Qualitative Interviews

Qualitative interviewing has today become a key method in the human and social sciences, and also in many other corners of the scientific landscape such as education and the health sciences. Some have even argued that interviewing has become the central resource through which the social sciences—and society—engages with the issues that concern it. People talk with others in order to learn about how they experience the world, how they think, act, feel and develop as individuals and in groups, and in recent decades such knowledge producing conversations have been refined and discussed as interviews. In this article, I introduce and review qualitative interviewing as a method. Different ways of preparing, conducting, and analyzing interviews are presented and discussed.