Asking questions and getting answers is a much harder task than it may seem at first. The spoken or written word always has a residue of ambiguity, no matter how carefully we word the questions and how carefully we report or code the answers. Yet interviewing is one of the most common and powerful ways in which we try to understand our fellow humans. Interviewing includes a wide variety of forms and a multiplicity of uses. The most common form of interviewing involves individual, face-to-face verbal interchange, but interviewing can also take the form of face-to-face group interchange, mailed or self-administered questionnaires, and telephone surveys. It can be structured, semistructured, or unstructured. Interviewing can be used for marketing research, political opinion polling, therapeutic reasons, or academic analysis. It can be used for the purpose of measurement, or its intent can be to better understand an individual or a group. An interview can be a one-time brief exchange, such as five minutes over the telephone, or it can take place over multiple lengthy sessions, at times spanning days or weeks, as in life history interviewing.
The use of interviewing to acquire information is so extensive today that it has been said that we live in an “interview society” (Atkinson and Silverman 1997; Silverman 1993), where everyone gets interviewed and gets a moment in the sun, even if only to reveal dastardly aberrations on the Jerry Springer show. Increasingly, qualitative researchers are realizing that interviews are not neutral tools of data gathering but rather active interactions between two (or more) people leading to negotiated, contextually based results. Thus, the focus of interviews is moving to encompass the “hows” of people’s lives (the constructive work involved in producing order in everyday life) as well as the traditional “whats” (the activities of everyday life) (Cicourel 1964; Dingwall 1997; Gubrium and Holstein 1997, 1998; Holstein and Gubrium 1995; Kvale 1996; Sarup 1996; Seidman 1991; Silverman 1993, 1997a). Interviews are moving toward new electronic forms and have seen a return to the pragmatic ideal of political involvement.
After discussing the interview society, we examine interviews by beginning with structured methods of interviewing and gradually moving to more qualitative types, examining interviews as negotiated texts and ending with electronic interviews and empathetic interviews. We begin by briefly outlining the history of interviewing and then turn to a discussion of the academic uses of interviewing. We discuss the major types of interviewing (structured, group, and unstructured) as well as other ways in which interviews are conducted. One caveat is that, in discussing the various interview methods, we use the language and rationales employed by practitioners of these methods; we note our differences with these practitioners and our criticisms later in the book. Following our examination of structured interviewing, we address in detail the various elements of qualitative interviewing. We then discuss the problems related to gender and interviewing, as well as issues of interpretation and reporting, as we broach some considerations related to ethical issues. Finally, we note some of the new trends in interviewing.

The Interview Society

Both qualitative and quantitative researchers today tend to rely on the interview as the basic method of data gathering, whether the purpose is to obtain a rich, in-depth experiential account of an event or episode in the life of the respondent or to garner a simple point on a scale of two to ten dimensions. There is inherent faith that the results are trustworthy and accurate and that the relation of the interviewer to the respondent that evolves during the interview process has not unduly biased the account (Atkinson and Silverman 1997; Silverman 1993). The commitment to, and reliance on, the interview to produce narrative experience reflects and reinforces the view of the United States as an interview society.
It seems that everyone—not just social researchers— relies on the interview as a source of information, with the assumption that interview results give a true and accurate picture of the respondents’ selves and lives. One cannot escape being interviewed; interviews are everywhere in the form of political polls, questionnaires about visits to doctors, housing applications, forms regarding social service eligibility, college applications, talk shows, news programs— the list goes on and on. The interview as a means of data gathering is no longer limited to use by social science researchers and police detectives; it is a “universal mode of systematic inquiry” (Holstein and Gubrium 1995:1). It seems that nearly any type of question—whether personal, sensitive, probing, upsetting, or accusatory—is fair game and permissible in the interview setting. Nearly all interviews, no matter their purposes (and these can be varied—to describe, to interrogate, to assist, to test, to evaluate, etc.), seek various forms of biographical description. As Gubrium and Holstein (1998) noted, the interview has become a means of contemporary storytelling, in which persons divulge life accounts in response to interview inquiries. The media have been especially adept at using this technique.
As a society, we rely on the interview and, by and large, take it for granted. The interview and the norms surrounding the enactment of the respondent and researcher roles have evolved to the point where they are institutionalized and no longer require extensive training; rules and roles are known and shared. (However, there is a growing group of individuals who increasingly question the traditional assumptions of the interview, and we address their concerns later, in our discussion of gender and interviewing and new trends in interviewing.) Many practitioners continue to use and take for granted traditional interviewing techniques. It is as though interviewing is now part of the mass culture, so that it has actually become the most feasible mechanism for obtaining information about individuals, groups, and organizations in a society characterized by individuation, diversity, and specialized role relations. Thus, many believe that it is not necessary to “reinvent the wheel” for each interview situation given that “interviewing has become a routine technical practice and a pervasive, taken-for-granted activity in our culture” (Mishler 1986: 23).
This is not to say, however, that the interview is so technical and the procedures so standardized that interviewers can ignore contextual, societal, and interpersonal elements. Each interview context is one of interaction and relation, and the result is as much a product of this social dynamic as it is the product of accurate accounts and replies. The interview has become a routine and nearly unnoticed part of everyday life. Yet response rates continue to decline, indicating that fewer people are willing to disclose their “selves,” or that they are so burdened by requests for interviews that they are much more selective in their choices of which interviews to grant. Social scientists are more likely to recognize, however, that interviews are interactional encounters and that the nature of the social dynamic of the interview can shape the nature of the knowledge generated. Interviewers with less training and experience than social scientists might not recognize that interview participants are actively constructing knowledge around questions and responses (Holstein and Gubrium 1995).
We now turn to a brief history of interviewing to frame its roots and development.

