully to what is being said and what is not said, and being sensitive to the feedback needs of the person being interviewed” ( Patton 2002:374 ). It takes work! And energy. I and many other interviewers I know report feeling emotionally and even physically drained after conducting an interview. You are tasked with active listening and rearranging your interview guide as needed on the fly. If you only ask the questions written down in your interview guide with no deviations, you are doing it wrong. [2]

The Final Question

Every interview guide should include a very open-ended final question that allows for the respondent to say whatever it is they have been dying to tell you but you’ve forgotten to ask. About half the time they are tired too and will tell you they have nothing else to say. But incredibly, some of the most honest and complete responses take place here, at the end of a long interview. You have to realize that the person being interviewed is often discovering things about themselves as they talk to you and that this process of discovery can lead to new insights for them. Making space at the end is therefore crucial. Be sure you convey that you actually do want them to tell you more, that the offer of “anything else?” is not read as an empty convention where the polite response is no. Here is where you can pull from that active listening and tailor the final question to the particular person. For example, “I’ve asked you a lot of questions about what it was like to live through that wildfire. I’m wondering if there is anything I’ve forgotten to ask, especially because I haven’t had that experience myself” is a much more inviting final question than “Great. Anything you want to add?” It’s also helpful to convey to the person that you have the time to listen to their full answer, even if the allotted time is at the end. After all, there are no more questions to ask, so the respondent knows exactly how much time is left. Do them the courtesy of listening to them!

Conducting the Interview

Once you have your interview guide, you are on your way to conducting your first interview. I always practice my interview guide with a friend or family member. I do this even when the questions don’t make perfect sense for them, as it still helps me realize which questions make no sense, are poorly worded (too academic), or don’t follow sequentially. I also practice the routine I will use for interviewing, which goes something like this:

• Introduce myself and reintroduce the study
• Provide consent form and ask them to sign and retain/return copy
• Ask if they have any questions about the study before we begin
• Ask if I can begin recording
• Ask questions (from interview guide)
• Turn off the recording device
• Ask if they are willing to fill out my demographic questionnaire
• Collect questionnaire and, without looking at the answers, place in same folder as signed consent form
• Thank them and depart

A note on remote interviewing: Interviews have traditionally been conducted face-to-face in a private or quiet public setting. You don’t want a lot of background noise, as this will make transcriptions difficult. During the recent global pandemic, many interviewers, myself included, learned the benefits of interviewing remotely. Although face-to-face is still preferable for many reasons, Zoom interviewing is not a bad alternative, and it does allow more interviews across great distances. Zoom also includes automatic transcription, which significantly cuts down on the time it normally takes to convert our conversations into “data” to be analyzed. These automatic transcriptions are not perfect, however, and you will still need to listen to the recording and clarify and clean up the transcription. Nor do automatic transcriptions include notations of body language or change of tone, which you may want to include. When interviewing remotely, you will want to collect the consent form before you meet: ask them to read, sign, and return it as an email attachment. I think it is better to ask for the demographic questionnaire after the interview, but because some respondents may never return it then, it is probably best to ask for this at the same time as the consent form, in advance of the interview.

What should you bring to the interview? I would recommend bringing two copies of the consent form (one for you and one for the respondent), a demographic questionnaire, a manila folder in which to place the signed consent form and filled-out demographic questionnaire, a printed copy of your interview guide (I print with three-inch right margins so I can jot down notes on the page next to relevant questions), a pen, a recording device, and water.

After the interview, you will want to secure the signed consent form in a locked filing cabinet (if in print) or a password-protected folder on your computer. Using Excel or a similar program that allows tables/spreadsheets, create an identifying number for your interview that links to the consent form without using the name of your respondent. For example, let’s say that I conduct interviews with US politicians, and the first person I meet with is George W. Bush. I will assign the transcription the number “INT#001” and add it to the signed consent form. [3] The signed consent form goes into a locked filing cabinet, and I never use the name “George W. Bush” again. I take the information from the demographic sheet, open my Excel spreadsheet, and add the relevant information in separate columns for the row INT#001: White, male, Republican. When I interview Bill Clinton as my second interview, I include a second row: INT#002: White, male, Democrat. And so on. The only link to the actual name of the respondent and this information is the fact that the consent form (unavailable to anyone but me) has stamped on it the interview number.

Many students get very nervous before their first interview. Actually, many of us are always nervous before the interview! But do not worry—this is normal, and it does pass. Chances are, you will be pleasantly surprised at how comfortable it begins to feel. These “purposeful conversations” are often a delight for both participants. This is not to say that sometimes things go wrong. I often have my students practice several “bad scenarios” (e.g., a respondent that you cannot get to open up; a respondent who is too talkative and dominates the conversation, steering it away from the topics you are interested in; emotions that completely take over; or shocking disclosures you are ill-prepared to handle), but most of the time, things go quite well. Be prepared for the unexpected, but know that the reason interviews are so popular as a technique of data collection is that they are usually richly rewarding for both participants.

One thing that I stress to my methods students and remind myself about is that interviews are still conversations between people. If there’s something you might feel uncomfortable asking someone about in a “normal” conversation, you will likely also feel a bit of discomfort asking it in an interview. Maybe more importantly, your respondent may feel uncomfortable. Social research—especially about inequality—can be uncomfortable. And it’s easy to slip into an abstract, intellectualized, or removed perspective as an interviewer. This is one reason trying out interview questions is important. Another is that sometimes the question sounds good in your head but doesn’t work as well out loud in practice. I learned this the hard way when a respondent asked me how I would answer the question I had just posed, and I realized that not only did I not really know how I would answer it, but I also wasn’t quite as sure I knew what I was asking as I had thought.

—Elizabeth M. Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology at Saint Joseph’s University, author of Class and Campus Life , and co-author of Geographies of Campus Inequality

How Many Interviews?

Your research design has included a targeted number of interviews and a recruitment plan (see chapter 5). Follow your plan, but remember that “ saturation ” is your goal. You interview as many people as you can until you reach a point at which you are no longer surprised by what they tell you. This means not that no one after your first twenty interviews will have surprising, interesting stories to tell you but rather that the picture you are forming about the phenomenon of interest to you from a research perspective has come into focus, and none of the interviews are substantially refocusing that picture. That is when you should stop collecting interviews. Note that to know when you have reached this, you will need to read your transcripts as you go. More about this in chapters 18 and 19.

Your Final Product: The Ideal Interview Transcript

A good interview transcript will demonstrate a subtly controlled conversation by the skillful interviewer. In general, you want to see replies that are about one paragraph long, not short sentences and not running on for several pages. Although it is sometimes necessary to follow respondents down tangents, it is also often necessary to pull them back to the questions that form the basis of your research study. This is not really a free conversation, although it may feel like that to the person you are interviewing.

Final Tips from an Interview Master

Annette Lareau is arguably one of the masters of the trade. In Listening to People , she provides several guidelines for good interviews and then offers a detailed example of an interview gone wrong and how it could be addressed (please see the “Further Readings” at the end of this chapter). Here is an abbreviated version of her set of guidelines: (1) interview respondents who are experts on the subjects of most interest to you (as a corollary, don’t ask people about things they don’t know); (2) listen carefully and talk as little as possible; (3) keep in mind what you want to know and why you want to know it; (4) be a proactive interviewer (subtly guide the conversation); (5) assure respondents that there aren’t any right or wrong answers; (6) use the respondent’s own words to probe further (this both allows you to accurately identify what you heard and pushes the respondent to explain further); (7) reuse effective probes (don’t reinvent the wheel as you go—if repeating the words back works, do it again and again); (8) focus on learning the subjective meanings that events or experiences have for a respondent; (9) don’t be afraid to ask a question that draws on your own knowledge (unlike trial lawyers who are trained never to ask a question for which they don’t already know the answer, sometimes it’s worth it to ask risky questions based on your hypotheses or just plain hunches); (10) keep thinking while you are listening (so difficult…and important); (11) return to a theme raised by a respondent if you want further information; (12) be mindful of power inequalities (and never ever coerce a respondent to continue the interview if they want out); (13) take control with overly talkative respondents; (14) expect overly succinct responses, and develop strategies for probing further; (15) balance digging deep and moving on; (16) develop a plan to deflect questions (e.g., let them know you are happy to answer any questions at the end of the interview, but you don’t want to take time away from them now); and at the end, (17) check to see whether you have asked all your questions. You don’t always have to ask everyone the same set of questions, but if there is a big area you have forgotten to cover, now is the time to recover ( Lareau 2021:93–103 ).

Sample: Demographic Questionnaire

ASA Taskforce on First-Generation and Working-Class Persons in Sociology – Class Effects on Career Success

Supplementary Demographic Questionnaire

Thank you for your participation in this interview project. We would like to collect a few pieces of key demographic information from you to supplement our analyses. Your answers to these questions will be kept confidential and stored by ID number. All of your responses here are entirely voluntary!

What best captures your race/ethnicity? (please check any/all that apply)

• White (Non Hispanic/Latina/o/x)
• Black or African American
• Hispanic, Latino/a/x of Spanish
• Asian or Asian American
• American Indian or Alaska Native
• Middle Eastern or North African
• Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
• Other : (Please write in: ________________)

What is your current position?

• Grad Student
• Full Professor

Please check any and all of the following that apply to you:

• I identify as a working-class academic
• I was the first in my family to graduate from college
• I grew up poor

What best reflects your gender?

• Transgender female/Transgender woman
• Transgender male/Transgender man
• Gender queer/ Gender nonconforming

Anything else you would like us to know about you?

Example: Interview Guide

In this example, follow-up prompts are italicized.  Note the sequence of questions.  That second question often elicits an entire life history , answering several later questions in advance.

Introduction Script/Question

Thank you for participating in our survey of ASA members who identify as first-generation or working-class.  As you may have heard, ASA has sponsored a taskforce on first-generation and working-class persons in sociology and we are interested in hearing from those who so identify.  Your participation in this interview will help advance our knowledge in this area.

• The first thing we would like to as you is why you have volunteered to be part of this study? What does it mean to you be first-gen or working class?  Why were you willing to be interviewed?
• How did you decide to become a sociologist?
• Can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up? ( prompts: what did your parent(s) do for a living?  What kind of high school did you attend?)
• Has this identity been salient to your experience? (how? How much?)
• How welcoming was your grad program? Your first academic employer?
• Why did you decide to pursue sociology at the graduate level?
• Did you experience culture shock in college? In graduate school?
• Has your FGWC status shaped how you’ve thought about where you went to school? debt? etc?
• Were you mentored? How did this work (not work)?  How might it?
• What did you consider when deciding where to go to grad school? Where to apply for your first position?
• What, to you, is a mark of career success? Have you achieved that success?  What has helped or hindered your pursuit of success?
• Do you think sociology, as a field, cares about prestige?
• Let’s talk a little bit about intersectionality. How does being first-gen/working class work alongside other identities that are important to you?
• What do your friends and family think about your career? Have you had any difficulty relating to family members or past friends since becoming highly educated?
• Do you have any debt from college/grad school? Are you concerned about this?  Could you explain more about how you paid for college/grad school?  (here, include assistance from family, fellowships, scholarships, etc.)
• (You’ve mentioned issues or obstacles you had because of your background.) What could have helped?  Or, who or what did? Can you think of fortuitous moments in your career?
• Do you have any regrets about the path you took?
• Is there anything else you would like to add? Anything that the Taskforce should take note of, that we did not ask you about here?

Further Readings

Britten, Nicky. 1995. “Qualitative Interviews in Medical Research.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 31(6999):251–253. A good basic overview of interviewing particularly useful for students of public health and medical research generally.

Corbin, Juliet, and Janice M. Morse. 2003. “The Unstructured Interactive Interview: Issues of Reciprocity and Risks When Dealing with Sensitive Topics.” Qualitative Inquiry 9(3):335–354. Weighs the potential benefits and harms of conducting interviews on topics that may cause emotional distress. Argues that the researcher’s skills and code of ethics should ensure that the interviewing process provides more of a benefit to both participant and researcher than a harm to the former.

Gerson, Kathleen, and Sarah Damaske. 2020. The Science and Art of Interviewing . New York: Oxford University Press. A useful guidebook/textbook for both undergraduates and graduate students, written by sociologists.

Kvale, Steiner. 2007. Doing Interviews . London: SAGE. An easy-to-follow guide to conducting and analyzing interviews by psychologists.

Lamont, Michèle, and Ann Swidler. 2014. “Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing.” Qualitative Sociology 37(2):153–171. Written as a response to various debates surrounding the relative value of interview-based studies and ethnographic studies defending the particular strengths of interviewing. This is a must-read article for anyone seriously engaging in qualitative research!

Pugh, Allison J. 2013. “What Good Are Interviews for Thinking about Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1(1):42–68. Another defense of interviewing written against those who champion ethnographic methods as superior, particularly in the area of studying culture. A classic.

Rapley, Timothy John. 2001. “The ‘Artfulness’ of Open-Ended Interviewing: Some considerations in analyzing interviews.” Qualitative Research 1(3):303–323. Argues for the importance of “local context” of data production (the relationship built between interviewer and interviewee, for example) in properly analyzing interview data.

Weiss, Robert S. 1995. Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies . New York: Simon and Schuster. A classic and well-regarded textbook on interviewing. Because Weiss has extensive experience conducting surveys, he contrasts the qualitative interview with the survey questionnaire well; particularly useful for those trained in the latter.

• I say “normally” because how people understand their various identities can itself be an expansive topic of inquiry. Here, I am merely talking about collecting otherwise unexamined demographic data, similar to how we ask people to check boxes on surveys. ↵
• Again, this applies to “semistructured in-depth interviewing.” When conducting standardized questionnaires, you will want to ask each question exactly as written, without deviations! ↵
• I always include “INT” in the number because I sometimes have other kinds of data with their own numbering: FG#001 would mean the first focus group, for example. I also always include three-digit spaces, as this allows for up to 999 interviews (or, more realistically, allows for me to interview up to one hundred persons without having to reset my numbering system). ↵

A method of data collection in which the researcher asks the participant questions; the answers to these questions are often recorded and transcribed verbatim. There are many different kinds of interviews - see also semistructured interview , structured interview , and unstructured interview .

A document listing key questions and question areas for use during an interview.  It is used most often for semi-structured interviews.  A good interview guide may have no more than ten primary questions for two hours of interviewing, but these ten questions will be supplemented by probes and relevant follow-ups throughout the interview.  Most IRBs require the inclusion of the interview guide in applications for review.  See also interview and  semi-structured interview .

A data-collection method that relies on casual, conversational, and informal interviewing.  Despite its apparent conversational nature, the researcher usually has a set of particular questions or question areas in mind but allows the interview to unfold spontaneously.  This is a common data-collection technique among ethnographers.  Compare to the semi-structured or in-depth interview .

A form of interview that follows a standard guide of questions asked, although the order of the questions may change to match the particular needs of each individual interview subject, and probing “follow-up” questions are often added during the course of the interview.  The semi-structured interview is the primary form of interviewing used by qualitative researchers in the social sciences.  It is sometimes referred to as an “in-depth” interview.  See also interview and  interview guide .

