10.3. Preparing for In-Depth Interviews

Now that you have an interview guide, you are ready to start scheduling interviews. In this section we’ll discuss some of the practical issues you’ll need to attend to before you do your first interview: interviewee recruitment and compensation, interview locations, and interview recording and notetaking.

How to Recruit Interviewees

Before you can begin any interviews, you need to determine an effective sampling strategy for recruiting interviewees. We already discussed the purposive sampling approaches you will want to use for any qualitative study in Chapter 6: Sampling. We want to point out, however, a few considerations distinct to in-depth interviewing. First, recruiting interviewees usually takes two general approaches. The first is using network-based referrals. This might entail adopting the snowball sampling strategy we highlighted earlier in the textbook, which involves asking individuals you’ve interviewed to suggest other potential interviewees—in effect, utilizing existing social networks to recruit more people for your study. Another network-based approach to finding interview respondents is through organizational referrals. You can talk to people who work at a particular organization—say, a nonprofit organization or government agency—and then get them to refer you to members of the population that their organization serves.

Note that this is easier said than done: many organizations have legal or professional rules preventing them from sharing personal information. That said, given the degree of trust you need to establish to get anyone to talk to you—especially those from more marginalized communities—you should use whatever contacts you have available to you, and sometimes the staff at community organizations are the sorts of gatekeepers you need to win over to garner a sizable sample of interviewees. If you take this approach, one strategy is to first interview the leadership at these organizations. These expert interviewees can provide important context for your study, and after they’ve sat down for an interview with you and have learned something about your study and your intentions, they might be more inclined to help you recruit interviewees from your actual population of interest. Less formal settings where your target population hangs out—anywhere from churches to support groups to sports clubs—may also have leaders or members you can ask for leads about potential interviewees, and those individuals may be less bound by privacy requirements.

The second general approach to recruiting interviewees is through venue-based recruitment—postings about your study in more or less public spaces. These announcements can take online and offline forms. You can post flyers asking for study participants in settings such as coffee shops, libraries, and grocery stories. You can also spread the word on social media platforms, discussion boards, and listings sites. If you can get the permission of an organization that works with your target population, you may even be able to disseminate your announcement through that organization’s mailing list or post it in their offices. Regardless of where you publicize your study, you should draft an announcement stating the selection criteria to participate in your study (i.e., that you are looking for college students, people who work in the retail industry, people between the ages of 18 and 35, and so on). In addition to briefly describing your study and any compensation you offer, the announcement needs to include one or more ways to reach you—an email address, phone number, and possibly a link to a website where you supply more details about your study. (To guard your privacy, you can create email addresses, voicemail numbers, and even websites through Google’s various apps and similar free-to-use products.) You may also find it helpful to design an eye-catching and professional-looking graphic that summarizes your announcement, which could take the form of an image you share online or a physical flyer you print out. See Figure 10.5 for an example of what a simple recruitment flyer might look like.

You are more likely to get people to agree to be interviewed if you have funds to pay them. The amounts that sociologists pay vary widely, depending on how much financial support their study has, but anywhere from $20 to $50 per interview (or hour of recorded interview) is typical. Unfortunately, getting funding to pay interviewees isn’t feasible for many researchers, which makes the job of recruiting a substantial sample harder but not impossible. With enough persuasion and persistence, you’ll find people willing to sit down with you for an interview—after all, journalists get people to talk to them all the time without payment.^[1]

Where to Conduct Your Interviews

Once you have recruited interviewees, you will need to decide where to conduct your interviews. In general, pick a location where your interviewee feels comfortable and is therefore more inclined to open up and speak truthfully. Oftentimes, the best location is someone’s home. That way, they are not worried about other people they don’t know or trust overhearing anything sensitive they say. However, some interviewees will be understandably wary about having strangers in their home. Depending on the topic, the presence of family members or housemates may also make them reluctant to talk openly.

Another possibility is interviewing people where they work—or, for that matter, any place related to their work. If you’re interviewing people about their jobs, you can get a better sense of their workplace environment and its interpersonal dynamics by conducting the interview there. (In that case, make sure to observe the person’s workspace, if applicable, to get a sense of their personal relationship to their work.) On the other hand, an interviewee may be reluctant to speak candidly about their work lives—such as any issues they have with management—if they might be in earshot of anyone else. Furthermore, their superiors might not take kindly to conducting interviews on the premises.

