Book summary “Interviews”: summary

Introduction

You often need to gather rich, meaningful data from people, but standard surveys and rigid questionnaires fail to capture the complexity of human experience. You struggle to extract deep insights while maintaining academic rigor and ethical standards throughout your qualitative study.

Steinar Kvale presents the qualitative research interview as an intellectual craft rather than a mechanical tool. A qualitative research interview is a professional interaction that constructs knowledge through conversation, aiming to understand themes from the subjects' own perspectives.

The book guides you through the entire research journey from initial conception to final reporting. You will learn how to address epistemological challenges, plan your study methodically, conduct sensitive dialogues, transcribe spoken words accurately, and analyze your material rigorously.

• What is the philosophical basis of qualitative research?
• How do you design and conduct a semi-structured interview?
• What ethical dilemmas arise during a study?
• How do you analyze interview texts without losing meaning?

1. Introduction to Interview Research

A qualitative research interview is a professional interaction that constructs knowledge through conversation, aiming to understand themes from the subjects' own perspectives.

Unlike an everyday conversation, the research interview has a specific purpose, structure, and methodological approach. It seeks nuanced, descriptive accounts of the lived daily world rather than quantification. Steinar Kvale uses the term semi-structured life-world interview to describe this approach, treating the dialogue as an inter-view where knowledge is constructed through the interaction between you and the subject.

Steinar Kvale used interviews with high school pupils in Denmark to uncover how they experienced grading as unjust and biased.

Historical Foundations

Qualitative interviews have deep historical roots across the social sciences, serving as the foundational empirical method for major twentieth-century psychological and sociological breakthroughs. Historical milestones demonstrate how qualitative and clinical interviews generated lasting theories on personality, child development, industrial productivity, and consumer behavior.

Sigmund Freud used one-hour therapeutic interviews based on free association. Jean Piaget used a clinical method of interviewing children. The Hawthorne plant study interviewed over 21,000 workers. Ernest Dichter conducted depth interviews on consumer motivation, using more than a hundred detailed conversational interviews in his 1939 car purchasing study.

The Miner and Traveller Metaphors

The miner and traveller metaphors illustrate contrasting epistemological conceptions of interviewing as either knowledge collection or knowledge construction. The miner metaphor treats knowledge as buried metal waiting to be extracted uncontaminated, aligning with positivism. The traveller metaphor views the interviewer as a wanderer conversing with locals and constructing narratives, aligning with postmodernism.

You should begin your training in the craft of interviewing with a practical exercise before reading further:

• Obtain about three sound-recorded research interviews.
• Spend a week transcribing them.
• Reflect on the processes and problems of transcribing and interviewing.

2. Epistemological and Ethical Issues

Qualitative interviews require managing micro-ethics and macro-ethics across all seven stages while navigating power asymmetries and epistemological shifts.

Different epistemological positions shape interview research. Positivism separates data observation from interpretation and seeks objective, reproducible facts. Postmodernism emphasizes local contexts, linguistic interaction, and the narrative nature of knowledge.

Interviews can be approached either as research instruments to capture past experiences or as situated social practices where participants produce accounts. While a research instrument approach focuses on minimizing interviewer effects to gather valid reports of reality, a social practice approach views interview talk as socially situated interaction that generates accounts oriented to the immediate context.

Power Asymmetry

The research interview is inherently an asymmetrical power relation rather than an egalitarian dialogue. The interviewer initiates the situation, defines the topic, poses questions, decides which answers to follow up, maintains a monopoly of interpretation, and terminates the conversation.

Twelve phenomenological aspects define the mode of understanding in a semi-structured life-world interview, ranging from a focus on the life world to interpersonal dynamics. These aspects guide you to prioritize qualitative descriptions of specific situations over general opinions, maintain a qualified naïveté, and handle ambiguity and change constructively.

Seven Stages of Ethics

Ethical issues must be managed continuously across all seven stages of an interview inquiry, not merely during the live interview. Kvale outlines how ethical concerns evolve through thematizing, designing, interviewing, transcribing, analyzing, verifying, and reporting. Issues range from ensuring beneficial purpose and informed consent to protecting confidentiality during public reporting.

You must manage both micro-ethics regarding direct subject welfare and macro-ethics concerning the broader social consequences of the generated knowledge. While micro-ethics focus on personal harm, informed consent, and confidentiality, macro-ethics address the societal impact of the findings. An interview may be pleasant for a participant on a micro-level, yet the resulting knowledge might serve questionable ends on a macro-level, such as consumer research promoting increased tobacco consumption or shaping corporate management.

