Research Interviewing: The Range of Techniques

Acknowledgements

List of tables

List of figures

PART ONE: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE

1 Research interviewing: key issues

2 The ethics of interviewing

3 The importance of question/topic development

4 Different techniques and the ‘cost’ development factor

5 The core skills of interviewing

PART TWO: FACE-TO-FACE METHODS

6 Ethnographic methods: the interviewer as participant-observer in real-life contexts

7 The unstructured interview

8 The élite interview

9 Group interviewing

10 The semi-structured interview

11 Structured interviewing: the use of recording schedules

12 The video interview

13 The interview as a qualitative experiment

PART THREE: DISTANCE METHODS

14 The telephone interview

15 The e-mail interview

16 The ‘open’ questionnaire interview

PART FOUR: ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF CONTENT

17 Transcribing the interview

18 Narrative overview versus categorical analysis

19 Deriving categories (coding) from the data

20 Quantitative analysis of categorical data

21 Writing up interview data

22 Combining interview data with data from other sources

References

Index

* What is research interviewing?

* What techniques are used? Exactly what do you do in each technique?

* How is interview data analysed and written up?

The robust, real-world approach makes this book appropriate for practitioner researchers and postgraduate students up to PhD level. Covers distance and face-to-face interviewing, from the un-structured and naturalistic to the highly structured, focused and time-efficient.

Emphasis is placed on using the most appropriate methods for the research purpose and how to identify which method is practicable. Based on over thirty years of teaching and supervising research and postgraduate students, the author anticipates questions and difficulties at a level of practical detail. Practical and easy to use, this book is essential for anyone doing research interviewing.