The History of Interviewing

At least one form of interviewing or another has been with us for a very long time. Even ancient Egyptians conducted population censuses (Babbie 1992). During more recent times, the tradition of interviewing evolved from two trends. First, interviewing found great popularity and widespread use in clinical diagnosis and counseling where the concern was with the quality of responses. Second, during World War I, interviewing came to be widely employed in psychological testing with the emphasis being on measurement (Maccoby and Maccoby 1954).
The individual generally credited with being the first to develop a social survey relying on interviewing was Charles Booth (Converse 1987). In 1886, Booth embarked on a comprehensive survey of the economic and social conditions of the people of London, published as Life and Labour of the People in London (Booth 1902–1903). In his early study, Booth embodied what were to become separate interviewing methods, because he not only implemented survey research but also triangulated his work by relying on unstructured interviews and ethnographic observations:
The data were checked and supplemented by visits to many neighborhoods, streets and homes, and by conferences with various welfare and community leaders. From time to time Booth lived as a lodger in districts where he was not known, so that he could become more intimately acquainted with the lives and habits of the poorer classes. (Parten 1950: 6–7)
Many other surveys of London and other English cities followed, patterned after Booth’s example. In the United States a similar pattern ensued. In 1895, a study attempted to do in Chicago what Booth had done in London (Converse 1987). In 1896, the American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who admittedly was following Booth’s lead, studied the black population of Philadelphia (Du Bois 1899). Surveys of cities and small towns followed, with the most notable among them being the Lynds’ Middletown (Lynd and Lynd 1929) and Middletown in Transition (Lynd and Lynd 1937).
Opinion polling was another early form of interviewing. Some polling took place well before the start of the twentieth century, but it really came into its own in 1935 with the forming of the American Institute of Public Opinion by George Gallup. Preceding Gallup, in both psychology and sociology during the 1920s, there was a movement toward the study (and usually the measurement) of attitudes. W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki used the documentary method to introduce the study of attitudes in social psychology. Thomas’s influence along with that of Robert Park, a former reporter who believed that sociology was to be found out in the field, sparked a number of community studies at the University of Chicago that came to be known collectively as the works of the Chicago School. Many others researchers, such as Albion Small, George H. Mead, E. W. Burgess, Everett C. Hughes, Louis Wirth, W. Lloyd Warner, and Anselm Strauss, were also greatly influential (for a recent discussion of the relations and influence of Chicago School members, see Becker 1999).
Although the members of the Chicago School are reputed to have used the ethnographic method in their inquiries, some disagree and have noted that many of the Chicago School studies lacked the analytic component of modern-day ethnography and so were, at best, “firsthand descriptive studies” (Harvey 1987: 50). Regardless of the correct label for the Chicago School members’ fieldwork, they clearly relied on a combination of observation, personal documents, and informal interviews in their studies. Interviews were especially in evidence in the work of Thrasher (1927/1963), who, in his study of gang members, relied primarily on some 130 qualitative interviews, and in that of Anderson (1923), whose classic study of hobos relied on informal in-depth conversations.
It was left to Herbert Blumer and his former student Howard Becker to formalize and give impetus to sociological ethnography during the 1950s and 1960s, and interviewing began to lose both the eclectic flavor given to it by Booth and the qualitative accent of the Chicago School members. Understanding gang members or hobos through interviews lost importance; instead, what became relevant was the use of interviewing in survey research as a tool to quantify data. This was not new, given that opinion polls and market research had been doing it for years. But during World War II, there was a tremendous increase in survey research as the U.S. armed forces hired great numbers of sociologists as survey researchers. More than a half million American soldiers were interviewed in one manner or another (Young 1966), and their mental and emotional lives were reported in a four-volume survey, Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, the first two volumes of which were directed by Samuel Stouffer and titled The American Soldier. This work had tremendous impact and led the way to widespread use of systematic survey research.
What was new, however, was that quantitative survey research moved into academia and came to dominate sociology as the method of choice for the next three decades. An Austrian immigrant, Paul Lazarsfeld, spearheaded this move. He welcomed The American Soldier with great enthusiasm. In fact, Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton edited a book of reflections on The American Soldier (Merton and Lazarsfeld 1950). Lazarsfeld moved to Columbia University in 1940, taking with him his market research and other applied grants, and he became instrumental in the directing of the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Two other “survey organizations” were also formed: the National Opinion Research Center (formed in 1941 by Harry Field, first at the University of Denver and then at the University of Chicago) and the Survey Research Center (formed in 1946 by Rensis Likert and his group at the University of Michigan).
Academia at the time was dominated by theoretical concerns, and there was some resistance toward this applied, numbers-based kind of sociology. Sociologists and other humanists were critical of Lazarsfeld and the other survey researchers. Herbert Blumer, C. Wright Mills, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Pitirin Sorokin were among those who voiced their displeasure. According to Converse (1987), Sorokin felt that “the new emphasis on quantitative work was obsessive, and he called the new practitioners ‘quantophrenics’—with special reference to Stouffer and Lazarsfeld” (p. 253). Converse also quoted Mills: “Th...