Unstructured and semistructured interviewing

This chapter gives an introduction to qualitative interviewing in its unstructured and semistructured forms. Initially, the human world is depicted as a conversational reality in which interviewing takes a central position as a research method. Interviewing is presented as a social practice that has a cultural history and that appears in a variety of formats in the 21st century. A number of distinctions are introduced, which are relevant when mapping the field of qualitative interviewing between different levels of structure, numbers of participants, media of interviewing, and interviewer styles. A more detailed exposition of semistructured lifeworld interviewing is offered because this is arguably the standard form of qualitative interviewing today.