10. In-Depth Interviews
10.4. Conducting In-Depth Interviews
Victor Tan Chen; Gabriela León-Pérez; Julie Honnold; and Volkan Aytar
Learning Objectives
- Describe the importance of rapport in an in-depth interview and how it can be cultivated.
- Discuss strategies for getting interviewees to elaborate on what they say.
- Describe the power differentials inherent in qualitative interviewing and how researchers might address them.
A unique feature of interviews is that they require some social interaction, which means that a relationship is formed between the interviewer and interviewee. Rapport is the sense of connection you establish with a research participant. One strength of in-depth interviewing, as we’ve mentioned, is that it generates a deep understanding of how people think about and experience their social realities. It can do so because of the bond of trust that the interviewer and interviewee develop over the course of their interactions. Building rapport makes the interviewee more likely to answer your questions with care and candor.
How do you cultivate rapport with your interviewees? A central component of rapport is respect. In-depth interviews are intimate encounters. Your participants will share with you how they view the world, how they understand themselves, and how they have coped with events that have happened to them. You should show respect for their story by not judging them. You are there to listen to them. They have been kind enough to give you their time and attention. Even if you disagree strongly with what an interviewee tells you in an interview, your job as the researcher is to learn what they know and feel, not to criticize them. This is not to suggest that you can’t push back on what your interviewees say—doing so is sometimes necessary to highlight contradictions or tensions in their thinking—but you should do so respectfully, without disdain or a sense of superiority, and you should be judicious about when and how often you choose to challenge people. It is also crucial that you, as the interviewer, conduct the interview in a way that is culturally sensitive. In some cases, this might mean educating yourself about your study population and even receiving some training to help you learn to effectively communicate with your research participants.
Developing good rapport requires good listening. In fact, listening during an interview is an active, not a passive, practice. You should engage with your interviewees by showing you understand whatever it is that they are telling you (Devault 1990). The follow-up questions you ask them should indicate you’ve actually heard what they’ve just said. You can also indicate that you are following along by giving verbal and nonverbal cues—for instance, nodding your head when you agree with what the interviewee said, or saying words like, “hmm,” “wow,” or “interesting.” Obviously, you can overdo this sort of encouragement, and you should not fake your enthusiasm or agreement—which, besides being duplicitous, is something many interviewees can readily sense.
In general, you should shoot for a natural flow of questions and answers in your interview, much like the back-and-forth of a normal conversation. Avoid just following the script of the interview guide, which can make the interview seem overly formal and forced. Instead, deepen the conversation by using probes—either ones included in your interview guide or improvised on the spot. This will strengthen your rapport with the interviewee. With time, they will come to see you as someone who truly cares about what they have to say.
As noted earlier, however, it is important to recognize that an interview is not a normal conversation: it is a controlled conversation. It is intended to be one-sided—which means that you as the researcher should not be doing much talking. In some situations, it may be useful to share something about your own personal views or background, but for the most part, you need to let the interviewee talk, only interjecting when you want to encourage them to say more. We can’t stress enough how important it is to know when to shut up during an interview. When you listen to your interview recordings afterward, you may be surprised by how often you talk over an interviewee just when they are about to disclose something personal or say something profound—try to curb this natural desire to weigh in.
As the interviewer, you want to control where the conversation goes. You probably don’t want the interviewee to go off on a 15-minute rant on their gripes about the current phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe if that isn’t at least tangentially related to your research question. Yet abruptly cutting them off can make you come across as rude, hurting your ability to develop rapport with the interviewee. Consider using gentler nudges—for instance, “Let’s get into that a bit later,” or “What you said reminds me of . . .”—to bring them back to subjects you care about. That said, if an interviewee is particularly excited about discussing something, and it has something to do with your research question, you might want to hold off on pivoting to another topic. As we’ve noted, one of the key strengths of qualitative research is its ability to surprise you as a researcher, so you don’t necessarily want to cut off an interviewee who’s on a roll: it may lead your conversation in an unexpected but fruitful direction.
On a related note, we would strongly advise you not to rush an interviewee if that person is sharing something deeply personal with you. In fact, you should show gratitude for this gesture of trust in you by being silent and listening intently. You want to make sure the interviewee feels heard, and showing respect for a person’s story is critical. If the interviewee is expressing strong emotions, you can offer comfort and encouragement whenever you feel it is both welcome and appropriate. The interviewee should not be treated as a means to an end, and in this situation, the interviewer has a moral responsibility to show empathy and compassion and absorb what the other person has to say without judgment. Always remember that you are a human being first, and a researcher second.