The cluster of data-collection tools and techniques that involve observing interactions between people, the behaviors, and practices of individuals (sometimes in contrast to what they say about how they act and behave), and cultures in context.  Observational methods are the key tools employed by ethnographers and Grounded Theory .

Follow-up questions used in a semi-structured interview  to elicit further elaboration.  Suggested prompts can be included in the interview guide  to be used/deployed depending on how the initial question was answered or if the topic of the prompt does not emerge spontaneously.

A form of interview that follows a strict set of questions, asked in a particular order, for all interview subjects.  The questions are also the kind that elicits short answers, and the data is more “informative” than probing.  This is often used in mixed-methods studies, accompanying a survey instrument.  Because there is no room for nuance or the exploration of meaning in structured interviews, qualitative researchers tend to employ semi-structured interviews instead.  See also interview.

The point at which you can conclude data collection because every person you are interviewing, the interaction you are observing, or content you are analyzing merely confirms what you have already noted.  Achieving saturation is often used as the justification for the final sample size.

An interview variant in which a person’s life story is elicited in a narrative form.  Turning points and key themes are established by the researcher and used as data points for further analysis.

Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods Copyright © 2023 by Allison Hurst is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Qualitative Research 101: Interviewing

5 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Undertaking Interviews

By: David Phair (PhD) and Kerryn Warren (PhD) | March 2022

Undertaking interviews is potentially the most important step in the qualitative research process. If you don’t collect useful, useable data in your interviews, you’ll struggle through the rest of your dissertation or thesis.  Having helped numerous students with their research over the years, we’ve noticed some common interviewing mistakes that first-time researchers make. In this post, we’ll discuss five costly interview-related mistakes and outline useful strategies to avoid making these.

Overview: 5 Interviewing Mistakes

• Not having a clear interview strategy /plan
• Not having good interview techniques /skills
• Not securing a suitable location and equipment
• Not having a basic risk management plan
• Not keeping your “ golden thread ” front of mind

1. Not having a clear interview strategy

The first common mistake that we’ll look at is that of starting the interviewing process without having first come up with a clear interview strategy or plan of action. While it’s natural to be keen to get started engaging with your interviewees, a lack of planning can result in a mess of data and inconsistency between interviews.

There are several design choices to decide on and plan for before you start interviewing anyone. Some of the most important questions you need to ask yourself before conducting interviews include:

• What are the guiding research aims and research questions of my study?
• Will I use a structured, semi-structured or unstructured interview approach?
• How will I record the interviews (audio or video)?
• Who will be interviewed and by whom ?
• What ethics and data law considerations do I need to adhere to?
• How will I analyze my data? 

Let’s take a quick look at some of these.

The core objective of the interviewing process is to generate useful data that will help you address your overall research aims. Therefore, your interviews need to be conducted in a way that directly links to your research aims, objectives and research questions (i.e. your “golden thread”). This means that you need to carefully consider the questions you’ll ask to ensure that they align with and feed into your golden thread. If any question doesn’t align with this, you may want to consider scrapping it.

Another important design choice is whether you’ll use an unstructured, semi-structured or structured interview approach . For semi-structured interviews, you will have a list of questions that you plan to ask and these questions will be open-ended in nature. You’ll also allow the discussion to digress from the core question set if something interesting comes up. This means that the type of information generated might differ a fair amount between interviews.

Contrasted to this, a structured approach to interviews is more rigid, where a specific set of closed questions is developed and asked for each interviewee in exactly the same order. Closed questions have a limited set of answers, that are often single-word answers. Therefore, you need to think about what you’re trying to achieve with your research project (i.e. your research aims) and decided on which approach would be best suited in your case.

It is also important to plan ahead with regards to who will be interviewed and how. You need to think about how you will approach the possible interviewees to get their cooperation, who will conduct the interviews, when to conduct the interviews and how to record the interviews. For each of these decisions, it’s also essential to make sure that all ethical considerations and data protection laws are taken into account.

Finally, you should think through how you plan to analyze the data (i.e., your qualitative analysis method) generated by the interviews. Different types of analysis rely on different types of data, so you need to ensure you’re asking the right types of questions and correctly guiding your respondents.

Simply put, you need to have a plan of action regarding the specifics of your interview approach before you start collecting data. If not, you’ll end up drifting in your approach from interview to interview, which will result in inconsistent, unusable data.

2. Not having good interview technique

While you’re generally not expected to become you to be an expert interviewer for a dissertation or thesis, it is important to practice good interview technique and develop basic interviewing skills .

Let’s go through some basics that will help the process along.

Firstly, before the interview , make sure you know your interview questions well and have a clear idea of what you want from the interview. Naturally, the specificity of your questions will depend on whether you’re taking a structured, semi-structured or unstructured approach, but you still need a consistent starting point . Ideally, you should develop an interview guide beforehand (more on this later) that details your core question and links these to the research aims, objectives and research questions.

Before you undertake any interviews, it’s a good idea to do a few mock interviews with friends or family members. This will help you get comfortable with the interviewer role, prepare for potentially unexpected answers and give you a good idea of how long the interview will take to conduct. In the interviewing process, you’re likely to encounter two kinds of challenging interviewees ; the two-word respondent and the respondent who meanders and babbles. Therefore, you should prepare yourself for both and come up with a plan to respond to each in a way that will allow the interview to continue productively.

To begin the formal interview , provide the person you are interviewing with an overview of your research. This will help to calm their nerves (and yours) and contextualize the interaction. Ultimately, you want the interviewee to feel comfortable and be willing to be open and honest with you, so it’s useful to start in a more casual, relaxed fashion and allow them to ask any questions they may have. From there, you can ease them into the rest of the questions.

As the interview progresses , avoid asking leading questions (i.e., questions that assume something about the interviewee or their response). Make sure that you speak clearly and slowly , using plain language and being ready to paraphrase questions if the person you are interviewing misunderstands. Be particularly careful with interviewing English second language speakers to ensure that you’re both on the same page.

Engage with the interviewee by listening to them carefully and acknowledging that you are listening to them by smiling or nodding. Show them that you’re interested in what they’re saying and thank them for their openness as appropriate. This will also encourage your interviewee to respond openly.

Need a helping hand?

3. Not securing a suitable location and quality equipment

Where you conduct your interviews and the equipment you use to record them both play an important role in how the process unfolds. Therefore, you need to think carefully about each of these variables before you start interviewing.

Poor location: A bad location can result in the quality of your interviews being compromised, interrupted, or cancelled. If you are conducting physical interviews, you’ll need a location that is quiet, safe, and welcoming . It’s very important that your location of choice is not prone to interruptions (the workplace office is generally problematic, for example) and has suitable facilities (such as water, a bathroom, and snacks).

If you are conducting online interviews , you need to consider a few other factors. Importantly, you need to make sure that both you and your respondent have access to a good, stable internet connection and electricity. Always check before the time that both of you know how to use the relevant software and it’s accessible (sometimes meeting platforms are blocked by workplace policies or firewalls). It’s also good to have alternatives in place (such as WhatsApp, Zoom, or Teams) to cater for these types of issues.

Poor equipment: Using poor-quality recording equipment or using equipment incorrectly means that you will have trouble transcribing, coding, and analyzing your interviews. This can be a major issue , as some of your interview data may go completely to waste if not recorded well. So, make sure that you use good-quality recording equipment and that you know how to use it correctly.

To avoid issues, you should always conduct test recordings before every interview to ensure that you can use the relevant equipment properly. It’s also a good idea to spot check each recording afterwards, just to make sure it was recorded as planned. If your equipment uses batteries, be sure to always carry a spare set.

4. Not having a basic risk management plan

Many possible issues can arise during the interview process. Not planning for these issues can mean that you are left with compromised data that might not be useful to you. Therefore, it’s important to map out some sort of risk management plan ahead of time, considering the potential risks, how you’ll minimize their probability and how you’ll manage them if they materialize.

Common potential issues related to the actual interview include cancellations (people pulling out), delays (such as getting stuck in traffic), language and accent differences (especially in the case of poor internet connections), issues with internet connections and power supply. Other issues can also occur in the interview itself. For example, the interviewee could drift off-topic, or you might encounter an interviewee who does not say much at all.

You can prepare for these potential issues by considering possible worst-case scenarios and preparing a response for each scenario. For instance, it is important to plan a backup date just in case your interviewee cannot make it to the first meeting you scheduled with them. It’s also a good idea to factor in a 30-minute gap between your interviews for the instances where someone might be late, or an interview runs overtime for other reasons. Make sure that you also plan backup questions that could be used to bring a respondent back on topic if they start rambling, or questions to encourage those who are saying too little.

In general, it’s best practice to plan to conduct more interviews than you think you need (this is called oversampling ). Doing so will allow you some room for error if there are interviews that don’t go as planned, or if some interviewees withdraw. If you need 10 interviews, it is a good idea to plan for 15. Likely, a few will cancel , delay, or not produce useful data.

5. Not keeping your golden thread front of mind

We touched on this a little earlier, but it is a key point that should be central to your entire research process. You don’t want to end up with pages and pages of data after conducting your interviews and realize that it is not useful to your research aims . Your research aims, objectives and research questions – i.e., your golden thread – should influence every design decision and should guide the interview process at all times. 

A useful way to avoid this mistake is by developing an interview guide before you begin interviewing your respondents. An interview guide is a document that contains all of your questions with notes on how each of the interview questions is linked to the research question(s) of your study. You can also include your research aims and objectives here for a more comprehensive linkage. 

You can easily create an interview guide by drawing up a table with one column containing your core interview questions . Then add another column with your research questions , another with expectations that you may have in light of the relevant literature and another with backup or follow-up questions . As mentioned, you can also bring in your research aims and objectives to help you connect them all together. If you’d like, you can download a copy of our free interview guide here .

Recap: Qualitative Interview Mistakes

In this post, we’ve discussed 5 common costly mistakes that are easy to make in the process of planning and conducting qualitative interviews.

To recap, these include:

If you have any questions about these interviewing mistakes, drop a comment below. Alternatively, if you’re interested in getting 1-on-1 help with your thesis or dissertation , check out our dissertation coaching service or book a free initial consultation with one of our friendly Grad Coaches.

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• University Libraries
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• Topic Guides
• Research Methods Guide
• Interview Research

Research Methods Guide: Interview Research

• Introduction
• Research Design & Method
• Survey Research
• Data Analysis
• Resources & Consultation

Tutorial Videos: Interview Method

Interview as a Method for Qualitative Research

Goals of Interview Research

• Preferences
• They help you explain, better understand, and explore research subjects' opinions, behavior, experiences, phenomenon, etc.
• Interview questions are usually open-ended questions so that in-depth information will be collected.

Mode of Data Collection

There are several types of interviews, including:

• Face-to-Face
• Online (e.g. Skype, Googlehangout, etc)

FAQ: Conducting Interview Research

What are the important steps involved in interviews?

• Think about who you will interview
• Think about what kind of information you want to obtain from interviews
• Think about why you want to pursue in-depth information around your research topic
• Introduce yourself and explain the aim of the interview
• Devise your questions so interviewees can help answer your research question
• Have a sequence to your questions / topics by grouping them in themes
• Make sure you can easily move back and forth between questions / topics
• Make sure your questions are clear and easy to understand
• Do not ask leading questions
• Do you want to bring a second interviewer with you?
• Do you want to bring a notetaker?
• Do you want to record interviews? If so, do you have time to transcribe interview recordings?
• Where will you interview people? Where is the setting with the least distraction?
• How long will each interview take?
• Do you need to address terms of confidentiality?

Do I have to choose either a survey or interviewing method?

No.  In fact, many researchers use a mixed method - interviews can be useful as follow-up to certain respondents to surveys, e.g., to further investigate their responses.

Is training an interviewer important?

Yes, since the interviewer can control the quality of the result, training the interviewer becomes crucial.  If more than one interviewers are involved in your study, it is important to have every interviewer understand the interviewing procedure and rehearse the interviewing process before beginning the formal study.

• << Previous: Survey Research
• Next: Data Analysis >>
• Last Updated: Aug 21, 2023 10:42 AM

• Harvard Library
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Library Support for Qualitative Research

• Interview Research
• Resources for Methodology
• Remote Research & Virtual Fieldwork

Resources for Research Interviewing

Nih-funded qualitative research.

• Oral History
• Data Management & Repositories
• Campus Access

Types of Interviews

• Engaging Participants

Interview Questions

• Conducting Interviews
• Transcription
• Coding and Analysis
• Managing & Finding Interview Data
• UX & Market Research Interviews

Textbooks, Guidebooks, and Handbooks  

• The Ethnographic Interview by James P. Spradley  “Spradley wrote this book for the professional and student who have never done ethnographic fieldwork (p. 231) and for the professional ethnographer who is interested in adapting the author’s procedures (p. iv). Part 1 outlines in 3 chapters Spradley’s version of ethnographic research, and it provides the background for Part 2 which consists of 12 guided steps (chapters) ranging from locating and interviewing an informant to writing an ethnography. Most of the examples come from the author’s own fieldwork among U.S. subcultures . . . Steps 6 and 8 explain lucidly how to construct a domain and a taxonomic analysis” (excerpted from book review by James D. Sexton, 1980).  
• Fundamentals of Qualitative Research by Johnny Saldana (Series edited by Patricia Leavy)  Provides a soup-to-nuts overview of the qualitative data collection process, including interviewing, participant observation, and other methods.  
• InterViews by Steinar Kvale  Interviewing is an essential tool in qualitative research and this introduction to interviewing outlines both the theoretical underpinnings and the practical aspects of the process. After examining the role of the interview in the research process, Steinar Kvale considers some of the key philosophical issues relating to interviewing: the interview as conversation, hermeneutics, phenomenology, concerns about ethics as well as validity, and postmodernism. Having established this framework, the author then analyzes the seven stages of the interview process - from designing a study to writing it up.  
• Practical Evaluation by Michael Quinn Patton  Surveys different interviewing strategies, from, a) informal/conversational, to b) interview guide approach, to c) standardized and open-ended, to d) closed/quantitative. Also discusses strategies for wording questions that are open-ended, clear, sensitive, and neutral, while supporting the speaker. Provides suggestions for probing and maintaining control of the interview process, as well as suggestions for recording and transcription.  
• The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research by Amir B. Marvasti (Editor); James A. Holstein (Editor); Jaber F. Gubrium (Editor); Karyn D. McKinney (Editor)  The new edition of this landmark volume emphasizes the dynamic, interactional, and reflexive dimensions of the research interview. Contributors highlight the myriad dimensions of complexity that are emerging as researchers increasingly frame the interview as a communicative opportunity as much as a data-gathering format. The book begins with the history and conceptual transformations of the interview, which is followed by chapters that discuss the main components of interview practice. Taken together, the contributions to The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft encourage readers simultaneously to learn the frameworks and technologies of interviewing and to reflect on the epistemological foundations of the interview craft.  
• The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods by Nigel G. Fielding, Raymond M. Lee and Grant Blank (Editors) Bringing together the leading names in both qualitative and quantitative online research, this new edition is organised into nine sections: 1. Online Research Methods 2. Designing Online Research 3. Online Data Capture and Data Collection 4. The Online Survey 5. Digital Quantitative Analysis 6. Digital Text Analysis 7. Virtual Ethnography 8. Online Secondary Analysis: Resources and Methods 9. The Future of Online Social Research

ONLINE RESOURCES, COMMUNITIES, AND DATABASES  

• Interviews as a Method for Qualitative Research (video) This short video summarizes why interviews can serve as useful data in qualitative research.  
• Companion website to Bloomberg and Volpe's  Completing Your Qualitative Dissertation: A Road Map from Beginning to End,  4th ed Provides helpful templates and appendices featured in the book, as well as links to other useful dissertation resources.
• International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Annual conference hosted by the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which aims to facilitate the development of qualitative research methods across a wide variety of academic disciplines, among other initiatives.  
• METHODSPACE ​​​​​​​​An online home of the research methods community, where practicing researchers share how to make research easier.  
• SAGE researchmethods ​​​​​​​Researchers can explore methods concepts to help them design research projects, understand particular methods or identify a new method, conduct their research, and write up their findings. A "methods map" facilitates finding content on methods.