Adorno et al.'s 1950 study "The Authoritarian Personality" used therapeutic interview techniques to uncover prejudices regarding anti-Semitism, violating micro-level informed consent while pursuing beneficial macro-level social goals.

Obtaining informed consent in qualitative interviews presents unique challenges because exploratory designs make it difficult to specify questions and topics in advance. Informed consent requires explaining research purposes, potential risks, and the right to withdraw. However, exploratory and funnel-shaped interviews intentionally withhold specific purposes initially to avoid leading subjects, requiring debriefing afterward. Institutional settings also complicate consent when superiors give permission, creating subtle pressure on subordinates.

Yow provided examples in 1994 of letters of agreement with subjects that serve as protection for both interviewees and researchers when dealing with conflictual or institutional topics.

Because you are the main research instrument, personal integrity is critical, and high rapport can ethically compromise subjects by functioning like a Trojan horse. Interpersonal closeness and active listening can lead to quasi-therapeutic relationships where subjects reveal sensitive details they later regret. Duncombe and Jessop argued in 2002, and Fog argued in 2004, that simulated empathy and commodified rapport can manipulate subjects into disclosing emotions, while an experienced interviewer's rapport acts like a Trojan horse entering private areas uninvited.

You can apply specific practices across the inquiry:

• Thematizing: Consider the improvement of the human situation investigated beyond scientific value.
• Designing: Obtain informed consent, secure confidentiality, and consider consequences for subjects.
• Interview situation: Take into account stress and changes in self-understanding.
• Transcription: Protect confidentiality and ensure textual loyalty to oral statements.
• Analysis: Decide on penetrating analysis depth and whether subjects have a say in interpretations.
• Verification: Report secured and verified knowledge critically.
• Reporting: Protect confidentiality when reporting private interviews publicly.

3. Planning an Interview Study

Planning a qualitative interview study requires navigating a linear yet iterative seven-stage framework from initial conceptualization to final publication.

The seven stages provide an idealized sequence to guide you through chaotic interview journeys. Pre-interview stages of thematizing and designing require deep advance preparation because qualitative interviews lack standard procedural rules.

You must plan procedures covering all seven stages before conducting interviews:

• Thematizing: Formulate the investigation's purpose and theoretical conception of the theme.
• Designing: Plan procedures covering all seven stages before conducting interviews.
• Interviewing: Conduct sessions using an interview guide and a reflective approach.
• Transcribing: Prepare interview material from oral speech to written text.
• Analyzing: Select appropriate modes of analysis based on purpose and material.
• Verifying: Ascertain validity, reliability, and generalizability.
• Reporting: Communicate findings matching scientific criteria and ethical standards.

Effective interview design requires maintaining an overview of all seven stages, anticipating post-interview hurdles early, and keeping a work-journal. Interactions across stages mean early decisions open or limit later options. You should push post-interview analysis tasks forward into the design phase, maintain a circular feedback model, and track learning through a work-journal.

In Kvale's 1980 study on grading in Danish high schools, you can see this scale in practice:

• 30 high school pupils interviewed individually in Kvale's grade study.
• 6 teachers interviewed to gain an alternative perspective.
• 1,000 pages of transcripts generated from 36 total interviews.

In a follow-up to Kvale's grade study, Hvolbøl and Kristensen used a questionnaire with 239 pupils from 6 schools to test the general prevalence of a single pupil's interview statement about talkativeness and grades.

Sample Size and When Not to Interview

The sample size in qualitative interview studies should be determined by saturation and research purpose rather than quantitative maximization principles.

Common interview studies cluster around 15 plus or minus 10 subjects. Too few subjects prevent grouping and comparisons, while too large a sample leaves no time for penetrating qualitative interpretations.

You should follow specific sample practices:

• Interview as many subjects as necessary to find out what you need to know.
• Continue conducting new interviews until a point of saturation is reached where further interviews yield little new knowledge.

Qualitative research interviews are inappropriate when predicting large-scale behavior, studying implicit tacit understandings, or probing deep personal traits without therapy safeguards. Surveys are better for predicting voting behavior across large groups. Participant observation is superior for implicit tacit habits. Therapy processes are required for deep personal probes because inducing strong emotional reactions purely for research is unethical.

Before designing your project, you should apply this rule:

• Consider whether other methods like surveys, field observations, or therapy are better suited before planning an interview study.

