Qualitative Interviewing Workshop

In-depth interviewing is a widely used method for data collection in the social and human sciences. It is the method of choice for research projects that aim to explore people's experiences, motives, opinions and perspectives in their depth and richness and without constraining the respondents' answers by a priori categories or pre-set reply options.

In political science in particular, it is often also used for the purpose of reconstructing processes and events. A yet less frequent, but equally interesting use of interviews is as tools for accessing collective and cultural discourses. Although generally structured by a topic guide, in-depth interviews allow for flexibility and openness throughout the interaction. They should be based on open, non-leading questions designed to get the interviewee to talk freely and at length, and to explore the width and depth of his or her views and experiences (see for example Ritchie et al. 2013, Kvale/Brinkman 2008 or Hermanowicz 2002).

Although widely used, in-depth interviewing as a method is often under-reflected, and consequently used too ‘naively’, with insufficient understanding of its limitations, specificities and difficulties. This hands-on course aims to provide you with methodological tools and a space for critical reflection, to refine your understanding of the method and help fine-tune the use you make of it.

I will assume you are familiar with the basics of some form of qualitative interviewing (such as semi-structured in-depth interviewing, biographic interviewing or other forms of un- or loosely structured interviewing, oral history interviews, expert interviews, etc). Experience with focus group interviewing or even journalistic or clinical interviewing might also be fine, provided you are familiar with the literature on research interviewing. Whether this experience has been acquired through formal training or/and hands-on experience is secondary – what counts is that you have a concrete sense of what research interviewing entails.

Part of each day will be devoted to lectures, discussions and exercises on key methodological issues (in light of, but not necessarily limited to, participants' own projects) such as:

• elaborating efficient topic guides that ensure theoretical soundness and communicative quality;
• interviewing techniques and ways of handling ‘difficult’ respondents, topics, groups or situations (for example un-talkative or evasive respondents; specific respondent groups such as high-level political elites or vulnerable respondents; sensitive topics such as corruption or violence; specific situations such as interviewing in non-democratic or cross-cultural contexts);
• strategies for negotiating access and for selecting respondents in a way that results in a meaningful ‘sample’;
• ensuring research ethics on issues such as confidentiality and informed consent, or criteria of scientific soundness (such as internal validity and process transparency), and how they should manifest themselves during data collection, data analysis and writing up;
• how to preempt and confront methodological criticism on the part of external agents such as PhD committees or editors.

We will briefly consider data analysis, mainly with the aim of making you aware of how to ‘hear’ data beyond explicit contents, and how to deal with the dilemmas inherent in interview data (such as interviewees making contradictory statements at different points of the interview, or discrepancies between what respondents say and what documents show). This is not a full data analysis course, though – if you are interested mainly in data analysis, take a data analysis-specific course.

The general aim of this part of the course is to broaden your methodological horizons, your understanding of how data collection through interviewing fits into the overall research design (whether qualitative or mixed methods), and how it relates to epistemological and theoretical as well as practical and ethical questions.

The other part of the day will be used to discuss particular aspects of participants’ projects (collectively), giving you ideas on how to move forward with your own work. You will be invited to give short presentations (to the whole group or – possibly – to a sub-group with similar issues). These will oblige you to make your assumptions and strategies explicit, and to confront critical questions. I hope you will also gain new insights into how you could enrich your approach, or ground or streamline it better.

At the end of each day you will be given homework for the next day (work on your topic guide; articulate your theoretical/epistemological understanding of interviewing; reflect on practical and ethical issues related to planned interviews, etc.), which will feed into the following day’s activities.

To benefit from this course, you must be willing to be actively engaged throughout the week, and to take part in methodological discussions beyond your own specific projects. A lot of learning will happen through collective engagement with other participants' projects.

By the end of the week, you will have had various opportunities to present your project and submit emerging ideas for discussion and feedback.

You must be using some form of qualitative interviewing in your current research (PhD thesis, project). 

This is not a beginner's course. You should already be familiar with the basics of qualitative interviewing.

This course is suitable for two types of participants:

1. those who have not yet collected their own interview data, but are planning to start interviews in the near future. These people can use this course to prepare their study (topic guides, access strategies, 'sampling'/selection procedures, etc), enhance their understanding of interviewing by learning from participants who have already collected more data, and from readings and common discussions;
2. those who have already done interviews that they will bring to the course. These people can reflect on and fine-tune their data collection, in light of their and other participants' experiences (with an eye on data analysis).

I will assume that all participants are familiar with the basics of qualitative interviewing. At very least you should know the basic literature on interviewing; ideally, you should have some practical experience, too (this may have been acquired in previous research, such as a Master's thesis, project work, or some pilot-stage data collection). We will not go step-by-step through the whole process of an interview, or teach interviewing techniques.

I require submission before the course of:

• a well elaborated (draft) research design that makes clear how you intend to use qualitative interviews
• a tentative topic guide that should have been discussed with you supervisor and, if possible, pre-tested or at least submitted to a few other people for preliminary feedback
• for participants who have already collected some data, an interview transcript (a full transcript if the data are in English, German, French, Italian or Spanish)
• if the original data are in any other language, a partial transcript of 5–6 pages translated into English, German or French.

I will circulate more information, well in advance of the course, about the documents you need to submit. You will also be asked to fill out a short questionnaire to make sure you have the prerequisites.