The decision to conduct interviews, and the type of interviewing to use, should flow from, or align with, the methodological paradigm chosen for your study, whether that paradigm is interpretivist, critical, positivist, or participative in nature (or a combination of these).

Structured:

• Structured Interview. Entry in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methodsby Floyd J. Fowler Jr., Editors: Michael S. Lewis-Beck; Alan E. Bryman; Tim Futing Liao (Editor)  A concise article noting standards, procedures, and recommendations for developing and testing structured interviews. For an example of structured interview questions, you may view the Current Population Survey, May 2008: Public Participation in the Arts Supplement (ICPSR 29641), Apr 15, 2011 at https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR29641.v1 (To see the survey questions, preview the user guide, which can be found under the "Data and Documentation" tab. Then, look for page 177 (attachment 8).

Semi-Structured:

• Semi-Structured Interview. Entry in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methodsby Lioness Ayres; Editor: Lisa M. Given  The semi-structured interview is a qualitative data collection strategy in which the researcher asks informants a series of predetermined but open-ended questions. The researcher has more control over the topics of the interview than in unstructured interviews, but in contrast to structured interviews or questionnaires that use closed questions, there is no fixed range of responses to each question.

Unstructured:

• Unstructured Interview. Entry in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methodsby Michael W. Firmin; Editor: Lisa M. Given  Unstructured interviews in qualitative research involve asking relatively open-ended questions of research participants in order to discover their percepts on the topic of interest. Interviews, in general, are a foundational means of collecting data when using qualitative research methods. They are designed to draw from the interviewee constructs embedded in his or her thinking and rationale for decision making. The researcher uses an inductive method in data gathering, regardless of whether the interview method is open, structured, or semi-structured. That is, the researcher does not wish to superimpose his or her own viewpoints onto the person being interviewed. Rather, inductively, the researcher wishes to understand the participant's perceptions, helping him or her to articulate percepts such that they will be understood clearly by the journal reader.

Genres and Uses

Focus groups:.

• "Focus Groups." Annual Review of Sociology 22 (1996): 129-1524.by David L. Morgan  Discusses the use of focus groups and group interviews as methods for gathering qualitative data used by sociologists and other academic and applied researchers. Focus groups are recommended for giving voice to marginalized groups and revealing the group effect on opinion formation.  
• Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector's Field Guide (See Module 4: "Focus Groups")by Mack, N., et al.  This field guide is based on an approach to doing team-based, collaborative qualitative research that has repeatedly proven successful in research projects sponsored by Family Health International (FHI) throughout the developing world. With its straightforward delivery of information on the main qualitative methods being used in public health research today, the guide speaks to the need for simple yet effective instruction on how to do systematic and ethically sound qualitative research. The aim of the guide is thus practical. In bypassing extensive discussion on the theoretical underpinnings of qualitative research, it distinguishes itself as a how-to guide to be used in the field.

In-Depth (typically One-on-One):

• A Practical Introduction to in-Depth Interviewingby Alan Morris  Are you new to qualitative research or a bit rusty and in need of some inspiration? Are you doing a research project involving in-depth interviews? Are you nervous about carrying out your interviews? This book will help you complete your qualitative research project by providing a nuts and bolts introduction to interviewing. With coverage of ethics, preparation strategies and advice for handling the unexpected in the field, this handy guide will help you get to grips with the basics of interviewing before embarking on your research. While recognising that your research question and the context of your research will drive your approach to interviewing, this book provides practical advice often skipped in traditional methods textbooks.  
• Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector's Field Guide (See Module 3: "In-Depth Interviews")by Mack, N., et al.  This field guide is based on an approach to doing team-based, collaborative qualitative research that has repeatedly proven successful in research projects sponsored by Family Health International (FHI) throughout the developing world. With its straightforward delivery of information on the main qualitative methods being used in public health research today, the guide speaks to the need for simple yet effective instruction on how to do systematic and ethically sound qualitative research. The aim of the guide is thus practical. In bypassing extensive discussion on the theoretical underpinnings of qualitative research, it distinguishes itself as a how-to guide to be used in the field.

Folklore Research and Oral Histories:

In addition to the following resource, see the  Oral History   page of this guide for helpful resources on Oral History interviewing.

American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Folklife and Fieldwork: A Layman’s Introduction to Field Techniques Interviews gathered for purposes of folklore research are similar to standard social science interviews in some ways, but also have a good deal in common with oral history approaches to interviewing. The focus in a folklore research interview is on documenting and trying to understand the interviewee's way of life relative to a culture or subculture you are studying. This guide includes helpful advice and tips for conducting fieldwork in folklore, such as tips for planning, conducting, recording, and archiving interviews.

An interdisciplinary scientific program within the Institute for Quantitative Social Science which encourages and facilitates research and instruction in the theory and practice of survey research. The primary mission of PSR is to provide survey research resources to enhance the quality of teaching and research at Harvard.

• Internet, Phone, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveysby Don A. Dillman; Jolene D. Smyth; Leah Melani Christian  The classic survey design reference, updated for the digital age. The new edition is thoroughly updated and revised, and covers all aspects of survey research. It features expanded coverage of mobile phones, tablets, and the use of do-it-yourself surveys, and Dillman's unique Tailored Design Method is also thoroughly explained. This new edition is complemented by copious examples within the text and accompanying website. It includes: Strategies and tactics for determining the needs of a given survey, how to design it, and how to effectively administer it. How and when to use mail, telephone, and Internet surveys to maximum advantage. Proven techniques to increase response rates. Guidance on how to obtain high-quality feedback from mail, electronic, and other self-administered surveys. Direction on how to construct effective questionnaires, including considerations of layout. The effects of sponsorship on the response rates of surveys. Use of capabilities provided by newly mass-used media: interactivity, presentation of aural and visual stimuli. The Fourth Edition reintroduces the telephone--including coordinating land and mobile.

User Experience (UX) and Marketing:

• See the  "UX & Market Research Interviews"  tab on this guide, above. May include  Focus Groups,  above.

Screening for Research Site Selection:

• Research interviews are used not only to furnish research data for theoretical analysis in the social sciences, but also to plan other kinds of studies. For example, interviews may allow researchers to screen appropriate research sites to conduct empirical studies (such as randomized controlled trials) in a variety of fields, from medicine to law. In contrast to interviews conducted in the course of social research, such interviews do not typically serve as the data for final analysis and publication.

ENGAGING PARTICIPANTS

Research ethics  .

• Human Subjects (IRB) The Committee on the Use of Human Subjects (CUHS) serves as the Institutional Review Board for the University area which includes the Cambridge and Allston campuses at Harvard. Find your IRB  contact person , or learn about  required ethics training.  You may also find the  IRB Lifecycle Guide  helpful. This is the preferred IRB portal for Harvard graduate students and other researchers. IRB forms can be downloaded via the  ESTR Library  (click on the "Templates and Forms" tab, then navigate to pages 2 and 3 to find the documents labelled with “HUA” for the Harvard University Area IRB. Nota bene: You may use these forms only if you submit your study to the Harvard University IRB). The IRB office can be reached through email at [email protected] or by telephone at (617) 496-2847.  
• Undergraduate Research Training Program (URTP) Portal The URTP at Harvard University is a comprehensive platform to create better prepared undergraduate researchers. The URTP is comprised of research ethics training sessions, a student-focused curriculum, and an online decision form that will assist students in determining whether their project requires IRB review. Students should examine the  URTP's guide for student researchers: Introduction to Human Subjects Research Protection.  
• Ethics reports From the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)  
• Respect, Beneficence, and Justice: QDR General Guidance for Human Participants If you are hoping to share your qualitative interview data in a repository after it has been collected, you will need to plan accordingly via informed consent, careful de-identification procedures, and data access controls. Consider  consulting with the Qualitative Research Support Group at Harvard Library  and consulting with  Harvard's Dataverse contacts  to help you think through all of the contingencies and processes.  
• "Conducting a Qualitative Child Interview: Methodological Considerations." Journal of Advanced Nursing 42/5 (2003): 434-441 by Kortesluoma, R., et al.  The purpose of this article is to illustrate the theoretical premises of child interviewing, as well as to describe some practical methodological solutions used during interviews. Factors that influence data gathered from children and strategies for taking these factors into consideration during the interview are also described.  
• "Crossing Cultural Barriers in Research Interviewing." Qualitative Social Work 63/3 (2007): 353-372 by Sands, R., et al.  This article critically examines a qualitative research interview in which cultural barriers between a white non-Muslim female interviewer and an African American Muslim interviewee, both from the USA, became evident and were overcome within the same interview.  
• Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith  This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. The text includes case-studies and examples, and sections on new indigenous literature and the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice.  

This resource, sponsored by University of Oregon Libraries, exemplifies the use of interviewing methodologies in research that foregrounds traditional knowledge. The methodology page summarizes the approach.

• Ethics: The Need to Tread Carefully. Chapter in A Practical Introduction to in-Depth Interviewing by Alan Morris  Pay special attention to the sections in chapter 2 on "How to prevent and respond to ethical issues arising in the course of the interview," "Ethics in the writing up of your interviews," and "The Ethics of Care."  
• Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology by Joan Cassell (Editor); Sue-Ellen Jacobs (Editor)  This publication of the American Anthropological Association presents and discusses issues and sources on ethics in anthropology, as well as realistic case studies of ethical dilemmas. It is meant to help social science faculty introduce discussions of ethics in their courses. Some of the topics are relevant to interviews, or at least to studies of which interviews are a part. See chapters 3 and 4 for cases, with solutions and commentary, respectively.  
• Research Ethics from the Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies, Trent University  (Open Access) An overview of Indigenous research ethics and protocols from the across the globe.  
• Resources for Equity in Research Consult these resources for guidance on creating and incorporating equitable materials into public health research studies that entail community engagement.

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics by Ron Iphofen (Editor); Martin Tolich (Editor)  This handbook is a much-needed and in-depth review of the distinctive set of ethical considerations which accompanies qualitative research. This is particularly crucial given the emergent, dynamic and interactional nature of most qualitative research, which too often allows little time for reflection on the important ethical responsibilities and obligations. Contributions from leading international researchers have been carefully organized into six key thematic sections: Part One: Thick Descriptions Of Qualitative Research Ethics; Part Two: Qualitative Research Ethics By Technique; Part Three: Ethics As Politics; Part Four: Qualitative Research Ethics With Vulnerable Groups; Part Five: Relational Research Ethics; Part Six: Researching Digitally. This Handbook is a one-stop resource on qualitative research ethics across the social sciences that draws on the lessons learned and the successful methods for surmounting problems - the tried and true, and the new.

RESEARCH COMPLIANCE AND PRIVACY LAWS

Research Compliance Program for FAS/SEAS at Harvard : The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), including the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) have established a shared Research Compliance Program (RCP). An area of common concern for interview studies is international projects and collaboration . RCP is a resource to provide guidance on which international activities may be impacted by US sanctions on countries, individuals, or entities and whether licenses or other disclosure are required to ship or otherwise share items, technology, or data with foreign collaborators.

• Harvard Global Support Services (GSS) is for students, faculty, staff, and researchers who are studying, researching, or working abroad. Their services span safety and security, health, culture, outbound immigration, employment, financial and legal matters, and research center operations. These include travel briefings and registration, emergency response, guidance on international projects, and managing in-country operations.

Generative AI: Harvard-affiliated researchers should not enter data classified as confidential ( Level 2 and above ), including non-public research data, into publicly-available generative AI tools, in accordance with the University’s Information Security Policy. Information shared with generative AI tools using default settings is not private and could expose proprietary or sensitive information to unauthorized parties.

Privacy Laws: Be mindful of any potential privacy laws that may apply wherever you conduct your interviews. The General Data Protection Regulation is a high-profile example (see below):

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) This Regulation lays down rules relating to the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and rules relating to the free movement of personal data. It protects fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons and in particular their right to the protection of personal data. The free movement of personal data within the Union shall be neither restricted nor prohibited for reasons connected with the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data. For a nice summary of what the GDPR requires, check out the GDPR "crash course" here .

SEEKING CONSENT  

If you would like to see examples of consent forms, ask your local IRB, or take a look at these resources:

• Model consent forms for oral history, suggested by the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University  
• For NIH-funded research, see this  resource for developing informed consent language in research studies where data and/or biospecimens will be stored and shared for future use.

POPULATION SAMPLING

If you wish to assemble resources to aid in sampling, such as the USPS Delivery Sequence File, telephone books, or directories of organizations and listservs, please contact our  data librarian  or write to  [email protected] .