Getting the Most Out of Your Questions
When you are actually conducting an in-depth interview, perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is asking follow-up questions. As we noted, this shows that you are actively listening to your interviewee, strengthening your rapport with them. It also helps you generate the thick description that is essential to qualitative work.
A key strategy in probing for more information is to get the interviewee to “show, not tell” (an adage that exemplifies the approach of qualitative research more broadly, as we noted in Chapter 9: Ethnography). In in-depth interviewing, this means getting your interviewee to give you specific examples to back up whatever statements or judgments they are making. Here are some examples of probes you can use to get your interviewee to provide examples:
- What would be an example of that?
- When you say that, what are you thinking of?
- Can you tell me the last time that happened?
- Can you think of a time that really showed that happening?
- Can you walk me through what happened?
You may also want to urge the interviewee to be detailed in describing whatever examples they give you—perhaps by saying something like, “The more concrete you can be, the better” (Weiss 2004).
The worst-case scenario for a qualitative researcher is an interviewee who has very little to say in response to your carefully crafted questions. Sometimes, there is nothing you can do about that: the interviewee just doesn’t want to talk, and you’ll have to stumble painfully through your interview with them, asking question after question to a blank wall of silence.
Nevertheless, you can employ several simple strategies to get people to talk in greater depth. One is to use stock probes—catchall follow-up questions that you can slip into the conversation to get an interviewee to elaborate on what they just said. Here are some examples:
- Why? (Or: Why do you say that?)
- How is that? (Or: How do you mean that?)
- In what ways?
- Could you tell me a little more about that? (Or: Could you elaborate a bit on that?)
Depending on how or when you use them, stock probes like “Why?” can come off as confrontational, even if that is not your intent. Oftentimes people won’t know how to respond to “Why?” in particular, perhaps because they don’t even know why they feel that way. If you’re worried about coming across as doubting or challenging, you might want to use the last option in our list (or any variation of “say more about that,” really), which provides a gentler way of encouraging interviewees to explain themselves. Alternatively, you could use more specific probes, asking for clarification or confirmation about what the person just said. These might be yes/no questions like, “So that friend you mentioned didn’t agree with your decision?” Or, you might pose simple questions asking for further details like, “When did that happen?” The interviewee may respond in just a word or two, but this line of questioning may eventually prompt a person who stopped talking to pick up the topic again.
To deepen the conversation, you can also follow the tried-and-true active listening strategy of repeating what was just said in your own words. You could summarize what you’ve heard, followed up by a question like, “Is that you mean?” Alternatively, you could slip in a brief statement that affirms or comments on what was just said. For instance, if an interviewee has just narrated an intense argument that their parents had when they were a child, you might say something like, “It sounds like your parents had a difficult relationship”; if they are talking about all the loans they have taken out to pay for college, you might want to comment on how personally challenging it was for them to pursue this goal. This active-listening approach not only helps you stay on top of what the interviewee is saying, but your interjection might encourage them to say more on the subject at hand—even if just to disagree with your summary or comment.
Asking follow-up questions is essential in in-depth interviewing, but the best way to get the interviewee to say more is often to just stay quiet. As National Public Radio host Rachel Martin said about conducting journalistic interviews: “Sometimes the best follow-up question is to say nothing. Especially after the person has just revealed something important. More often than not, if you are quiet and give them the space to keep sharing—they will.” The same principle applies in sociological research. While you don’t necessarily want too many awkward silences in an interview (remember the importance of building rapport!), don’t try to fill in every pause in the conversation with your own words. Sometimes silence is the most effective probe.
Beyond continually probing for deeper information, the following strategies can make your interviews more productive:
- Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions. When people are talking about topics they know a lot about, they may assume you are an insider who knows all the lingo and context. Obviously, you should do your homework before the interview to understand as much about any relevant topics as you can, but if you don’t understand something, say so: you don’t want to nod along amiably while steadily growing more confused. You’ll find that most of the time, people are happy to explain things to someone new to their area of expertise.
