Interviews

An interview is a guided conversation used to understand experience, meaning, behaviour or evidence from one or more participants. It can produce depth that a fixed questionnaire cannot, but the result is shaped by sampling, question design, interviewer skill and the conditions of disclosure.

When to use it

Use interviews when the research question requires explanation, context, stories or interpretation. Define what you need to learn and why before choosing participants or writing questions. Do not interview people when observation, records or a short survey would answer the question with less burden.

Origins

Interviewing grew from older journalistic, clinical and administrative questioning and became a formal research method through sociology, anthropology, psychology and market research. Twentieth-century qualitative methodology developed structured, semi-structured and unstructured forms, along with systematic approaches to sampling, transcription and interpretation. No single inventor owns the method.

What it is

Common formats include:

• Informal conversational interviews, which follow the participant’s responses with minimal pre-set structure.
• Interview-guide conversations, which cover consistent topics while allowing follow-up.
• Standardised open-ended interviews, which ask everyone the same open questions for comparability.
• Closed fixed-response interviews, which use common questions and answer choices.

Why it matters

Interviews can reveal how people understand events, why they acted and which concerns a metric misses. Follow-up questions expose assumptions and examples. Tone and behaviour may guide careful probing, but they should not be treated as reliable proof of deception or inner state.