• Research Randomizer   A free web-based service that permits instant random sampling and random assignment. It also contains an interactive tutorial perfect for students taking courses in research methods.  
• Practical Tools for Designing and Weighting Survey Samples by Richard Valliant; Jill A. Dever; Frauke Kreuter  Survey sampling is fundamentally an applied field. The goal in this book is to put an array of tools at the fingertips of practitioners by explaining approaches long used by survey statisticians, illustrating how existing software can be used to solve survey problems, and developing some specialized software where needed. This book serves at least three audiences: (1) Students seeking a more in-depth understanding of applied sampling either through a second semester-long course or by way of a supplementary reference; (2) Survey statisticians searching for practical guidance on how to apply concepts learned in theoretical or applied sampling courses; and (3) Social scientists and other survey practitioners who desire insight into the statistical thinking and steps taken to design, select, and weight random survey samples. Several survey data sets are used to illustrate how to design samples, to make estimates from complex surveys for use in optimizing the sample allocation, and to calculate weights. Realistic survey projects are used to demonstrate the challenges and provide a context for the solutions. The book covers several topics that either are not included or are dealt with in a limited way in other texts. These areas include: sample size computations for multistage designs; power calculations related to surveys; mathematical programming for sample allocation in a multi-criteria optimization setting; nuts and bolts of area probability sampling; multiphase designs; quality control of survey operations; and statistical software for survey sampling and estimation. An associated R package, PracTools, contains a number of specialized functions for sample size and other calculations. The data sets used in the book are also available in PracTools, so that the reader may replicate the examples or perform further analyses.  
• Sampling: Design and Analysis by Sharon L. Lohr  Provides a modern introduction to the field of sampling. With a multitude of applications from a variety of disciplines, the book concentrates on the statistical aspects of taking and analyzing a sample. Overall, the book gives guidance on how to tell when a sample is valid or not, and how to design and analyze many different forms of sample surveys.  
• Sampling Techniques by William G. Cochran  Clearly demonstrates a wide range of sampling methods now in use by governments, in business, market and operations research, social science, medicine, public health, agriculture, and accounting. Gives proofs of all the theoretical results used in modern sampling practice. New topics in this edition include the approximate methods developed for the problem of attaching standard errors or confidence limits to nonlinear estimates made from the results of surveys with complex plans.  
• "Understanding the Process of Qualitative Data Collection" in Chapter 13 (pp. 103–1162) of 30 Essential Skills for the Qualitative Researcher by John W. Creswell  Provides practical "how-to" information for beginning researchers in the social, behavioral, and health sciences with many applied examples from research design, qualitative inquiry, and mixed methods.The skills presented in this book are crucial for a new qualitative researcher starting a qualitative project.  
• Survey Methodology by Robert M. Groves; Floyd J. Fowler; Mick P. Couper; James M. Lepkowski; Eleanor Singer; Roger Tourangeau; Floyd J. Fowler  coverage includes sampling frame evaluation, sample design, development of questionnaires, evaluation of questions, alternative modes of data collection, interviewing, nonresponse, post-collection processing of survey data, and practices for maintaining scientific integrity.

The way a qualitative researcher constructs and approaches interview questions should flow from, or align with, the methodological paradigm chosen for the study, whether that paradigm is interpretivist, critical, positivist, or participative in nature (or a combination of these).

Constructing Your Questions

Helpful texts:.

• "Developing Questions" in Chapter 4 (pp. 98–108) of Becoming Qualitative Researchers by Corrine Glesne  Ideal for introducing the novice researcher to the theory and practice of qualitative research, this text opens students to the diverse possibilities within this inquiry approach, while helping them understand how to design and implement specific research methods.  
• "Learning to Interview in the Social Sciences" Qualitative Inquiry, 9(4) 2003, 643–668 by Roulston, K., deMarrais, K., & Lewis, J. B. See especially the section on "Phrasing and Negotiating Questions" on pages 653-655 and common problems with framing questions noted on pages 659 - 660.  
• Qualitative Research Interviewing: Biographic Narrative and Semi-Structured Methods (See sections on “Lightly and Heavily Structured Depth Interviewing: Theory-Questions and Interviewer-Questions” and “Preparing for any Interviewing Sequence") by Tom Wengraf  Unique in its conceptual coherence and the level of practical detail, this book provides a comprehensive resource for those concerned with the practice of semi-structured interviewing, the most commonly used interview approach in social research, and in particular for in-depth, biographic narrative interviewing. It covers the full range of practices from the identification of topics through to strategies for writing up research findings in diverse ways.  
• "Scripting a Qualitative Purpose Statement and Research Questions" in Chapter 12 (pp. 93–102) of 30 Essential Skills for the Qualitative Researcher by John W. Creswell  Provides practical "how-to" information for beginning researchers in the social, behavioral, and health sciences with many applied examples from research design, qualitative inquiry, and mixed methods.The skills presented in this book are crucial for a new qualitative researcher starting a qualitative project.  
• Some Strategies for Developing Interview Guides for Qualitative Interviews by Sociology Department, Harvard University Includes general advice for conducting qualitative interviews, pros and cons of recording and transcription, guidelines for success, and tips for developing and phrasing effective interview questions.  
• Tip Sheet on Question Wording by Harvard University Program on Survey Research

Let Theory Guide You:

The quality of your questions depends on how you situate them within a wider body of knowledge. Consider the following advice:

A good literature review has many obvious virtues. It enables the investigator to define problems and assess data. It provides the concepts on which percepts depend. But the literature review has a special importance for the qualitative researcher. This consists of its ability to sharpen his or her capacity for surprise (Lazarsfeld, 1972b). The investigator who is well versed in the literature now has a set of expectations the data can defy. Counterexpectational data are conspicuous, readable, and highly provocative data. They signal the existence of unfulfilled theoretical assumptions, and these are, as Kuhn (1962) has noted, the very origins of intellectual innovation. A thorough review of the literature is, to this extent, a way to manufacture distance. It is a way to let the data of one's research project take issue with the theory of one's field.

McCracken, G. (1988), The Long Interview, Sage: Newbury Park, CA, p. 31

When drafting your interview questions, remember that everything follows from your central research question. Also, on the way to writing your "operationalized" interview questions, it's  helpful to draft broader, intermediate questions, couched in theory. Nota bene:  While it is important to know the literature well before conducting your interview(s), be careful not to present yourself to your research participant(s) as "the expert," which would be presumptuous and could be intimidating. Rather, the purpose of your knowledge is to make you a better, keener listener.

If you'd like to supplement what you learned about relevant theories through your coursework and literature review, try these sources:

• Annual Reviews   Review articles sum up the latest research in many fields, including social sciences, biomedicine, life sciences, and physical sciences. These are timely collections of critical reviews written by leading scientists.  
• HOLLIS - search for resources on theories in your field   Modify this example search by entering the name of your field in place of "your discipline," then hit search.  
• Oxford Bibliographies   Written and reviewed by academic experts, every article in this database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship in a variety of fields, containing original commentary and annotations.  
• ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)   Indexes dissertations and masters' theses from most North American graduate schools as well as some European universities. Provides full text for most indexed dissertations from 1990-present.  
• Very Short Introductions   Launched by Oxford University Press in 1995, Very Short Introductions offer concise introductions to a diverse range of subjects from Climate to Consciousness, Game Theory to Ancient Warfare, Privacy to Islamic History, Economics to Literary Theory.

CONDUCTING INTERVIEWS

Equipment and software:  .

• Lamont Library  loans microphones and podcast starter kits, which will allow you to capture audio (and you may record with software, such as Garage Band). 
• Cabot Library  loans digital recording devices, as well as USB microphones.

If you prefer to use your own device, you may purchase a small handheld audio recorder, or use your cell phone.

• Audio Capture Basics (PDF)  - Helpful instructions, courtesy of the Lamont Library Multimedia Lab.
• Getting Started with Podcasting/Audio:  Guidelines from Harvard Library's Virtual Media Lab for preparing your interviewee for a web-based recording (e.g., podcast, interview)
• ​ Camtasia Screen Recorder and Video Editor
• Zoom: Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing
• Visit the Multimedia Production Resources guide! Consult it to find and learn how to use audiovisual production tools, including: cameras, microphones, studio spaces, and other equipment at Cabot Science Library and Lamont Library.
• Try the virtual office hours offered by the Lamont Multimedia Lab!

TIPS FOR CONDUCTING INTERVIEWS

Quick handout:  .

• Research Interviewing Tips (Courtesy of Dr. Suzanne Spreadbury)

Remote Interviews:  

• For Online or Distant Interviews, See "Remote Research & Virtual Fieldwork" on this guide .  
• Deborah Lupton's Bibliography: Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic

Seeking Consent:

Books and articles:  .

• "App-Based Textual Interviews: Interacting With Younger Generations in a Digitalized Social Reallity."International Journal of Social Research Methodology (12 June 2022). Discusses the use of texting platforms as a means to reach young people. Recommends useful question formulations for this medium.  
• "Learning to Interview in the Social Sciences." Qualitative Inquiry, 9(4) 2003, 643–668 by Roulston, K., deMarrais, K., & Lewis, J. B. See especially the section on "Phrasing and Negotiating Questions" on pages 653-655 and common problems with framing questions noted on pages 659-660.  
• "Slowing Down and Digging Deep: Teaching Students to Examine Interview Interaction in Depth." LEARNing Landscapes, Spring 2021 14(1) 153-169 by Herron, Brigette A. and Kathryn Roulston. Suggests analysis of videorecorded interviews as a precursor to formulating one's own questions. Includes helpful types of probes.  
• Using Interviews in a Research Project by Nigel Joseph Mathers; Nicholas J Fox; Amanda Hunn; Trent Focus Group.  A work pack to guide researchers in developing interviews in the healthcare field. Describes interview structures, compares face-to-face and telephone interviews. Outlines the ways in which different types of interview data can be analysed.  
• “Working through Challenges in Doing Interview Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods, (December 2011), 348–66 by Roulston, Kathryn.  The article explores (1) how problematic interactions identified in the analysis of focus group data can lead to modifications in research design, (2) an approach to dealing with reported data in representations of findings, and (3) how data analysis can inform question formulation in successive rounds of data generation. Findings from these types of examinations of interview data generation and analysis are valuable for informing both interview practice as well as research design.

Videos:  

The way a qualitative researcher transcribes interviews should flow from, or align with, the methodological paradigm chosen for the study, whether that paradigm is interpretivist, critical, positivist, or participative in nature (or a combination of these).

TRANSCRIPTION

Before embarking on a transcription project, it's worthwhile to invest in the time and effort necessary to capture good audio, which will make the transcription process much easier. If you haven't already done so, check out the  audio capture guidelines from Harvard Library's Virtual Media Lab , or  contact a media staff member  for customized recommendations. First and foremost, be mindful of common pitfalls by watching this short video that identifies  the most common errors to avoid!

SOFTWARE:  

• Adobe Premiere Pro Speech-To-Text  automatically generates transcripts and adds captions to your videos. Harvard affiliates can download Adobe Premiere in the Creative Cloud Suite.  
• GoTranscript  provides cost-effective human-generated transcriptions.  
• pyTranscriber  is an app for generating automatic transcription and/or subtitles for audio and video files. It uses the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text service, has a friendly graphical user interface, and is purported to work nicely with Chinese.   
• Otter  provides a new way to capture, store, search and share voice conversations, lectures, presentations, meetings, and interviews. The startup is based in Silicon Valley with a team of experienced Ph.Ds and engineers from Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Nuance (à la Dragon). Free accounts available. This is the software that  Zoom  uses to generate automated transcripts, so if you have access to a Zoom subscription, you have access to Otter transcriptions with it (applicable in several  languages ). As with any automated approach, be prepared to correct any errors after the fact, by hand.  
• Panopto  is available to Harvard affiliates and generates  ASR (automated speech recognition) captions . You may upload compatible audio files into it. As with any automatically generated transcription, you will need to make manual revisions. ASR captioning is available in several  languages . Panopto maintains robust security practices, including strong authentication measures and end-to-end encryption, ensuring your content remains private and protected.  
• REV.Com  allows you to record and transcribe any calls on the iPhone, both outgoing and incoming. It may be useful for recording phone interviews. Rev lets you choose whether you want an AI- or human-generated transcription, with a fast turnaround. Rev has Service Organization Controls Type II (SOC2) certification (a SOC2 cert looks at and verifies an organization’s processing integrity, privacy practices, and security safeguards).   
• Scribie Audio/Video Transcription  provides automated or manual transcriptions for a small fee. As with any transcription service, some revisions will be necessary after the fact, particularly for its automated transcripts.  
• Sonix  automatically transcribes, translates, and helps to organize audio and video files in over 40 languages. It's fast and affordable, with good accuracy. The free trial includes 30 minutes of free transcription.  
• TranscriptionWing  uses a human touch process to clean up machine-generated transcripts so that the content will far more accurately reflect your audio recording.   
• Whisper is a tool from OpenAI that facilitates transcription of sensitive audiovisual recordings (e.g., of research interviews) on your own device. Installation and use depends on your operating system and which version you install. Important Note: The Whisper API, where audio is sent to OpenAI to be processed by them and then sent back (usually through a programming language like Python) is NOT appropriate for sensitive data. The model should be downloaded with tools such as those described in this FAQ , so that audio is kept to your local machine. For assistance, contact James Capobianco .

EQUIPMENT:  

• Transcription pedals  are in circulation and available to borrow from the Circulation desk at Lamont, or use at Lamont Library's Media Lab on level B. For hand-transcribing your interviews, they work in conjunction with software such as  Express Scribe , which is loaded on Media Lab computers, or you may download for free on your own machine (Mac or PC versions; scroll down the downloads page for the latter). The pedals are plug-and-play USB, allow a wide range of playback speeds, and have 3 programmable buttons, which are typically set to rewind/play/fast-forward. Instructions are included in the bag that covers installation and set-up of the software, and basic use of the pedals.

NEED HELP?  

• Try the virtual office hours offered by the Lamont Multimedia Lab!    
• If you're creating podcasts, login to  Canvas  and check out the  Podcasting/Audio guide . 

Helpful Texts:  

• "Transcription as a Crucial Step of Data Analysis" in Chapter 5 of The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysisby Uwe Flick (Editor)  Covers basic terminology for transcription, shares caveats for transcribers, and identifies components of vocal behavior. Provides notation systems for transcription, suggestions for transcribing turn-taking, and discusses new technologies and perspectives. Includes a bibliography for further reading.  
• "Transcribing the Oral Interview: Part Art, Part Science " on p. 10 of the Centre for Community Knowledge (CCK) newsletter: TIMESTAMPby Mishika Chauhan and Saransh Srivastav

QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS

Software  .

• Free download available for Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) affiliates
• Desktop access at Lamont Library Media Lab, 3rd floor
• Desktop access at Harvard Kennedy School Library (with HKS ID)
• Remote desktop access for Harvard affiliates from  IQSS Computer Labs . Email them at  [email protected] and ask for a new lab account and remote desktop access to NVivo.
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) access available to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health affiliates

CODING AND THEMEING YOUR DATA

Data analysis methods should flow from, or align with, the methodological paradigm chosen for your study, whether that paradigm is interpretivist, critical, positivist, or participative in nature (or a combination of these). Some established methods include Content Analysis, Critical Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Gestalt Analysis, Grounded Theory Analysis, Interpretive Analysis, Narrative Analysis, Normative Analysis, Phenomenological Analysis, Rhetorical Analysis, and Semiotic Analysis, among others. The following resources should help you navigate your methodological options and put into practice methods for coding, themeing, interpreting, and presenting your data.

