Doing Interviews

Svend Brinkmann, Steinar Kvale

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526426079
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a concise introduction to the richness and scope of interviewing in social science research, teaching the craft of interview research with practical, hands-on guidance. Incorporating discussion of the wide variety of methods in interview-based research and the different approaches to reading the data, this book will help you to navigate the broad field of qualitative research with confidence and get out there and start collecting your data.

Chapter One Introduction to interview research

contents

• Three interview sequences 2
• Interview research in history and in the social sciences 6
• Methodological and ethical issues 9

objectives

After reading this chapter, you should:

• be familiar with some examples of research interviews;
• know about interview research in a historical and social context; and
• understand methodological and ethical issues related to interviewing.

Three interview sequences

If you want to know how people understand their world and their lives, why not talk with them? Conversation is a basic mode of human interaction. Human beings talk with each other, they interact, pose questions and answer questions. Through conversations we get to know other people, get to learn about their experiences, feelings and hopes and the world they live in. In an interview conversation, the researcher asks about, and listens to, what people themselves say about their lived world, about their dreams, fears and hopes; hears their views and opinions in their own words; and learns about their school and work situation, their family and social life. The research interview is an inter-view where knowledge is constructed in the inter-action between the interviewer and the interviewee.

Below follow interview sequences from three research projects, treating Danish pupils’ views on grading in high school in Denmark, Canadian teachers’ views on their work situation in a postmodern society, and the views of the downtrodden on their living conditions in a French suburb, respectively.

The passages serve here to give a first impression of what a qualitative research interview may look like, and they will be returned to throughout the book in discussions of interviewing and of analyzing interviews.

Box 1.1 An interview on grading

Interviewer: You mentioned previously something about grades, would you please try and say more about that?

Pupil: Grades are often unjust, because very often – very often – they are only a measure of how much you talk, and how much you agree with the teacher’s opinion. For instance, I may state an opinion on the basis of a tested ideology, and which is against the teacher’s ideology. The teacher will then, because it is his ideology, which he finds to be the best one, of course say that what he is saying is right and what I am saying is wrong.

Interviewer: How should that influence the grade?

Pupil: Well, because he would then think that I was an idiot – who comes up with the wrong answers.

Interviewer: Is this not only your postulate?

Pupil: No, there are lots of concrete examples.

The first interview sequence (Box 1.1) is taken from Steinar Kvale’s study of the effects of grading in Danish high schools, and was conducted by one of his students. The overall design of the study is presented later (Box 4.2). Here we see how the pupil, in a response to an open question from the interviewer, himself introduces an important dimension of his experience of grades – they are unfair – and then spontaneously gives several reasons why they are unfair. The interviewer critically follows up the answers, asks for specifics, and tests the strength of the pupil’s belief through counter-questions where he doubts what the pupil tells him. This rather simple form of straightforward questioning contrasts with the reciprocity of everyday conversations. The interviewer is in a power position and sets the stage by determining the topic of the interchange; it is the interviewer who asks and the interviewee who answers. The researcher does not contribute with his position on the issue, nor does the pupil ask the interviewer about his view of grades.

The next sequence (Box 1.2) is from Hargreaves’s (1994) study of the work situation of Canadian teachers with changes of forms of school leadership in a postmodern society. Hargreaves interviewed Canadian teachers about their work situation in the transit from a modern to a postmodern age. One key theme that emerged was the tension between individualism and collegiality. The teacher quoted in Box 1.2 is thus rather critical of the school administration’s requirements of teamwork, which he regards as a control counteracting creative teaching by the individual teachers. The interviewer does not merely register opinions, but is also asking for elaborations, and receives the teacher’s arguments for why he does not think that anybody should have to participate in the form of teamwork he is subjected to. Hargreaves interpreted this and other interview sequences on teamwork as expressions of a ‘contrived collegiality’ (see Chapter 9 in the present book).

Box 1.2 An interview on teamwork

Teacher: It’s being encouraged more and more. They’ve been through all the schools. They want you working as a team.

Interviewer: Do you think that’s good?

Teacher: So long as they allow for the creativity of the individual to modify the program. But if they want everything lock-stepped, identical – no, I think it would be disastrous, because you’re going to get some people that won’t think at all, that just sit back and coast on somebody else’s brains and I don’t feel that’s good for anybody.

Interviewer: Do you feel you’re given that space at the moment?

Teacher: With [my teaching partner] I am. I know with some others here, I wouldn’t … I’d go crazy.

Interviewer: How would that be …?

Teacher: Basically controlled. They would want – first of all it would be their ideas. And I would have to fit into their teaching style, and it would have to fit into their time slot. And I don’t think anybody should have to work like that.