- Move regularly between “miner” and “traveler” questions during your interview. A “miner” delves deeply into a specific area; a “traveler” ranges about the terrain, covering a wide range of topics (Kvale 1996). You want to find a nice balance between these two modes of asking questions. Sometimes you will want to gather meticulous details about a phenomenon, nudging the interviewee to give you concrete examples of it and describe it in all its complexity. Other times, you will want to move quickly between distinct topics—thereby ensuring you have covered everything relevant—or take the conversation to a higher level—getting your interviewee to think of the big picture and share their thoughts, in broad brushstrokes, on an issue or set of issues. Both approaches are essential to conducting a good qualitative interview.
- Stay focused for the entirety of the interview. Building rapport takes time, and the later parts of the interview (or later interviews with the same person) will frequently feature more candid and explicit discussion. Until the interviewee is comfortable with you, they might give you formulaic or superficial answers to your questions—especially for any that have a hint of stigma or controversy attached to them. In fact, you may want to return to these difficult questions later in an interview, after the interviewee has warmed up to you, to see if they have become more open to answering them or providing additional details.
Power Dynamics in an In-Depth Interview
Interviewers must be attentive to the inevitable power differential between themselves and the people they interview. This is one example of the reflexivity that qualitative researchers engage in whenever they go into the field. As ethical researchers, we should seek to understand our social position in relation to those we are studying (our positionality) as well as the impact we can have on them—positive and negative—in part because of the underlying inequalities in our relationships.
As we noted, the interview is a controlled conversation, and it is the interviewer who sets the agenda and leads the conversation. Qualitative interviewers aim to allow participants to have some control over which topics are discussed, but at the end of the day, it is the researcher who is in charge of the interview and how any of its findings are reported to the public. The interviewee loses the ability to shape the narrative after the interview is over because it is the researcher who tells the story to the world.
In a good in-depth interview, interviewees may reveal things about themselves they may not typically share with others. Yet researchers do not reciprocate by revealing much or anything about themselves. As much as we have emphasized the importance of rapport in in-depth interviewing, it is important to consider whose interests are being served by this rapport. In fact, some critics see rapport as a ruse—the interviewer tricks the interviewee into believing they are closer to the interviewer than they really are, which means they divulge sensitive information at their expense but the interviewer’s benefit (for a discussion of these issues, see the sidebar The Journalist and the Ethnographer in Chapter 8: Ethics).
As we talked about in our earlier discussion of ethics, one of the ways that researchers address these power differentials is by providing as much information to research participants as possible so they can make informed decisions about whether to be part of a study. As part of that consent process, we ensure that interviewees understand very clearly the purpose and approach of our research. We share with them how the data we gather will be used and stored. And we explain what procedures will be taken to protect their identities and minimize any other risks of the study. Some researchers have argued, however, that qualitative researchers should go further in addressing power imbalances between interviewers and interviewees. Feminist researchers in particular have pioneered strategies such as making interviews a more reciprocal exchange of experiences, allowing participants to view and edit interview transcripts before the researcher uses them for analysis, and giving participants an opportunity to read and comment on papers before they are published (Hesse-Biber 2013; Oakley 1981; Reinharz 1992). That said, sociologists disagree about what level of involvement research participants should have in a qualitative study’s data collection and analysis, and even these suggestions have been criticized as conveying a false sense of security, when in reality researchers can still present participants’ stories in whatever way they see fit (Stacey 1988).
Ultimately, there are no easy answers when it comes to addressing the power differential between interviewers and interviewees. Because qualitative research involves engaging in interpersonal interactions and building relationships with research participants, there is always a danger that researchers will use the rapport they cultivate to take advantage of those they study. You as a sociologist will need to continually reflect on your relationships with your interviewees and figure out the best way to safeguard their well-being while successfully carrying out your research.
Capturing Stories that Resonate: A Q&A with Allison Pugh
Allison Pugh is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the chair of its Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research and teaching focus on how economic trends—from job insecurity, to commodification, to automation—shape the way people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at home and at work. She has also written about the theoretical benefits and best practices of interpretive interviewing, and about resonance in ethnography—when stories of other people’s lives make powerful meaning for a larger world (Pugh 2013, 2014).
Drawing from extensive in-depth interviews, Pugh’s acclaimed book The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (2015) is a study of the broader impacts of job precariousness. Another of her books, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture (2009), received four honors from the American Sociological Association and was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award. Her current research, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a study of the standardization of work that relies on relationships. She has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a visiting scholar in Germany, France, and Australia.