• Users can browse content by topic, discipline, or format type (reference works, book chapters, definitions, etc.). SRM offers several research tools as well: a methods map, user-created reading lists, a project planner, and advice on choosing statistical tests.  
• Abductive Coding: Theory Building and Qualitative (Re)Analysis by Vila-Henninger, et al.  The authors recommend an abductive approach to guide qualitative researchers who are oriented towards theory-building. They outline a set of tactics for abductive analysis, including the generation of an abductive codebook, abductive data reduction through code equations, and in-depth abductive qualitative analysis.  
• Analyzing and Interpreting Qualitative Research: After the Interview by Charles F. Vanover, Paul A. Mihas, and Johnny Saldana (Editors)   Providing insight into the wide range of approaches available to the qualitative researcher and covering all steps in the research process, the authors utilize a consistent chapter structure that provides novice and seasoned researchers with pragmatic, "how-to" strategies. Each chapter author introduces the method, uses one of their own research projects as a case study of the method described, shows how the specific analytic method can be used in other types of studies, and concludes with three questions/activities to prompt class discussion or personal study.   
• "Analyzing Qualitative Data." Theory Into Practice 39, no. 3 (2000): 146-54 by Margaret D. LeCompte   This article walks readers though rules for unbiased data analysis and provides guidance for getting organized, finding items, creating stable sets of items, creating patterns, assembling structures, and conducting data validity checks.  
• "Coding is Not a Dirty Word" in Chapter 1 (pp. 1–30) of Enhancing Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research with Technology by Shalin Hai-Jew (Editor)   Current discourses in qualitative research, especially those situated in postmodernism, represent coding and the technology that assists with coding as reductive, lacking complexity, and detached from theory. In this chapter, the author presents a counter-narrative to this dominant discourse in qualitative research. The author argues that coding is not necessarily devoid of theory, nor does the use of software for data management and analysis automatically render scholarship theoretically lightweight or barren. A lack of deep analytical insight is a consequence not of software but of epistemology. Using examples informed by interpretive and critical approaches, the author demonstrates how NVivo can provide an effective tool for data management and analysis. The author also highlights ideas for critical and deconstructive approaches in qualitative inquiry while using NVivo. By troubling the positivist discourse of coding, the author seeks to create dialogic spaces that integrate theory with technology-driven data management and analysis, while maintaining the depth and rigor of qualitative research.   
• The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldana   An in-depth guide to the multiple approaches available for coding qualitative data. Clear, practical and authoritative, the book profiles 32 coding methods that can be applied to a range of research genres from grounded theory to phenomenology to narrative inquiry. For each approach, Saldaña discusses the methods, origins, a description of the method, practical applications, and a clearly illustrated example with analytic follow-up. Essential reading across the social sciences.  
• Flexible Coding of In-depth Interviews: A Twenty-first-century Approach by Nicole M. Deterding and Mary C. Waters The authors suggest steps in data organization and analysis to better utilize qualitative data analysis technologies and support rigorous, transparent, and flexible analysis of in-depth interview data.  
• From the Editors: What Grounded Theory is Not by Roy Suddaby Walks readers through common misconceptions that hinder grounded theory studies, reinforcing the two key concepts of the grounded theory approach: (1) constant comparison of data gathered throughout the data collection process and (2) the determination of which kinds of data to sample in succession based on emergent themes (i.e., "theoretical sampling").  
• “Good enough” methods for life-story analysis, by Wendy Luttrell. In Quinn N. (Ed.), Finding culture in talk (pp. 243–268). Demonstrates for researchers of culture and consciousness who use narrative how to concretely document reflexive processes in terms of where, how and why particular decisions are made at particular stages of the research process.   
• The Ethnographic Interview by James P. Spradley  “Spradley wrote this book for the professional and student who have never done ethnographic fieldwork (p. 231) and for the professional ethnographer who is interested in adapting the author’s procedures (p. iv) ... Steps 6 and 8 explain lucidly how to construct a domain and a taxonomic analysis” (excerpted from book review by James D. Sexton, 1980). See also:  Presentation slides on coding and themeing your data, derived from Saldana, Spradley, and LeCompte Click to request access.  
• Qualitative Data Analysis by Matthew B. Miles; A. Michael Huberman   A practical sourcebook for researchers who make use of qualitative data, presenting the current state of the craft in the design, testing, and use of qualitative analysis methods. Strong emphasis is placed on data displays matrices and networks that go beyond ordinary narrative text. Each method of data display and analysis is described and illustrated.  
• "A Survey of Qualitative Data Analytic Methods" in Chapter 4 (pp. 89–138) of Fundamentals of Qualitative Research by Johnny Saldana   Provides an in-depth introduction to coding as a heuristic, particularly focusing on process coding, in vivo coding, descriptive coding, values coding, dramaturgical coding, and versus coding. Includes advice on writing analytic memos, developing categories, and themeing data.   
• "Thematic Networks: An Analytic Tool for Qualitative Research." Qualitative Research : QR, 1(3), 385–405 by Jennifer Attride-Stirling Details a technique for conducting thematic analysis of qualitative material, presenting a step-by-step guide of the analytic process, with the aid of an empirical example. The analytic method presented employs established, well-known techniques; the article proposes that thematic analyses can be usefully aided by and presented as thematic networks.  
• Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clark Walks readers through the process of reflexive thematic analysis, step by step. The method may be adapted in fields outside of psychology as relevant. Pair this with One Size Fits All? What Counts as Quality Practice in Reflexive Thematic Analysis? by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clark

TESTING OR GENERATING THEORIES

The quality of your data analysis depends on how you situate what you learn within a wider body of knowledge. Consider the following advice:

Once you have coalesced around a theory, realize that a theory should  reveal  rather than  color  your discoveries. Allow your data to guide you to what's most suitable. Grounded theory  researchers may develop their own theory where current theories fail to provide insight.  This guide on Theoretical Models  from Alfaisal University Library provides a helpful overview on using theory.

MANAGING & FINDING INTERVIEW DATA

Managing your elicited interview data, general guidance:  .

• Research Data Management @ Harvard A reference guide with information and resources to help you manage your research data. See also: Harvard Research Data Security Policy , on the Harvard University Research Data Management website.  
• Data Management For Researchers: Organize, Maintain and Share Your Data for Research Success by Kristin Briney. A comprehensive guide for scientific researchers providing everything they need to know about data management and how to organize, document, use and reuse their data.  
• Open Science Framework (OSF) An open-source project management tool that makes it easy to collaborate within and beyond Harvard throughout a project's lifecycle. With OSF you can manage, store, and share documents, datasets, and other information with your research team. You can also publish your work to share it with a wider audience. Although data can be stored privately, because this platform is hosted on the Internet and designed with open access in mind, it is not a good choice for highly sensitive data.  
• Free cloud storage solutions for Harvard affiliates to consider include:  Google Drive ,  DropBox , or  OneDrive ( up to DSL3 )  

Data Confidentiality and Secure Handling:  

• Data Security Levels at Harvard - Research Data Examples This resource provided by Harvard Data Security helps you determine what level of access is appropriate for your data. Determine whether it should be made available for public use, limited to the Harvard community, or be protected as either "confidential and sensitive," "high risk," or "extremely sensitive." See also:  Harvard Data Classification Table  
• Harvard's Best Practices for Protecting Privacy and  Harvard Information Security Collaboration Tools Matrix Follow the nuts-and-bolts advice for privacy best practices at Harvard. The latter resource reveals the level of security that can be relied upon for a large number of technological tools and platforms used at Harvard to conduct business, such as email, Slack, Accellion Kiteworks, OneDrive/SharePoint, etc.  
• “Protecting Participant Privacy While Maintaining Content and Context: Challenges in Qualitative Data De‐identification and Sharing.” Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting 57 (1) (2020): e415-420 by Myers, Long, and Polasek Presents an informed and tested protocol, based on the De-Identification guidelines published by the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) at Syracuse University. Qualitative researchers may consult it to guide their data de-identification efforts.  
• QDS Qualitative Data Sharing Toolkit The Qualitative Data Sharing (QDS) project and its toolkit was funded by the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (R01HG009351). It provides tools and resources to help researchers, especially those in the health sciences, share qualitative research data while protecting privacy and confidentiality. It offers guidance on preparing data for sharing through de-identification and access control. These health sciences research datasets in ICPSR's Qualitative Data Sharing (QDS) Project Series were de-identified using the QuaDS Software and the project’s QDS guidelines.  
• Table of De-Identification Techniques  
• Generative AI Harvard-affiliated researchers should not enter data classified as confidential ( Level 2 and above ), including non-public research data, into publicly-available generative AI tools, in accordance with the University’s Information Security Policy. Information shared with generative AI tools using default settings is not private and could expose proprietary or sensitive information to unauthorized parties.  
• Harvard Information Security Quick Reference Guide Storage guidelines, based on the data's security classification level (according to its IRB classification) is displayed on page 2, under "handling."  
• Email Encryption Harvard Microsoft 365 users can now send encrypted messages and files directly from the Outlook web or desktop apps. Encrypting an email adds an extra layer of security to the message and its attachments (up to 150MB), and means only the intended recipient (and their inbox delegates with full access) can view it. Message encryption in Outlook is approved for sending high risk ( level 4 ) data and below.  

Sharing Qualitative Data:  

• Repositories for Qualitative Data If you have cleared this intention with your IRB, secured consent from participants, and properly de-identified your data, consider sharing your interviews in one of the data repositories included in the link above. Depending on the nature of your research and the level of risk it may present to participants, sharing your interview data may not be appropriate. If there is any chance that sharing such data will be desirable, you will be much better off if you build this expectation into your plans from the beginning.  
• Guide for Sharing Qualitative Data at ICPSR The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has created this resource for investigators planning to share qualitative data at ICPSR. This guide provides an overview of elements and considerations for archiving qualitative data, identifies steps for investigators to follow during the research life cycle to ensure that others can share and reuse qualitative data, and provides information about exemplars of qualitative data  

International Projects:

• Research Compliance Program for FAS/SEAS at Harvard The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), including the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) have established a shared Research Compliance Program (RCP). An area of common concern for interview studies is international projects and collaboration . RCP is a resource to provide guidance on which international activities may be impacted by US sanctions on countries, individuals, or entities and whether licenses or other disclosure are required to ship or otherwise share items, technology, or data with foreign collaborators.

Finding Extant Interview Data

Finding journalistic interviews:  .

• Academic Search Premier This all-purpose database is great for finding articles from magazines and newspapers. In the Advanced Search, it allows you to specify "Document Type":  Interview.  
• Guide to Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes Use this guide created to Harvard Librarians to identify newspapers collections you'd like to search. To locate interviews, try adding the term  "interview"  to your search, or explore a database's search interface for options to  limit your search to interviews.  Nexis Uni  and  Factiva  are the two main databases for current news.   
• Listen Notes Search for podcast episodes at this podcast aggregator, and look for podcasts that include interviews. Make sure to vet the podcaster for accuracy and quality! (Listen Notes does not do much vetting.)  
• NPR  and  ProPublica  are two sites that offer high-quality long-form reporting, including journalistic interviews, for free.

Finding Oral History and Social Research Interviews:  

• To find oral histories, see the Oral History   page of this guide for helpful resources on Oral History interviewing.  
• Repositories for Qualitative Data It has not been a customary practice among qualitative researchers in the social sciences to share raw interview data, but some have made this data available in repositories, such as the ones listed on the page linked above. You may find published data from structured interview surveys (e.g., questionnaire-based computer-assisted telephone interview data), as well as some semi-structured and unstructured interviews.  
• If you are merely interested in studies interpreting data collected using interviews, rather than finding raw interview data, try databases like  PsycInfo ,  Sociological Abstracts , or  Anthropology Plus , among others. 

Finding Interviews in Archival Collections at Harvard Library:

In addition to the databases and search strategies mentioned under the  "Finding Oral History and Social Research Interviews" category above,  you may search for interviews and oral histories (whether in textual or audiovisual formats) held in archival collections at Harvard Library.

• HOLLIS searches all documented collections at Harvard, whereas HOLLIS for Archival Discovery searches only those with finding aids. Although HOLLIS for Archival Discovery covers less material, you may find it easier to parse your search results, especially when you wish to view results at the item level (within collections). Try these approaches:

Search in  HOLLIS :  

• To retrieve items available online, do an Advanced Search for  interview* OR "oral histor*" (in Subject), with Resource Type "Archives/Manuscripts," then refine your search by selecting "Online" under "Show Only" on the right of your initial result list.  Revise the search above by adding your topic in the Keywords or Subject field (for example:  African Americans ) and resubmitting the search.  
•  To enlarge your results set, you may also leave out the "Online" refinement; if you'd like to limit your search to a specific repository, try the technique of searching for  Code: Library + Collection on the "Advanced Search" page .   

Search in  HOLLIS for Archival Discovery :  

• To retrieve items available online, search for   interview* OR "oral histor*" limited to digital materials . Revise the search above by adding your topic (for example:  artist* ) in the second search box (if you don't see the box, click +).  
• To preview results by collection, search for  interview* OR "oral histor*" limited to collections . Revise the search above by adding your topic (for example:  artist* ) in the second search box (if you don't see the box, click +). Although this method does not allow you to isolate digitized content, you may find the refinement options on the right side of the screen (refine by repository, subject or names) helpful.  Once your select a given collection, you may search within it  (e.g., for your topic or the term interview).

UX & MARKET RESEARCH INTERVIEWS

Ux at harvard library  .

• User Experience and Market Research interviews can inform the design of tangible products and services through responsive, outcome-driven insights. The  User Research Center  at Harvard Library specializes in this kind of user-centered design, digital accessibility, and testing. They also offer guidance and  resources  to members of the Harvard Community who are interested in learning more about UX methods. Contact [email protected] or consult the URC website for more information.

Websites  

• User Interviews: The Beginner’s Guide (Chris Mears)  
• Interviewing Users (Jakob Nielsen)

Books  

• Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal; Grant McCracken (Foreword by)  Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You'll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.  
• Rapid Contextual Design by Jessamyn Wendell; Karen Holtzblatt; Shelley Wood  This handbook introduces Rapid CD, a fast-paced, adaptive form of Contextual Design. Rapid CD is a hands-on guide for anyone who needs practical guidance on how to use the Contextual Design process and adapt it to tactical projects with tight timelines and resources. Rapid Contextual Design provides detailed suggestions on structuring the project and customer interviews, conducting interviews, and running interpretation sessions. The handbook walks you step-by-step through organizing the data so you can see your key issues, along with visioning new solutions, storyboarding to work out the details, and paper prototype interviewing to iterate the design all with as little as a two-person team with only a few weeks to spare *Includes real project examples with actual customer data that illustrate how a CD project actually works.

Videos  

Instructional Presentations on Interview Skills  

• Interview/Oral History Research for RSRA 298B: Master's Thesis Reading and Research (Spring 2023) Slideshow covers: Why Interviews?, Getting Context, Engaging Participants, Conducting the Interview, The Interview Guide, Note Taking, Transcription, File management, and Data Analysis.  
• Interview Skills From an online class on February 13, 2023:  Get set up for interview research. You will leave prepared to choose among the three types of interviewing methods, equipped to develop an interview schedule, aware of data management options and their ethical implications, and knowledgeable of technologies you can use to record and transcribe your interviews. This workshop complements Intro to NVivo, a qualitative data analysis tool useful for coding interview data.

