Interviews: Using conversations in public scholarship

Qualitative interviews are normally conducted as personal conversations between two or more individuals. Such personal conversations, however, are frequently used in the service of public scholarship, which gives rise to a number of significant issues having to do with researching private lives and placing accounts in the public arena. This chapter addresses the role of qualitative interviewing in public scholarship. It first discusses the very idea of the public, especially as it was articulated by the American pragmatist John Dewey. It is argued that the social sciences, and qualitative interviewing specifically, have
a central role to play in the constitution of a public in modern society. The reader is then taken through various stages of interview research and some examples are given that show how qualitative interview studies have significantly advanced public scholarship.