How did you get into sociology?
I found sociology relatively late, after I had already been a journalist, a diplomat, and a peon in advertising. In 1994, I enrolled as a “community scholar” at Berkeley. That’s the way that Berkeley lets people from the community—that is, not regularly enrolled students—take classes. I took three classes in the fall and three classes in the spring before I actually enrolled as a graduate student. I ended up taking a family sociology class with Arlie Hochschild, a feminist theory class with Nancy Chodorow, and a cultural sociology class with Ann Swidler—all three were incredible. I thought I was just looking for a place that would give me structure while I wrote a nonfiction book, but I read Arlie’s book The Second Shift and was hooked.[1]
How do you use in-depth interviews in your own research?
I rely on them as the primary prism through which we can view how people experience and interpret their own sorrows and triumphs. They are a source of inspiration and of exhaustion. I often am particularly attuned to sadness or compromise, the evidence of all the ways we struggle to reconcile ourselves to the contradictory dictates of social life—for example, to be an ideal worker and an ideal parent. I also use them as a guide, a flag of sorts for what we might be missing or misunderstanding in scholarship. Each one is a gift from the interviewee.
You’ve interviewed a wide range of people over the course of your projects—from parents and children in Longing and Belonging, to diverse kinds of workers (including the unemployed) in The Tumbleweed Society. Do you find yourself taking a different approach to your interviewing when you talk with different sorts of people? Are there any particular concerns or strategies you consider when interviewing people from one group over another?
I suppose my first concern is always rapport, and how to achieve that can vary depending on the interviewee. There are basics, of course. Try to make it as natural a conversation as possible—avoid reading lengthy questions from long lists on paper, for example. Pay attention to the length of their answers as well as to their body language. If there are rapport problems, I sometimes abandon my whole interview schedule and just try to learn more about them—essentially, following them where they want to go—before figuring out how to ask my questions of interest. I might also change my own presentation of self, depending on who I am meeting. I might dress up a little more for some formal settings, but be more casual in other settings.
But at its core, rapport is about how much you listen to and see the other person, and reflect that back to them, so they know they are seen—that is the path to a good interview, and more important than any other practice. That is a constant across interviewees.
What advantages do you think in-depth interviews offer as a research method over other approaches?
At the most fundamental level, it allows us to hear how people narrate their own lives, struggles, issues. But as they tell their stories, the very language they choose—the metaphors, the emotional descriptors, etc.—also offers us very compelling data on what they actually think, not just what they think they are supposed to think. Interviews allow us to understand what it feels like to live in their lives for a while. Other methods are better at investigating the extent of an issue or phenomenon, or, as in ethnography, documenting the practical intersections between an individual’s views and the social world in which they must translate them into action. But interviewing gives us someone’s own perspective—their own commitments and compromises—like no other.
You are very skilled at getting your interviewees to talk about intimate details of their lives. How has your experience been in getting people to open up about sensitive subjects and confide in you? What advice would you give novice researchers about how to develop rapport with their respondents?
Successful rapport, and interviewing in general, relies almost entirely on listening really intently, hearing the other person and reflecting that back to them. What you are listening for is not just what they are saying but, underneath that, what—or what else—they really mean. If, for example, someone tells you they are proud of their son for standing up to his school, but they also communicate worry—they fidget a lot, or they can’t seem to let it go somehow, repeating themselves or talking a lot about it, or they say they are proud but their eyebrows are high and their forehead is furrowed—I might say something like, “It sounds like you are proud of him, but I am also hearing a lot of worry there, too.”
That can feel like taking a risk, especially for new interviewees—what if I’m wrong? In fact, it is okay to be wrong—they’ll correct you, it’s a natural conversation. But they usually appreciate your effort to get it right, and if you get it right, and someone feels seen on both a surface and a deeper level, it can actually offer some relief to them. Naming the unnamed, carefully, in a way that doesn’t threaten them unduly, is the best way to help someone feel safe in disclosing their inner thoughts or feelings.
Have you come across any challenges balancing the researcher’s need to present an accurate perspective of an interviewee’s feelings, beliefs, and actions and our ethical obligations to be humane and respectful about how people are portrayed in print? How do you balance these goals in your own work?