NIH Data Management & Sharing Policy (DMSP) This policy, effective January 25, 2023, applies to all research, funded or conducted in whole or in part by NIH, that results in the generation of  scientific data , including NIH-funded qualitative research. Click here to see some examples of how the DMSP policy has been applied in qualitative research studies featured in the 2021 Qualitative Data Management Plan (DMP) Competition . As a resource for the community, NIH has developed a resource for developing informed consent language in research studies where data and/or biospecimens will be stored and shared for future use. It is important to note that the DMS Policy does NOT require that informed consent obtained from research participants must allow for broad sharing and the future use of data (either with or without identifiable private information). See the FAQ for more information.

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• Next: Oral History >>

Except where otherwise noted, this work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which allows anyone to share and adapt our material as long as proper attribution is given. For details and exceptions, see the Harvard Library Copyright Policy ©2021 Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.

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3 Writing Up the Methods Section

• Published: May 2013
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This chapter focuses on how to write up the methodological procedures of an interview study. It considers both standard formats for writing-up methodological procedures and non-traditional formats in which methodological descriptions are often integrated into the more general narrative of the text. The chapter first provides an overview of the most common elements that comprise interview reports, such as dissertations, journal articles, or monographs. It then presents three different ways of conceiving of the methods section—as a prelude to the analysis and findings, as a postscript, and as embedded in the interpretation itself. It concludes with reflections on how to deal with the idea that, in qualitative interview research, the researcher is the most important “methodological instrument.”

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How to Conduct Interviews for Research

Last Updated: July 7, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Jeremiah Kaplan . Jeremiah Kaplan is a Research and Training Specialist at the Center for Applied Behavioral Health Policy at Arizona State University. He has extensive knowledge and experience in motivational interviewing. In addition, Jeremiah has worked in the mental health, youth engagement, and trauma-informed care fields. Using his expertise, Jeremiah supervises Arizona State University’s Motivational Interviewing Coding Lab. Jeremiah has also been internationally selected to participate in the Motivational Interviewing International Network of Trainers sponsored Train the Trainer event. Jeremiah holds a BS in Human Services with a concentration in Family and Children from The University of Phoenix. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 30,138 times.

If you’re putting together a news report, a documentary film, or gathering oral history for any kind of personal project, you’ll likely need to perform 1 or more research interviews to gather the information you need. While these interviews can be relatively informal (unless they’re being broadcast live), you’ll need to make a few preparations beforehand, including having a written list of questions to ask. Let the interviewee answer the questions as they see fit, and guide the interview so that all of your questions are adequately answered.

Laying Groundwork for an Interview

• For example, if you’re interviewing a local biologist about declining frog populations, read up on what types of frogs and frog predators inhabit the area, and find out how much of the frog population has died off.

• If you set up the interview over the phone or via email, say something like, “Thank you for agreeing to answer a few questions. I’m mostly interested in asking you about your extensive knowledge of the publishing industry. I have about 10 questions, but I don’t think this will take more than 30 minutes.”

• If you’re conducting the interview over the phone, find a time when you and the interviewee are both free.

• Don’t tell yourself that you’ll remember the interview! If you don’t record the questions and answers, you’re likely to forget details.

Writing and Asking Effective Questions

• “How did you get your start in the industry?”
• “What’s your favorite type of book to see published?”
• “What would you recommend for any young men or women who’d like to get into publishing?”

• For example, if you ask something like, “Do you think the city planners have done a good job of laying out the new downtown area?” the subject can just answer “yes” or “no.”
• Instead, ask, “What do you think are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the ways the city planners laid out the new downtown area?”

• For example, avoid a question like, “Isn’t it true that the publishing industry refuses to pay women as much as it pays men?”
• Try asking instead: “What are your views on what some people perceive to be a gender pay gap in the industry?”

• For example, avoid asking, “Do pay-to-print or vanity presses hurt the fiscal state of big publishing houses?”
• Instead, ask something like, “Are there any trends within publishing that you think are harmful to the industry overall?”

Behaving During the Interview

• If you'd rather not ask immediately before the interview, ask the interviewee to fill out a consent form a week before the interview takes place. If the subject refuses to give their consent, you'll be unable to legally do the interview.
• For a sample consent form, look online at: https://managementhelp.org/businessresearch/consent-form.htm .

• If the interviewee lingers too long on a specific question, try moving things along. Say something like, “I appreciate your insights. I’d like to turn to a different topic at this point: what’s the best college major for a career in publishing?”

• For example, even if the interviewee says something surprising like: “I think it’s good that the frogs are dying!” avoid jumping up or shouting “What!?”

• For example, say that the interviewee says, “I became interested in city planning after a friend was killed in a poorly-designed intersection.” It would be inappropriate to say, “So what?” or “That sucks.” Instead, say something like, “I’m sorry to hear that; it’s a real tragedy.”

• This would also be a good time to scroll through the audio or video file that you recorded and make sure that it’s all clear and audible.

Expert Q&A

• Always speak clearly when you ask questions and speak to the interviewee, especially if you’re recording with a tape recorder. Ask the interviewee to do the same. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Give your interviewee enough time to answer each question. Don’t rush them on to answer another question while they’re still thinking of an answer for the first one. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Always interview your subjects face-to-face when it’s possible. If a face-to-face interview is impractical, a telephone interview is a decent substitute. Avoid conducting interviews over email except as a last resort. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art116/readings/guide%20for%20conducting%20interviews.pdf
• ↑ https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/interviewing/research-interview
• ↑ https://managementhelp.org/businessresearch/interviews.htm
• ↑ https://aultman.libguides.com/c.php?g=974169&p=7042440
• ↑ https://guides.lib.vt.edu/researchmethods/interviews
• ↑ https://uk.indeed.com/career-advice/interviewing/research-interview

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Write an A+ Interview Paper Using Our Tips and Examples

06 September, 2021

13 minutes read

Author:  Josh Carlyle

You will quickly find yourself with your back to the wall once your teacher assigns you an interview paper. Studying is often a headache by itself, and now you have to conduct interviews. Worse yet, you probably have no idea how you can do this. Luckily, we will tell you how to write an interview paper step by step in this comprehensive guide. So prepare your favorite drink and learn how to write a top-notch interview paper.

What is an Interview Paper?

An interview paper provides an expert opinion on a specific issue. In essence, it is an interview transcript inserted somewhere between the introduction and conclusion of an academic piece.

How long should it be? It depends on the topic and the length of your interview, but most papers are within the length of 2,000 – 5,000 words. What things should you consider before writing an interview paper in the first place? Let’s check them out below.

General Aspects of Writing an Interview Paper

Academic papers require you to provide arguments based on studies, research pieces, statistics, etc. But an interview paper is different – for this type of essay, you will develop assumptions around an expert’s opinion.

Let’s imagine your essay question reads the following: “Should we ban abortions?” If you write an interview paper, you should ask someone high-powered for their consideration. Let them be an executive director of the American Gynecological & Obstetrical Society.

You would reach them via email or phone or whatever communication channel you prefer and conduct an interview. Afterward, you would put all your findings on paper.

But in practice, writing an interview paper involves many more complexities and challenges, like planning, topic research , drafting, etc.

Let’s speak straight facts: nobody will reschedule their week to meet you because you need to do some homework. You’re one of the millions of students, and the local governor or a famous scientist won’t give you an interview nine times out of ten.

So you would want to target someone less busy, like professors from other faculties of your college or some researchers within your academic environment. Hunting a bigger fish is pointless unless you’re a well-established journalist working for a popular media channel. If you struggle to find someone within your college/university, you can contact people from your circle.

Writing Outline and Structure of an Interview Paper

 As you know, a typical paper consists of three parts:

• Introduction. This part includes background information, the hook, the thesis statement, and the transition.
• Body. It is the longest part of the paper consisting of several paragraphs. It should contain the actual interview.
• Conclusion. The final part summarizes the considerations and insights of your essay.

The question is: ‘where should you put an interview transcript and how do you do this?’

To answer this question, you need to come up with the interview papers format in the first place. There are several of them:

The narrative format implies that you can use either direct or indirect speech when referring to your interviewee. If you choose this path, you can stick to a 5-paragraph essay structure, retell the considerations of your interviewee, and cite their words here and there at your discretion.

You can also choose this format if you contact several people. Check what a narrative interview paper structure looks like when you reach out to several people:

• Introduction.
• Paragraph #1 – the first interviewee’s perspective.
• Paragraph #2 – the second interviewee’s opinion.
• Paragraph #3 – the third interviewee’s thoughts.
• Conclusion.

Alternatively, you can dedicate each paragraph to a particular idea of one person.

“Question and answer” will suit your needs perfectly if you interview one person. It is the simplest format used in online magazines, news reports, and other media. Your interview paper outline will look like this:

• Introduction
• Question #1 – Answer #1
• Question #2 – Answer #2
• Question #3 – Answer #3
• Question #4/5/6/etc. – Answer #4/5/6/etc.
• Interview analysis. You may include your thoughts on the subject matter.

Conversational

Conversational style is informal, and you can use either first-person or second-person narrative and follow a typical 5-paragraph paper structure. But writing interview papers in this lousy style might be perplexing, especially if you deal with this task for the first time.

We advise you to try the Q&A format because it’s the simplest one and takes the least time. Just imagine how much time your paper writing will take if you decide to interview three or five people.

How to Start an Interview Paper?

If you have no idea how to start an interview paper, choose the topic first. Selecting a topic for your interview paper is not a big deal, but you should keep in mind that you may not find appropriate interviewees for it.

Let’s imagine you want to explore whether the government should force people to get vaccines. This topic implies that you need to contact authorities. It might be a local lawyer, governor, or executive director of a local hospital. Well, the chances are these people will politely refuse to give an interview for your homework.

But if you choose to investigate how lockdown impacts intellectual workers, you can contact your friends or family members who work at home. In other words, it’s better to choose topics that reflect the experiences of ordinary people rather than the opinions of untouchable experts.

Asking people for their opinion about well-known facts like the Earth’s shape is a bad idea. You would want to choose high-profile debatable topics you can actually discuss.

Establish the Goal of Your Interview Essay

You have to establish the goal of your essay before researching the topic. For this, ask yourself: “What message should your interview essay deliver?” Sometimes, a topic of your choice might already explain the purpose of your essay.

Conduct Research

Interviewing someone implies that you should ask questions. But you will fail to do so if you know little to nothing about your topic. So read some case studies, news, articles, etc. Once you get the picture of your subject matter, you will come up with dozens of interview questions.

Get to Know Your Interviewee

A good interviewer always refers to the life and experience of their interviewee. If you’re lucky to work with someone you can read about on the Internet, find out as much information about them as possible. If your interviewee publishes any books, articles, or studies, you will better know them as well.

The more you know about the person, the more interview questions you can come up with. You can ask them whether the Internet tells their true story: “Is it true that you, Mr. Interviewee, support flat earthers?”

Draft Your Interview Questions

If you want a person to share their in-depth vision of the topic, you need to ask both open-ended and close-ended (“yes/no”) questions. However, you may struggle to prepare interview questions. Many students get stuck during this stage. To overcome this block, you need to learn some types of interview questions:

• Opinion – What do you think of this topic?
• Behavioral – What would you do in this situation?
• Experience and knowledge – What do you know about the subject?
• Background – How are you connected to the subject? What is your age, occupation, etc?
• Emotional – How do you feel about the subject?
• Sensory – What does the subject taste and feel like?

You can also think of the questions following the interviewee’s “yes” and “no” answers.

Tips for Conducting a Successful Interview

These four tips will help you conduct a productive interview on the first try:

1. Plan Your Meeting

Note that you want to interview a person in a quiet place so that nobody will distract you. This might be some cozy book store or a café. Or, you can arrange an online meeting. Make sure you have at least one hour for the interview.

2. Rehearse a bit

If you will conduct your first-ever interview, you want to practice with your friends/significant other/ family in the first place. This approach will help you identify what stage of your upcoming interview may challenge you the most.

3. Record Your Interview

You will forget about 50% of the information within an hour once you finish the interview. So don’t rely on your memory − bring a recorder instead. Why not take notes? You wouldn’t want to go red while asking your interviewee to repeat what they have just said or wait until you write down their answers.

4. Talk to Your Interviewee for a While Before You Begin

Speaking to someone you don’t know might be uncomfortable. You don’t have to attack them with your interview questions straightaway. Instead, you can exchange some casual phrases or discuss the weather. This will help you relieve stress and get comfortable with each other.

5. Explain Your Interview Protocol

It’s better to explain to your interviewee how you will conduct your interview. Tell them that you will use a recorder and introduce the discussion topic.

Interview Papers Format

In academic writing, you have to explain the purpose of your interview and introduce your interviewee in a specific “scholarly” format. The APA format interview paper has the following requirements:

• Use 12-point Times New Roman.
• Write a title page.
• Use double spacing.
• Introduce your interviewee and provide the background information – explain why this person is suitable for the interview. Mention their name and qualifications.
• Use direct quotes if you cite some facts provided by the interviewee.
• Use block quotes for citations longer than 40 words.

How to Write a Title Page?

The title of your paper must include your name, your institution, department, the course name and number, the teacher’s name, and the assignment date. The rules of writing the title page are the following:

• The title page must be numbered.
• Capitalize all major words in your title and make it bold.
• Place the title of the essay three or four lines down the top of the page.
• There must be one empty line before the student’s name.

Interview Papers Examples

If you’re searching for an interview essay example – check several samples below:

• A narrative interview essay .
• A Q&A interview format paper.
• An interview with a scientist.

Interview Papers Writing Tips

The following writing tips will help you deliver the first-class interview paper:

• Write the introduction at the end. Once you finish your essay, you will likely reconsider some ideas you had before you began. They will help you frame your interview essay with a captivating introduction and conclusion.
• Give yourself a break after finishing your final draft. This will help you look at your paper with a fresh pair of eyes once you start editing.
• Edit one type of error at a time. For example, you can reduce logical errors first and switch to grammatical mistakes afterward.
• Use an active voice. If active voice makes your sentence shorter, use it without hesitation.
• Check for any sample interview paper to decide on the interview questions. Perhaps, some pieces will spark your interest.

Writing Help by Handmadewriting

An interview paper doesn’t seem that intimidating once you learn how to write it step by step. First, you have to choose the subject that allows you to interview ordinary people rather than hard-to-reach ones. Then, you need to research your topic, conduct an interview, and write a paper.

You can get an A+ for this assignment with enough effort and dedication. But a doable task doesn’t necessarily mean that you must do it by yourself. If you have plenty of other assignments to do, you can ask our essay writers to craft an exemplary interview paper for you. For this, you can place an order on our website, and we will do all the dirty work.

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AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules

May 08, 2024

[[read-time]] min read

Introducing AlphaFold 3, a new AI model developed by Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. By accurately predicting the structure of proteins, DNA, RNA, ligands and more, and how they interact, we hope it will transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery.