Interviewing is fundamentally an intellectual craft resting on the personal judgment, competence, and subject matter knowledge of the researcher rather than mechanical rule-following. Positivist views reduce method to mechanical rules requiring no judgment. In contrast, anthropological and qualitative approaches treat you as the primary instrument. Skilled research is learned through apprenticeship, practical experience, and contextual familiarity, similar to Heidegger's carpenter focusing on the wood rather than the hammer. Jean Lave argues that treating methods as autonomous instruments is nonsense because only another complex human being can comprehend human existence.

You should guide your craftsmanship with these principles:

• Avoid any rigid set of procedures or fetishism of method and technique.
• Develop and use the sociological imagination as an unpretentious intellectual craftsman.
• Let every person be their own methodologist and theorist.

4. Conducting an Interview and Variations

Semi-structured life-world interviews combine thematic and dynamic dimensions through structured question types and specialized variations.

The semi-structured life-world interview combines a thematic sequence with openness to follow the interviewee's spontaneous answers. You seek to understand the subject's world from their point of view by maintaining flexibility in the sequence and formulation of questions. Steinar Kvale demonstrated this approach in a 1987 workshop at Saybrook Institute, interviewing a woman for 10 minutes about the childhood meaning of getting grades.

Interview questions must simultaneously serve thematic knowledge production and dynamic interpersonal interaction. While thematic questions address the research topic and what needs to be analyzed, dynamic questions govern the how, keeping the conversation flowing without academic jargon. Sociologist Sennett asked a Boston elite matron point-blank to describe her identity over tea, receiving the reply, "My what, young man?"

Preparing for an interview involves translating academic research questions into colloquial interviewer questions. You should maintain two separate lists: one containing theoretical project questions and another containing everyday vernacular questions designed to elicit rich descriptions.

You can guide your preparation with these practices:

• Develop a project guide with academic thematic research questions.
• Develop an interview guide with colloquial questions taking thematic and dynamic dimensions into account.

Scripting and Question Types

Interviewers can utilize a structured typology of questions ranging from introductory episodes to direct and indirect probes. Questions are categorized to elicit specific depth, such as opening with concrete episodes, probing with repetitions of significant words, and postponing direct questions. Kvale opened a demonstration by asking a student if she remembered the first time she ever had any grades.

You can direct the conversation using these specific probes:

• Ask introductory questions about concrete situations or memories.
• Use follow-up questions like repeating significant words or using pauses.
• Deploy probing questions for deeper description without stating dimensions.
• Apply specifying questions to operationalize general statements.
• Postpone direct questions until later parts of the interview.
• Use indirect or projective questions to uncover hidden attitudes.
• Employ structuring questions to transition between themes.
• Use silence to allow subjects time to reflect.
• Utilize interpreting questions to rephrase or clarify meanings.

Interview Variations and Focus Groups

Qualitative interviewing encompasses diverse epistemological conceptions and methodological formats tailored to different research goals. Conceptions range from neo-positivist miner metaphors and romantic confessions to constructionist traveller co-constructions and postmodern transformative dialogics.

Obtaining valid factual data requires extreme caution in question wording due to the susceptibility of human memory and witness reports. Minor shifts in vocabulary can significantly alter the quantitative estimates or qualitative facts reported by interviewees. Loftus and Palmer found that asking about car speeds using contacted yielded an average speed estimate of 32 mph, whereas smashed raised it to 41 mph.

Special populations like children and elites require distinct methodological adaptations to overcome power asymmetries and cognitive gaps. Children are prone to leading questions and power imbalances, whereas elite interviews require deep subject mastery to achieve conversational symmetry. Piaget repeatedly questioned young children about the spatial location of dreams, leading them to mirror his phrasing.

You must adapt your approach for different populations using these practices:

• Avoid associating the interviewer with classroom teachers when interviewing children.
• Refrain from conveying expectations of a single right answer to children.
• Use age-appropriate questions and integrate interviews with tasks like drawing or playing.
• Master technical language and the interviewee biography when interviewing elites.

Cross-cultural interviews introduce subtle linguistic and extra-linguistic pitfalls that can easily distort data collection. Interactions across cultures are affected by differing norms regarding directness, body gestures like nodding, and the potentially biased role of interpreters. Nodding signifies agreement in most of Europe but means no in several areas of Greece.

You must manage cross-cultural interactions with this practice:

• Select an interpreter who is culturally acceptable as well as proficient in the language.