Source: Hargreaves (1994, pp. 178–9).

The next sequence (Box 1.3) is from a large interview project on the conditions of the downtrodden by the French sociologist Bourdieu and his co-workers. The sequence in Box 1.3 is taken from one of the many interviews reported at length by Bourdieu et al. (1999) in their book on the situation of the immigrants and the poor in France. The two young men in the interview sequence in Box 1.3 are living in a suburban housing project in the north of France under dismal living conditions. In the extract, Bourdieu, who is the interviewer, is not a neutral questioner, but expresses his own attitudes and feelings towards the situation of the young men, as well as taking a critical attitude towards their account.

Box 1.3 An interview with two young men

– You were telling me that it wasn’t much fun around here, why? What is it, your job, your leisure time?

François: Yeah, both work and leisure. Even in this neighborhood there is nothing much.

Ali: There’s no leisure activities.

François: We have this leisure center but the neighbors complain.

Ali: They’re not very nice, that’s true.
– Why do they complain, because they …

François: Because we hang around the public garden, and in the evening there is nothing in our project, we have to go in the hallways when it’s too cold outside. And when there’s too much noise and stuff, they call the cops.
[…]
– You are not telling me the whole story …

Ali: We are always getting assaulted in our project; just yesterday we got some tear gas thrown at us, really, by a guy in an apartment. A bodybuilder. A pumper.
– Why, what were you doing, bugging him?

François: No, when we are in the entryway he lives just above, when we are in the hall we talk, sometimes we shout.
– But that took place during the daytime, at night?

François: No, just in the evening.
– Late?

François: Late, around 10, 11 o’clock.
– Well you know, he’s got the right to snooze. The tear gas is a bit much but if you got on his nerves all night, you can see where he’s coming from, right?

Ali: Yeah, but he could just come down and say …
– Yes, sure, he could come down and merely say ‘go somewhere else’ …

Ali: Instead of tear gas.

Source: Bourdieu et al. (1999, pp. 64–5).

These three interviews address important issues of the subjects’ life world, such as grades in school, changes in school leadership, and deplorable suburban living conditions. They are not merely ‘tape-recording sociologies’, in Bourdieu’s expression, but the interviewers actively follow up on the subjects’ answers, and seek to clarify and extend the interview statements. This concerns obtaining reasons for the teacher’s rejection of teamwork, posing critical questions to the pupil believing in a biased grading by his teachers, and challenging the young men’s presentations of themselves as innocent victims of harassment. We shall return to the knowledge production in these interview sequences throughout the book.

Interview research in history and in the social sciences

Conversations are an old way of obtaining systematic knowledge. In ancient Greece, Thucydides interviewed participants from the Peloponnesian War to write the history of the war, and Socrates developed philosophical knowledge through dialogues with his Sophist opponents. The term interview, is, however, of recent origin; it came into use in the seventeenth century. An interview is literally an inter-view, an interchange of views between two persons conversing about a theme of common interest. The first journalistic interview is dated to 1859 with an interview with the Mormon leader Brigham Young published in the New York Herald Tribune (Silvester, 1993).

Systematic literature on research interviewing is a new phenomenon of the last few decades. Qualitative interviews have, however, previously been extensively employed in the social sciences. Anthropologists and sociologists have long used informal interviews to obtain knowledge from their informants. Within education and the health sciences, the interview has become a common research method in the last few decades. Turning to our own discipline, we shall give some examples of how qualitative interviews throughout the history of psychology have been a key method for producing scientific and professional knowledge.

• Freud’s psychoanalytic theory was to a large extent founded on therapeutic interviews with his patients. His several hundred interviews, an hour long with each patient, were based on the patient’s free associations and on the therapist’s ‘free-hovering attention’ (Freud, 1963). These qualitative interviews produced new psychological knowledge about dreams and neuroses, personality and sexuality, knowledge that after a hundred years still has a prominent position in psychological textbooks. Psychoanalysis continues to have a professional impact on psychotherapy, to be of interest to other disciplines and the general public, and to represent a challenge to philosophers.
• Piaget’s (1930) theory of child development was based on his interviews with children in natural settings, often in combination with simple experimental tasks. He was trained as a psychoanalyst, and what he termed his ‘clinical method’ was inspired by the psychoanalytic interview. He let the children talk spontaneously about the weight and size of objects and noticed the manner in which their thoughts unfolded, using a combination of naturalistic observations, simple tests and interviews.
• Experiments on the effects of changes in illumination on production at the Hawthorne Chicago plant of the Western Electrical Company in the 1920s had led to unexpected results – work output and worker morale improv...