Inside every plant, animal and human cell are billions of molecular machines. They’re made up of proteins, DNA and other molecules, but no single piece works on its own. Only by seeing how they interact together, across millions of types of combinations, can we start to truly understand life’s processes.

In a paper published in Nature , we introduce AlphaFold 3, a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy. For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy.

We hope AlphaFold 3 will help transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery. Scientists can access the majority of its capabilities, for free, through our newly launched AlphaFold Server , an easy-to-use research tool. To build on AlphaFold 3’s potential for drug design, Isomorphic Labs is already collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to apply it to real-world drug design challenges and, ultimately, develop new life-changing treatments for patients.

Our new model builds on the foundations of AlphaFold 2, which in 2020 made a fundamental breakthrough in protein structure prediction . So far, millions of researchers globally have used AlphaFold 2 to make discoveries in areas including malaria vaccines, cancer treatments and enzyme design. AlphaFold has been cited more than 20,000 times and its scientific impact recognized through many prizes, most recently the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences . AlphaFold 3 takes us beyond proteins to a broad spectrum of biomolecules. This leap could unlock more transformative science, from developing biorenewable materials and more resilient crops, to accelerating drug design and genomics research.

7PNM - Spike protein of a common cold virus (Coronavirus OC43): AlphaFold 3’s structural prediction for a spike protein (blue) of a cold virus as it interacts with antibodies (turquoise) and simple sugars (yellow), accurately matches the true structure (gray). The animation shows the protein interacting with an antibody, then a sugar. Advancing our knowledge of such immune-system processes helps better understand coronaviruses, including COVID-19, raising possibilities for improved treatments.

How AlphaFold 3 reveals life’s molecules

Given an input list of molecules, AlphaFold 3 generates their joint 3D structure, revealing how they all fit together. It models large biomolecules such as proteins, DNA and RNA, as well as small molecules, also known as ligands — a category encompassing many drugs. Furthermore, AlphaFold 3 can model chemical modifications to these molecules which control the healthy functioning of cells, that when disrupted can lead to disease.

AlphaFold 3’s capabilities come from its next-generation architecture and training that now covers all of life’s molecules. At the core of the model is an improved version of our Evoformer module — a deep learning architecture that underpinned AlphaFold 2’s incredible performance. After processing the inputs, AlphaFold 3 assembles its predictions using a diffusion network, akin to those found in AI image generators. The diffusion process starts with a cloud of atoms, and over many steps converges on its final, most accurate molecular structure.

AlphaFold 3’s predictions of molecular interactions surpass the accuracy of all existing systems. As a single model that computes entire molecular complexes in a holistic way, it’s uniquely able to unify scientific insights.

7R6R - DNA binding protein: AlphaFold 3’s prediction for a molecular complex featuring a protein (blue) bound to a double helix of DNA (pink) is a near-perfect match to the true molecular structure discovered through painstaking experiments (gray).

Leading drug discovery at Isomorphic Labs

AlphaFold 3 creates capabilities for drug design with predictions for molecules commonly used in drugs, such as ligands and antibodies, that bind to proteins to change how they interact in human health and disease.

AlphaFold 3 achieves unprecedented accuracy in predicting drug-like interactions, including the binding of proteins with ligands and antibodies with their target proteins. AlphaFold 3 is 50% more accurate than the best traditional methods on the PoseBusters benchmark without needing the input of any structural information, making AlphaFold 3 the first AI system to surpass physics-based tools for biomolecular structure prediction. The ability to predict antibody-protein binding is critical to understanding aspects of the human immune response and the design of new antibodies — a growing class of therapeutics.

Using AlphaFold 3 in combination with a complementary suite of in-house AI models, Isomorphic Labs is working on drug design for internal projects as well as with pharmaceutical partners. Isomorphic Labs is using AlphaFold 3 to accelerate and improve the success of drug design — by helping understand how to approach new disease targets, and developing novel ways to pursue existing ones that were previously out of reach.

AlphaFold Server: A free and easy-to-use research tool

8AW3 - RNA modifying protein: AlphaFold 3’s prediction for a molecular complex featuring a protein (blue), a strand of RNA (purple), and two ions (yellow) closely matches the true structure (gray). This complex is involved with the creation of other proteins — a cellular process fundamental to life and health.

Google DeepMind’s newly launched AlphaFold Server is the most accurate tool in the world for predicting how proteins interact with other molecules throughout the cell. It is a free platform that scientists around the world can use for non-commercial research. With just a few clicks, biologists can harness the power of AlphaFold 3 to model structures composed of proteins, DNA, RNA and a selection of ligands, ions and chemical modifications.

AlphaFold Server helps scientists make novel hypotheses to test in the lab, speeding up workflows and enabling further innovation. Our platform gives researchers an accessible way to generate predictions, regardless of their access to computational resources or their expertise in machine learning.

Experimental protein-structure prediction can take about the length of a PhD and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our previous model, AlphaFold 2, has been used to predict hundreds of millions of structures, which would have taken hundreds of millions of researcher-years at the current rate of experimental structural biology.

Sharing the power of AlphaFold 3 responsibly

With each AlphaFold release, we’ve sought to understand the broad impact of the technology , working together with the research and safety community. We take a science-led approach and have conducted extensive assessments to mitigate potential risks and share the widespread benefits to biology and humanity.

Building on the external consultations we carried out for AlphaFold 2, we’ve now engaged with more than 50 domain experts, in addition to specialist third parties, across biosecurity, research and industry, to understand the capabilities of successive AlphaFold models and any potential risks. We also participated in community-wide forums and discussions ahead of AlphaFold 3’s launch.

AlphaFold Server reflects our ongoing commitment to share the benefits of AlphaFold, including our free database of 200 million protein structures. We’ll also be expanding our free AlphaFold education online course with EMBL-EBI and partnerships with organizations in the Global South to equip scientists with the tools they need to accelerate adoption and research, including on underfunded areas such as neglected diseases and food security. We’ll continue to work with the scientific community and policy makers to develop and deploy AI technologies responsibly.

Opening up the future of AI-powered cell biology

7BBV - Enzyme: AlphaFold 3’s prediction for a molecular complex featuring an enzyme protein (blue), an ion (yellow sphere) and simple sugars (yellow), along with the true structure (gray). This enzyme is found in a soil-borne fungus (Verticillium dahliae) that damages a wide range of plants. Insights into how this enzyme interacts with plant cells could help researchers develop healthier, more resilient crops.

AlphaFold 3 brings the biological world into high definition. It allows scientists to see cellular systems in all their complexity, across structures, interactions and modifications. This new window on the molecules of life reveals how they’re all connected and helps understand how those connections affect biological functions — such as the actions of drugs, the production of hormones and the health-preserving process of DNA repair.

The impacts of AlphaFold 3 and our free AlphaFold Server will be realized through how they empower scientists to accelerate discovery across open questions in biology and new lines of research. We’re just beginning to tap into AlphaFold 3’s potential and can’t wait to see what the future holds.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

This article is part of the research topic.

Digital Health Applications: Acceptance, Benefit Assessment, and Costs from the Perspective of Patients and Medical Professionals

Implementation of the electronic health record (EHR) in the German healthcare system: An assessment of the current status and future development perspectives considering the potentials of health data utilisation by representatives of different stakeholder groups. Provisionally Accepted

• 1 West Saxon University of Applied Sciences of Zwickau, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Introduction: The digitalisation of the German healthcare system enables a wide range of opportunities to utilize healthcare data. The implementation of the EHR in January 2021 was a significant step, but compared to other European countries, the implementation of the EHR in the German healthcare system is still at an early stage. The aim of this paper is to characterise the structural factors relating to the adoption of the EHR in more detail from the perspective of representatives of stakeholders working in the German healthcare system and to identify existing barriers to implementation and the need for change. Methods: Qualitative expert interviews were conducted with one representative from each of the stakeholder groups health insurance, pharmacies, healthcare research, EHR development and panel doctors. Results: The interviews with the various stakeholders revealed that the implementation process of the EHR is being delayed by a lack of a viable basis for decision-making, existing conflicts of interest and insufficient consideration of the needs of patients and service providers, among other things. Discussion: The current status of EHR implementation is due to deficiency in legal regulations as well as structural problems and the timing of the introduction. For instance, the access rights of various stakeholders to the EHR data and the procedure in the event of a technical failure of the telematics infrastructure are remain unclear. In addition, insufficient information and communication measures have not led to the desired acceptance of EHR use among patients and service providers.

Keywords: Digital Health, electronic health record - (EHR), Personal health records, health data use, Digitalisation

Received: 15 Jan 2024; Accepted: 26 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Rau, Tischendorf and Mitzscherlich. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mx. Tim Tischendorf, West Saxon University of Applied Sciences of Zwickau, Zwickau, 08056, Lower Saxony, Germany

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The Green Paradox posits that fossil fuel markets respond to changing expectations about climate legislation, which limits future consumption, by shifting consumption to the present through lower present-day prices. We demonstrate that oil futures responded negatively to daily changes in the prediction market's expectations that the Waxman-Markey bill — the US climate bill discussed in 2009-2010 — would pass. This effect is consistent across various maturities as the proposed legislation would reset the entire price and consumption path, unlike temporary supply or demand shocks that phase out over time. The bill’s passage would have increased current global oil consumption by 2-4%. Furthermore, a strengthening of climate policy, as measured by monthly variations in media salience regarding climate policy over the last four decades, and two court rulings signaling limited future fossil fuel use, were associated with negative abnormal oil future returns. Taken together, our findings confirm that restricting future fossil fuel use will accelerate current-day consumption.

We would like to thank Kyle Meng and Derek Lemoine for sharing the prediction market data and for helpful feedback, as well as participants of the Virtual Seminar on Climate Economics by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Harvard Seminar in Environmental Economics and Policy. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening?

All vaccines have at least occasional side effects. But people who say they were injured by Covid vaccines believe their cases have been ignored.

Shaun Barcavage, 54, a nurse practitioner in New York City, said that ever since his first Covid shot, standing up has sent his heart racing. Credit... Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

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By Apoorva Mandavilli

Apoorva Mandavilli spent more than a year talking to dozens of experts in vaccine science, policymakers and people who said they had experienced serious side effects after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine.

• Published May 3, 2024 Updated May 4, 2024

Within minutes of getting the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, Michelle Zimmerman felt pain racing from her left arm up to her ear and down to her fingertips. Within days, she was unbearably sensitive to light and struggled to remember simple facts.

She was 37, with a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and until then could ride her bicycle 20 miles, teach a dance class and give a lecture on artificial intelligence, all in the same day. Now, more than three years later, she lives with her parents. Eventually diagnosed with brain damage, she cannot work, drive or even stand for long periods of time.

“When I let myself think about the devastation of what this has done to my life, and how much I’ve lost, sometimes it feels even too hard to comprehend,” said Dr. Zimmerman, who believes her injury is due to a contaminated vaccine batch .

The Covid vaccines, a triumph of science and public health, are estimated to have prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths . Yet even the best vaccines produce rare but serious side effects . And the Covid vaccines have been given to more than 270 million people in the United States, in nearly 677 million doses .

Dr. Zimmerman’s account is among the more harrowing, but thousands of Americans believe they suffered serious side effects following Covid vaccination. As of April, just over 13,000 vaccine-injury compensation claims have been filed with the federal government — but to little avail. Only 19 percent have been reviewed. Only 47 of those were deemed eligible for compensation, and only 12 have been paid out, at an average of about $3,600 .

Some scientists fear that patients with real injuries are being denied help and believe that more needs to be done to clarify the possible risks.

“At least long Covid has been somewhat recognized,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Yale University. But people who say they have post-vaccination injuries are “just completely ignored and dismissed and gaslighted,” she added.

In interviews and email exchanges conducted over several months, federal health officials insisted that serious side effects were extremely rare and that their surveillance efforts were more than sufficient to detect patterns of adverse events.

“Hundreds of millions of people in the United States have safely received Covid vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history,” Jeff Nesbit, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an emailed statement.

But in a recent interview, Dr. Janet Woodcock, a longtime leader of the Food and Drug Administration, who retired in February, said she believed that some recipients had experienced uncommon but “serious” and “life-changing” reactions beyond those described by federal agencies.

“I feel bad for those people,” said Dr. Woodcock, who became the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner in January 2021 as the vaccines were rolling out. “I believe their suffering should be acknowledged, that they have real problems, and they should be taken seriously.”

“I’m disappointed in myself,” she added. “I did a lot of things I feel very good about, but this is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring it home.”

Federal officials and independent scientists face a number of challenges in identifying potential vaccine side effects.

The nation’s fragmented health care system complicates detection of very rare side effects, a process that depends on an analysis of huge amounts of data. That’s a difficult task when a patient may be tested for Covid at Walgreens, get vaccinated at CVS, go to a local clinic for minor ailments and seek care at a hospital for serious conditions. Each place may rely on different health record systems.

There is no central repository of vaccine recipients, nor of medical records, and no easy to way to pool these data. Reports to the largest federal database of so-called adverse events can be made by anyone, about anything. It’s not even clear what officials should be looking for.

“I mean, you’re not going to find ‘brain fog’ in the medical record or claims data, and so then you’re not going to find” a signal that it may be linked to vaccination, Dr. Woodcock said. If such a side effect is not acknowledged by federal officials, “it’s because it doesn’t have a good research definition,” she added. “It isn’t, like, malevolence on their part.”

The government’s understaffed compensation fund has paid so little because it officially recognizes few side effects for Covid vaccines. And vaccine supporters, including federal officials, worry that even a whisper of possible side effects feeds into misinformation spread by a vitriolic anti-vaccine movement.

‘I’m Not Real’

Patients who believe they experienced serious side effects say they have received little support or acknowledgment.

Shaun Barcavage, 54, a nurse practitioner in New York City who has worked on clinical trials for H.I.V. and Covid, said that ever since his first Covid shot, merely standing up sent his heart racing — a symptom suggestive of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome , a neurological disorder that some studies have linked to both Covid and, much less often, vaccination .

He also experienced stinging pain in his eyes, mouth and genitals, which has abated, and tinnitus, which has not.

“I can’t get the government to help me,” Mr. Barcavage said of his fruitless pleas to federal agencies and elected representatives. “I am told I’m not real. I’m told I’m rare. I’m told I’m coincidence.”

Renee France, 49, a physical therapist in Seattle, developed Bell’s palsy — a form of facial paralysis, usually temporary — and a dramatic rash that neatly bisected her face. Bell’s palsy is a known side effect of other vaccines, and it has been linked to Covid vaccination in some studies.

But Dr. France said doctors were dismissive of any connection to the Covid vaccines. The rash, a bout of shingles, debilitated her for three weeks, so Dr. France reported it to federal databases twice.

“I thought for sure someone would reach out, but no one ever did,” she said.

Similar sentiments were echoed in interviews, conducted over more than a year, with 30 people who said they had been harmed by Covid shots. They described a variety of symptoms following vaccination, some neurological, some autoimmune, some cardiovascular.