Focus groups use non-directive moderation to encourage spontaneous, expressive, and conflicting viewpoints among multiple participants. Originating in market research and later adopted in academic social research, focus groups typically involve 6 to 10 subjects and rely on group interaction rather than individual cognitive reporting.

Confrontational and active interviewing uses Socratic provocation and dialectical opposition to uncover implicit assumptions and power dynamics. Instead of seeking harmony and consensus, you actively challenge the subject's statements, creating a battleground that can yield deep insights. Bellah and co-workers challenged respondents in interviews about values by persistently probing when their stated personal responsibility applied to others.

5. Interview Quality and Transcribing

Interview quality rests on rigorous craftsmanship, ideal criteria, and treating transcription as an interpretive translation from oral speech to written text.

Appraisal of interview technique depends heavily on the content, purpose, and interpretation of the session. In Hamlet, act III, scene 2, Hamlet asks Polonius if a cloud looks like a camel, a weasel, and a whale, and Polonius agrees to each contradictory suggestion. Hamlet uses leading questions about the shape of a cloud to test Polonius, which can be viewed as an unreliable technique for cloud observation, an indirect reliable test of Polonius's trustworthiness, or a display of court power dynamics. The 7 lines of dialogue are dense and rich enough for extensive commentary.

The quality of original interviews dictates the success of subsequent analysis. You can target specific standards during the session:

• Ensure spontaneous, rich, specific, and relevant answers from the interviewee.
• Keep interviewer's questions short and subject's answers long.
• Follow up and clarify meanings of relevant aspects of the answers.
• Interpret the interview throughout the conversation.
• Attempt to verify interpretations of answers in the course of the interview.
• Make the interview self-reported so it forms a self-reliant story requiring few extra explanations.

Qualitative inquiry relies heavily on the interviewer's ability to navigate on-the-spot decisions and maintain critical awareness without intimidating the subject. You need specific personal and conversational qualifications:

• Be knowledgeable about the interview theme and conduct an informed conversation without showing off.
• Structure the session by introducing purpose, outlining procedure, and rounding off.
• Pose clear, simple, easy, and short questions without academic jargon.
• Be gentle by allowing subjects to finish, proceeding at their rate, and tolerating pauses.
• Be sensitive by listening actively, catching nuances and emotional messages.
• Be open by listening with evenly hovering attention and following up on new aspects.
• Steering the interview by knowing what to find out and controlling digressions.
• Be critical by questioning claims to test reliability and validity.
• Remember earlier statements to ask for elaboration and relate different parts of the conversation.
• Interpret statements throughout to clarify meanings and confirm them with the interviewee.

Mainstream social science often raises 10 typical criticisms against qualitative interviews regarding subjectivity and lack of global generalization. A Google search in March 2017 showed 4.4 million hits for qualitative analysis chemistry and 3.8 million hits for qualitative analysis social science. Potter and Hepburn noted contingent problems on page 285 and discussed interview set-up descriptions on page 290. A deep scientific probe can conflict with the ethics of principles and utilitarian interests. A woman living with cancer denies fearing the return of her disease with a fast-paced voice and rigid body, forcing you to choose between respecting her surface words or probing her denial.

Transcribing as Translation

Transcription is not a simple clerical task but an interpretive translation from oral speech to written text that involves multiple abstractions and losses of context.

Transforming face-to-face dialogue into written transcripts strips away body language, tone, intonation, and breathing. A one-hour interview in the grading study results in 20 to 25 pages of single-spaced typescript and takes an experienced secretary 5 hours to type verbatim. Transcripts suffer from intersubjective reliability issues regarding where pauses end or sentences begin. You can handle transcription practically using concrete steps:

• State explicitly in the report how the transcriptions were made based on written instructions.
• Ensure transcribers use the same procedures for typing if multiple transcribers are used.
• Choose whether statements should be transcribed verbatim or transformed into formal written style.

Computer programs act as electronic scissors for qualitative data. You can perform basic tasks during analysis:

• Read through transcripts and code relevant passages.
• Retrieve and inspect coded passages using code-and-retrieve programs.
• Recode and combine codes as needed.
• Write memos and reflections on interviews for later analysis.

6. Analyzing Interviews

Interview analysis utilizes a continuum from description to interpretation across six steps, employing categorization, condensation, hermeneutics, and language-focused tools.

You can integrate interpretation across a self-correcting process starting right inside the interview. A pupil describing grading effects realizes how it fosters destructive competition, and the interviewer condenses and feeds back this meaning for immediate confirmation.

