Qualitative Interviewing

Qualitative interviewing has today become one of the most common research methods across the human and social sciences, but it is an approach that comes in different guises. Qualitative Interviewing will help its readers write, represent, understand, and critique qualitative interview research in its many forms as currently practiced. The book begins with a theoretically informed introduction to qualitative interviewing by presenting a variegated landscape of how conversations have been used for knowledge-producing purposes. Particular attention is paid to the complementary positions of experience-focused interviewing (phenomenological positions) and language-focused interviewing (discourse-oriented positions), which focus on interview talk as reports (of the experiences of interviewees) and accounts (occasioned by the situation of interviewing), respectively. The following chapters address various ways of designing qualitative interview studies and a guide to writing up the methodological procedures and results of an interview study. The book concludes with a presentation of the most common errors in interview reports, offering a range of solutions and strategies for evaluating research findings based on qualitative interviews.

Svend Brinkmann is a professor of psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. He has studied philosophy and psychology at the Universities of Aarhus and Oxford, and he has published widely within these fields. He is particularly interested in qualitative research and philosophy of science. In 2012 he won the prestigious Sapere Aude elite researcher grant from the Danish Research Council.