All said they had been turned away by physicians, told their symptoms were psychosomatic, or labeled anti-vaccine by family and friends — despite the fact that they supported vaccines.

Even leading experts in vaccine science have run up against disbelief and ambivalence.

Dr. Gregory Poland, 68, editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, said that a loud whooshing sound in his ears had accompanied every moment since his first shot, but that his entreaties to colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to explore the phenomenon, tinnitus, had led nowhere.

He received polite responses to his many emails, but “I just don’t get any sense of movement,” he said.

“If they have done studies, those studies should be published,” Dr. Poland added. In despair that he might “never hear silence again,” he has sought solace in meditation and his religious faith.

Dr. Buddy Creech, 50, who led several Covid vaccine trials at Vanderbilt University, said his tinnitus and racing heart lasted about a week after each shot. “It’s very similar to what I experienced during acute Covid, back in March of 2020,” Dr. Creech said.

Research may ultimately find that most reported side effects are unrelated to the vaccine, he acknowledged. Many can be caused by Covid itself.

“Regardless, when our patients experience a side effect that may or may not be related to the vaccine, we owe it to them to investigate that as completely as we can,” Dr. Creech said.

Federal health officials say they do not believe that the Covid vaccines caused the illnesses described by patients like Mr. Barcavage, Dr. Zimmerman and Dr. France. The vaccines may cause transient reactions, such as swelling, fatigue and fever, according to the C.D.C., but the agency has documented only four serious but rare side effects .

Two are associated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is no longer available in the United States: Guillain-Barré syndrome , a known side effect of other vaccines , including the flu shot; and a blood-clotting disorder.

The C.D.C. also links mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to heart inflammation, or myocarditis, especially in boys and young men. And the agency warns of anaphylaxis, or severe allergic reaction, which can occur after any vaccination.

Listening for Signals

Agency scientists are monitoring large databases containing medical information on millions of Americans for patterns that might suggest a hitherto unknown side effect of vaccination, said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the C.D.C.’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

“We toe the line by reporting the signals that we think are real signals and reporting them as soon as we identify them as signals,” he said. The agency’s systems for monitoring vaccine safety are “pretty close” to ideal, he said.

Those national surveillance efforts include the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). It is the largest database, but also the least reliable: Reports of side effects can be submitted by anyone and are not vetted, so they may be subject to bias or manipulation.

The system contains roughly one million reports regarding Covid vaccination, the vast majority for mild events, according to the C.D.C.

Federal researchers also comb through databases that combine electronic health records and insurance claims on tens of millions of Americans. The scientists monitor the data for 23 conditions that may occur following Covid vaccination. Officials remain alert to others that may pop up, Dr. Daskalakis said.

But there are gaps, some experts noted. The Covid shots administered at mass vaccination sites were not recorded in insurance claims databases, for example, and medical records in the United States are not centralized.

“It’s harder to see signals when you have so many people, and things are happening in different parts of the country, and they’re not all collected in the same system,” said Rebecca Chandler, a vaccine safety expert at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

An expert panel convened by the National Academies concluded in April that for the vast majority of side effects, there was not enough data to accept or reject a link.

Asked at a recent congressional hearing whether the nation’s vaccine-safety surveillance was sufficient, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said, “I do believe we could do better.”

In some countries with centralized health care systems, officials have actively sought out reports of serious side effects of Covid vaccines and reached conclusions that U.S. health authorities have not.

In Hong Kong, the government analyzed centralized medical records of patients after vaccination and paid people to come forward with problems. The strategy identified “a lot of mild cases that other countries would not otherwise pick up,” said Ian Wong, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong who led the nation’s vaccine safety efforts.

That included the finding that in rare instances — about seven per million doses — the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine triggered a bout of shingles serious enough to require hospitalization.

The European Medicines Agency has linked the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to facial paralysis, tingling sensations and numbness. The E.M.A. also counts tinnitus as a side effect of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, although the American health agencies do not. There are more than 17,000 reports of tinnitus following Covid vaccination in VAERS.

Are the two linked? It’s not clear. As many as one in four adults has some form of tinnitus. Stress, anxiety, grief and aging can lead to the condition, as can infections like Covid itself and the flu.

There is no test or scan for tinnitus, and scientists cannot easily study it because the inner ear is tiny, delicate and encased in bone, said Dr. Konstantina Stankovic, an otolaryngologist at Stanford University.

Still, an analysis of health records from nearly 2.6 million people in the United States found that about 0.04 percent , or about 1,000, were diagnosed with tinnitus within three weeks of their first mRNA shot. In March, researchers in Australia published a study linking tinnitus and vertigo to the vaccines .

The F.D.A. is monitoring reports of tinnitus, but “at this time, the available evidence does not suggest a causal association with the Covid-19 vaccines,” the agency said in a statement.

Despite surveillance efforts, U.S. officials were not the first to identify a significant Covid vaccine side effect: myocarditis in young people receiving mRNA vaccines. It was Israeli authorities who first raised the alarm in April 2021. Officials in the United States said at the time that they had not seen a link.

On May 22, 2021, news broke that the C.D.C. was investigating a “relatively few” cases of myocarditis. By June 23, the number of myocarditis reports in VAERS had risen to more than 1,200 — a hint that it is important to tell doctors and patients what to look for.

Later analyses showed that the risk for myocarditis and pericarditis, a related condition, is highest after a second dose of an mRNA Covid vaccine in adolescent males aged 12 to 17 years.

In many people, vaccine-related myocarditis is transient. But some patients continue to experience pain, breathlessness and depression, and some show persistent changes on heart scans . The C.D.C. has said there were no confirmed deaths related to myocarditis, but in fact there have been several accounts of deaths reported post-vaccination .

Pervasive Misinformation

The rise of the anti-vaccine movement has made it difficult for scientists, in and out of government, to candidly address potential side effects, some experts said. Much of the narrative on the purported dangers of Covid vaccines is patently false, or at least exaggerated, cooked up by savvy anti-vaccine campaigns.

Questions about Covid vaccine safety are core to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. Citing debunked theories about altered DNA, Florida’s surgeon general has called for a halt to Covid vaccination in the state.

“The sheer nature of misinformation, the scale of misinformation, is staggering, and anything will be twisted to make it seem like it’s not just a devastating side effect but proof of a massive cover-up,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at Johns Hopkins University.

Among the hundreds of millions of Americans who were immunized for Covid, some number would have had heart attacks or strokes anyway. Some women would have miscarried. How to distinguish those caused by the vaccine from those that are coincidences? The only way to resolve the question is intense research .

But the National Institutes of Health is conducting virtually no studies on Covid vaccine safety, several experts noted. William Murphy, a cancer researcher who worked at the N.I.H. for 12 years, has been prodding federal health officials to initiate these studies since 2021.

The officials each responded with “that very tired mantra: ‘But the virus is worse,’” Dr. Murphy recalled. “Yes, the virus is worse, but that doesn’t obviate doing research to make sure that there may be other options.”

A deeper understanding of possible side effects, and who is at risk for them, could have implications for the design of future vaccines, or may indicate that for some young and healthy people, the benefit of Covid shots may no longer outweigh the risks — as some European countries have determined.

Thorough research might also speed assistance to thousands of Americans who say they were injured.

The federal government has long run the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program , designed to compensate people who suffer injuries after vaccination. Established more than three decades ago, the program sets no limit on the amounts awarded to people found to have been harmed.

But Covid vaccines are not covered by that fund because Congress has not made them subject to the excise tax that pays for it. Some lawmakers have introduced bills to make the change.

Instead, claims regarding Covid vaccines go to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program . Intended for public health emergencies, this program has narrow criteria to pay out and sets a limit of $50,000, with stringent standards of proof.

It requires applicants to prove within a year of the injury that it was “the direct result” of getting the Covid vaccine, based on “compelling, reliable, valid, medical, and scientific evidence.”

The program had only four staff members at the beginning of the pandemic, and now has 35 people evaluating claims. Still, it has reviewed only a fraction of the 13,000 claims filed, and has paid out only a dozen.

Dr. Ilka Warshawsky, a 58-year-old pathologist, said she lost all hearing in her right ear after a Covid booster shot. But hearing loss is not a recognized side effect of Covid vaccination.

The compensation program for Covid vaccines sets a high bar for proof, she said, yet offers little information on how to meet it: “These adverse events can be debilitating and life-altering, and so it’s very upsetting that they’re not acknowledged or addressed.”

Dr. Zimmerman, the neuroscientist, submitted her application in October 2021 and provided dozens of supporting medical documents. She received a claim number only in January 2023.

In adjudicating her claim for workers’ compensation, Washington State officials accepted that Covid vaccination caused her injury, but she has yet to get a decision from the federal program.

One of her therapists recently told her she might never be able to live independently again.

“That felt like a devastating blow,” Dr. Zimmerman said. “But I’m trying not to lose hope there will someday be a treatment and a way to cover it.”

Apoorva Mandavilli is a reporter focused on science and global health. She was a part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the pandemic. More about Apoorva Mandavilli

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Mother who lost son to fentanyl overdose wants to share message about substance use

by NICK MINOCK | WJLA Staff

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. (WJLA) — In January 2023, Thurraya Kent’s son Malcolm died of a fentanyl overdose.

He was 17 years old.

“I want for our family and his friends to always remember his laugh, his hugs, and how really talented he was,” Kent told WJLA Reporter Nick Minock . “We are sandwiched between bereaved Mother's Day, which some people don't know exists, and Mother's Day, and Fentanyl Awareness Day, so it's all coming to a crash.”

Through this tragic experience, Kent has learned a lot about Virginia’s and Fairfax County’s approach to addressing youth substance use.

“It's hard when you find out that your child has a substance problem,” Kent said. “The child recognizes it and says, ‘Mom, I want to get help.’ And then all you do is get on waiting lists, waiting lists after waiting lists, and you call and you call and you write and then someone will say, ‘Oh, well, we can't take someone who is on the autism spectrum. Oh, we have a female bed but not a male bed. Or well, the closest bed that will take your insurance is in Texas, or in Florida or something like that.’ And your child is looking at you and saying ‘Mom, I don't want to go to Texas, but I want to get better. I don't want to have to go so far away from home, but I want to get better.’ So why isn’t that care available in Virginia? Why have we limited so many youth beds? Our capacity to treat youth in our own state is not keeping up with the demand, unfortunately.”

On her behalf, WJLA asked Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin what is the Commonwealth doing to increase the number of youth treatment facilities including in-patient care and how the Commonwealth and insurance companies regulate private youth treatment facilities. And what is the measure of effectiveness?

In a statement, Gov. Youngkin’s Press Secretary Christian Martinez told WJLA:

The Governor’s proposed budget amendments included $1.6 million over the biennium to increase the number of inpatient and residential treatment facilities to serve adolescents with substance use disorders. His Right Help, Right Now plan includes the implementation of a pilot program to provide training and education to providers on adolescent substance use disorder treatment, including the use of Medication Assisted Treatment when appropriate.

The licensing regulations were recently updated by the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services to adopt the evidence-based framework of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). The ASAM model of care was widely adopted in Virginia and serves as the model for building out the continuum of services under Virginia Medicaid in the Addiction Recovery Treatment Services (ARTS) program. It includes services ranging from prevention, early intervention, active treatment, through recovery. Virginia Medicaid is the largest payer of substance use disorder treatment in the Commonwealth and requires all Medicaid Managed Care Organizations to be trained in the ASAM model for service authorization and delivery.

Virginia Medicaid has an established contract with Virginia Commonwealth University to conduct an annual evaluation of the ARTS program since its inception in 2017, which includes a review of the availability of services, use of emergency departments, overdose, care transitions, utilization of services, and outcomes that include recovery. Evaluating Medicaid - Department of Health Behavior and Policy - Virginia Commonwealth University (vcu.edu).

Kent would like a law requiring standardized procedures that keep minor children in the ER after a suspected overdose until a follow-up appointment for treatment is secured, and a law requiring emergency rooms to test for fentanyl.

“They don’t test for fentanyl,” Kent said. “The only person that actually tested it for my son for fentanyl was the medical examiner. That doesn't do me any good at that point after he passed away.”

Kent would also like procedures in local schools that help children with identified substance misuse issues succeed in treatment and school.

On behalf of Kent, WJLA asked Fairfax County School board members what is the role of county substance abuse prevention specialists and given increased awareness of drug misuse by teens, why are many of them responsible for more than one high school.

WJLA asked Kent why this question was important to her.

“Our children are hurting and we need to figure out how to help them. Having part-time help on something that is a matter of life and death seems kind of silly,” said Kent. “We need to really value the lives of each of these children and help them figure out that they can recover and move forward.”

Fairfax County Chair Karl Frisch didn’t respond to WJLA's interview request, but At-Large school board member, Kyle McDaniel did.

“First, my heart goes out to this family,” said McDaniel. “No family should have to go through that.”

McDaniel said FCPS has 21 authorized substance abuse prevention specialist positions right now.

FCPS created these positions in 2018 and what they're geared to do on the school side is provide education, provide some intervention services, and really try to bring families, students, and community groups to the table in partnership with our county partners at the CSB, the community services boards,” said McDaniel. “I think, specifically when we're talking about staffing levels, having 21 authorized positions right now, a couple of them are vacant and they're being filled. Which to your point doesn't allow one specialist per High School pyramid. Now we have about two dozen high schools. What I am gathering and what I'm being told on my end is we try to shift these positions in places where we have higher cases of these types of referrals and these situations. So, it's kind of targeted. I would almost call it a needs-based staffing formula. There isn't a federal or state standard for staffing like you would have with other positions such as teachers or mental health counselors. So it's one of those things where we have to target that staff in a way that makes the most sense given the resource constraints that the public school system is facing.

“The [Fairfax] Board of Supervisors passed their budget; it's likely going to be that the school system receives a lot more money. Do you think some of those resources should go to positions like this to address the opioid [and fentanyl] crisis?” WJLA Nick Minock asked McDaniel.

“One of the things that we have to do is take a look from a top-down function of how we go about delivering these types of services, whether it's drug intervention specialists, mental health counselors, that's another component of this is the shortage of mental health counselors, not just in Fairfax County, but across the country, and not just in terms of them being hired, but also being able to fill those positions with qualified individuals. So as we continue to go through the budget cycle, this is certainly going to be something that I monitor and pay close attention to,” answered McDaniel.

Kent said Malcolm had started to self-medicate.

“Is the supplier still out there?” WJLA Reporter Nick Minock asked.

“Yes,” Kent replied.

“What do you think about that? Does that alarm you?” WJLA asked McDaniel.

“One of the things that I'm looking at and I'm trying to work with some of our regional partners at the school board level is pulling together a regional federal task force where we have schools and we have law enforcement,” said McDaniel. “We have counselors, we have community groups at the table. The pills and the distribution is not micro-contained to a school whether it's a high school, middle school or elementary school. It's a regional challenge. I think there needs to be a regional approach to addressing this.”

Kent also has concerns about vape shops in Annandale and Kratom that produce opioid stimulant-like effects.

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