I suppose I approach my interviewees as if they are not that different from me. My goal is to understand how they think and feel, and to reckon with how their perspectives and practices make sense in their environment. We are all just trying to get dignity and respect in our own social worlds. If we remember that, it makes their particular foibles or flaws understandable. I am not sure I would do “better than” any person I have interviewed if I were given their origins and experiences, and that’s true for some pretty tough folks. In my research for Tumbleweed, I heard people repeatedly invoking respected others—their priest, their brother, their therapist—when they explained why they had to abandon or detach themselves from family or friends. I did not think to myself, “Well, I’m sure I would not do that.” Instead, I thought, “What is the underlying conflict, the cultural contradiction, even the desperation, that is leading people to turn their backs on people they love?” It’s not useful or interesting or even true to point to “good” or “bad” people. I consider it my job to name the cultural contradictions that are pressing upon people, the systems that generate the conditions of people’s choices.
Where do you personally fall in some of the recent debates about transparency in interview-based research—for instance, whether sociologists should use the real names of their respondents when given permission, whether they should offer their data for public scrutiny—as many journals now require for quantitative data—and whether they should independently fact-check the statements of respondents?
I have a piece, written with a former student, on this very issue.[2] I feel very strongly that we owe respondents confidentiality; that they do not always understand what it will feel like to be the subject of a book or article at the time of the research; and that concealing their identities gives them what Victoria Reyes has called “plausible deniability.”[3] Protecting them in this way feels like the least we can do, in the face of the enormous gift of their participation in our research. Not protecting them exposes them to potentially vituperative social opprobrium—in other words, trolls—and saying they consented to it just deflects the blame from us, as an ethical fig leaf, as it were. Meanwhile, fact-checking fetishizes “facts” as if they are the source of trust in qualitative methods. If someone does not trust the book or article after they have read it, “fact-checking” is not going to change their mind. Furthermore, as Sarah Mosseri and I write in our article, many of the proposed reforms of qualitative research actually threaten the very aspect that makes it precious: its capacity for resonance.
There have been incidents in the past where sociologists have been called out about the veracity or ethics of their qualitative methods. What do you think qualitative sociologists can do to inspire confidence in their approaches?
Qualitative researchers have longstanding practices of reflexivity that incrementally build trust in their work. This includes being frank about our positionality, being detailed about our processes of data collection and analysis, and writing explicitly about exceptions, “negative cases,” and variability. But ultimately, qualitative research—like many good things in the world—does rely on a modicum of trust, which I do not regard as a flaw. Qualitative sociology also gets read by a large audience, and has been for more than a century. I would argue there is already substantial confidence in its approaches, despite a few recent controversies.
What advice would you give an aspiring sociologist if they wanted to pursue interview-based research?
Interviewing is widely used as a method in sociology, so I would not be worried about them or their future careers. I would advise them to practice! Interviewing relies on oral and interpersonal skills, and many aspiring sociologists are good at reading, writing, critiquing arguments, etc., but less so at reading another person’s signals, managing the pace of an interview, and handling emotional clues. These are skills you can develop. Also, I would advise them to read up on the debates and advances in the field so that they can be intentional about the choices they are making. There has been a lot of good work in qualitative methods recently, from Mario Small and Kristin Luker’s advice about research design and how to devise a sample, to Nicole Deterding and Mary Waters’s suggestions for effective coding, to Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans’s work on abductive analysis.[4] While I still regard Robert Weiss’s Learning from Strangers as a vital guide, there are two strong recent books by Kathleen Gerson and Sarah Damaske and Annette Lareau, and some more in the offing, as I understand.[5] It’s a good time to be a qualitative researcher.
Key Takeaways
- By building rapport with interviewees, a researcher is able to maximize the ability of in-depth interviews to obtain detailed and intimate knowledge of an individual’s experiences and attitudes.
- Interviewers can use probes—both planned and improvised—to gather concrete examples and encourage interviewees to go into greater detail.
- Interviewers should recognize the power differential between themselves and their interviewees and try their best to minimize it.
The sense of connection a researcher establishes with a research participant, which may encourage the participant to speak in greater detail about their thoughts, feelings, and experiences or to act more naturally while being observed.
A self-reflective process that researchers engage in to understand how their own identity, beliefs, dispositions, actions, and practices may have influenced their research, especially the results they found.
How a researcher’s personal identities and perspectives shape how they interpret reality, including what they observe over the course of their research and what conclusions they draw.