Locations that are not people’s homes or workplaces—so-called third places—offer a wide range of additional possibilities for interview sites: anything from street corners and parks to coffee shops and libraries to churches and agencies. If you found your interviewees with the help of an organization, that organization may be willing to let you do interviews in one of their conference rooms or another space they control. This may give you further opportunities to observe the organization itself and your target population’s interactions with their staff, fellow clients, and others.

While you may gain something from observations you make at the interview site, weigh those advantages against your ability to have a thoughtful conversation in that space. (After all, you can set aside time to do a separate observation of any relevant location, perhaps with the interviewee accompanying you.) Make sure that whatever site you choose has few distractions. For example, some coffee shops and restaurants are so loud that recording the interview can be a challenge. The screech of espresso machines may drown out your voices. Servers may routinely interrupt your conversation. Likewise, if you conduct interviews with parents in their homes, they may out of necessity spend more time attending to young children during an interview than responding to your questions (of course, depending on the topic of your research, the opportunity to observe such interactions could be invaluable). As an interviewer, you may want to suggest a few possible locations, and note the goal of avoiding distractions, when you ask your interviewees to choose a location.

You can also conduct interviews over the phone or a video chat application. We generally don’t recommend phone calls, because you gather so much more information about the person’s expressions and mannerisms when you can see them talking. You may lose that vital data about their mood and outlook when you just have audio to go by. That said, video chat applications have become so advanced and ubiquitous that they are a good substitute for in-person interviewing.

That brings us to a final point about location: always prioritize your own well-being as an interviewer. You may need to do your interviews over video chat, rather than in person, for health or safety reasons. Ultimately, your respondent’s comfort and convenience has to be balanced against a particular location’s accessibility to you as well as how safe and comfortable you will feel there. For example, there’s no reason you should feel pressured to conduct an interview at the late-night meeting place your interviewee prefers, much less in the inner sanctum of their secret society. Not only might you fear for your safety, you might be too distracted to conduct a good interview.

Interview Recordings and Notes

Before you embark on your first interview, you should decide whether you plan to record the conversation, and how you will go about taking notes. Even the most diligent sociologist cannot write down everything that is seen or heard during an interview. It is also difficult to be truly present and observant if you are writing down everything your interviewee is saying. For this reason, you probably want to follow the standard sociological practice of audio-recording your in-depth interviews. Of course, not all interviewees will feel comfortable being recorded, and sometimes even the interviewer may feel that the subject is so sensitive that recording would be inappropriate. Keep in mind, too, that transcribing the audio recordings of your interviews on your own may take considerable time. (In Chapter 11: Qualitative Data Analysis, we go over the transcription process as well as the automated transcription tools that are now available to shorten this process.) Sociologists often buy digital recorders for their interviewing, but today’s smartphones have voice memo apps with very good audio quality. Video recordings are also an option, and they are especially helpful for interviews with multiple interviewees—and especially easy to create using video chat software if you’re doing a remote interview.

Regardless of whether you record the interview, we do recommend that you write field jottings—research notes—during your interviews (and before and afterward as well, if there is anything interesting to observe). As we described in Chapter 9: Ethnography, you should then convert your jottings into a formal field note. Field notes help researchers document what they observe, and in so doing, they form the first draft of data analysis. Field notes for in-depth interviews may contain many things—observations of body language or environment, reflections on whether interview questions are working well, connections between the responses that multiple interviewees gave you, and so on. We suggest that as soon after your interview as possible, you conduct a brain dump. Use any jottings you wrote during or immediately after each interview to draft a formal field note that contains key quotes, descriptions of what topics you discussed, and any observational notes, including any details you think are relevant about the setting where the interview was conducted or about your interviewee’s appearance and mannerisms.

Sometimes qualitative sociologists create documents separate from field notes—called journals or memos—where they put personal reflections and analytical insights that come to them during the data collection process. You might just incorporate these preliminary thoughts about your research into your field notes, but regardless, you should write them down somewhere while you are still gathering data. For example, an interviewee might suggest a new concept you hadn’t thought of before or define a concept in a new way. This may lead you to create new questions or ask questions in a different way to future interviewees. When writing down notes between interviews, you can reflect on your own feelings about your research and talk through any methodological decisions you made. Documenting these details is important, as you will be surprised by how quickly you will forget what happened during your fieldwork. When the time comes to analyze your data, your notes will help you remember how, when, and why you made certain decisions or made certain connections. These notes also provide evidence of the rigor of your research process, including its trustworthiness and authenticity (refer to our discussion of these standards of qualitative rigor in Chapter 7: Measuring the Social World).