Kvale outlines a continuum from description to interpretation and action:

• First step: subjects spontaneously describe their life world during the interview without much interpretation.
• Second step: subjects discover new relationships and meanings based on their spontaneous descriptions.
• Third step: the interviewer condenses and interprets the meaning, sending it back for on-the-spot confirmation or disconfirmation.
• Fourth step: the recorded interview is analyzed alone or with co-researchers using transcription and computer programs.
• Fifth step: a re-interview gives interpretations back to subjects for membership validation and elaboration.
• Sixth step: extend the continuum to action, where subjects act on new insights or engage in collective action like action research.

Researchers can frame their analysis through induction, deduction, or abduction. Induction scrutinizes empirical instances to form general concepts. Deduction tests hypotheses derived from general theories, seeking falsification. Abduction addresses diffuse or unexpected situations where observations break normal understanding, requiring a provisional explanatory hypothesis.

Six Steps of Analysis

Meaning coding and categorization reduce large volumes of interview texts into structured tables by attaching keywords or quantitative scales. In Kvale's grade study, 30 pupil interviews spanning 762 pages were categorized into eight subcategories of teacher-pupil relationships, such as bluffing and wheedling.

When you use coding, apply these practices:

• Record code names, who coded which parts, dates, definitions, and thoughts in code memos.
• Attach keywords to text segments or map occurrences with plus and minus markers or numerical scales.

Meaning condensation abridges long statements into shorter formulations without quantitative expressions. Developed by Giorgi from phenomenological philosophy, this method follows specific steps:

• Read the complete interview to get a sense of the whole.
• Determine the natural meaning units of the text as expressed by subjects.
• Restate the dominant theme of each natural meaning unit as simply as possible from the subject's viewpoint.
• Interrogate the meaning units in terms of the specific study purpose.
• Tie the essential, non-redundant themes of the entire interview into a descriptive statement.

Meaning and Language Analysis

Meaning interpretation goes beyond manifest text to deeper structures using hermeneutic principles and sometimes critical suspicion. Hermeneutic text interpretation operates through a hermeneutical circle where global meaning and single passage meanings continuously inform each other.

• Explicate text passages through the hermeneutical circle until a sensible coherent meaning is established.

Language-focused modes of analysis treat interview data as accounts, examining grammar, interaction sequences, plots, and power discourses. Derrida's deconstruction can be applied to the phrase the interview dialogue to reveal how it often glosses over asymmetrical power relationships.

Apply language tools with these practices:

• Study active and passive voice, pronoun usage, and temporal-spatial references in linguistic analysis.
• Examine sequencing of talk, turn-taking, and repair in conversation analysis.
• Work out structures, plots, and actant models in narrative analysis.
• Focus on how talk is constructed and what social consequences it has in discourse analysis.
• Tear texts apart, unsettling taken-for-granted concepts and binary oppositions in deconstruction.

Researchers can analyze interviews flexibly using ad hoc bricolage tactics or deep theoretical reading without following a rigid step-by-step method. In Kvale's study, ranking interview page lengths and correlating them with grade point averages revealed a statistically significant connection between talkativity and high grades, showing a 0.65 correlation with a chance probability of p < 0.001.

10 Key Ideas

1. A qualitative research interview is a professional interaction that constructs knowledge through conversation, aiming to understand themes from the subjects' own perspectives.
2. The miner and traveller metaphors illustrate contrasting epistemological conceptions of interviewing as either knowledge collection or knowledge construction.
3. Ethical issues must be managed continuously across all seven stages of an interview inquiry, not merely during the live interview.
4. Interviewing is fundamentally an intellectual craft resting on the personal judgment, competence, and subject matter knowledge of the researcher rather than mechanical rule-following.
5. Semi-structured life-world interviews combine thematic and dynamic dimensions through structured question types and specialized variations.
6. Interview quality rests on rigorous craftsmanship, ideal criteria, and treating transcription as an interpretive translation from oral speech to written text.
7. Transcription is not a simple clerical task but an interpretive translation from oral speech to written text that involves multiple abstractions and losses of context.
8. Interview analysis utilizes a continuum from description to interpretation across six steps, employing categorization, condensation, hermeneutics, and language-focused tools.
9. Qualitative interviews require managing micro-ethics and macro-ethics across all seven stages while navigating power asymmetries and epistemological shifts.
10. Planning a qualitative interview study requires navigating a linear yet iterative seven-stage framework from initial conceptualization to final publication.