10.1. When Should In-Depth Interviewing Be Used?

In-depth interviewing is arguably the best research method to rely upon if you want to explore a phenomenon in great detail. Not only are your interviewees given the opportunity to elaborate in a way that is not possible with other methods, but they also are able to share information in their own words and from their own perspectives. By contrast, survey research asks participants to fit their views into the limited response options provided by the researcher. Ethnographic observation can tell you how people act, and it can give you hints—through their expressions and mannerisms as well as their words—about what they are feeling in the moment, but in-depth interviewing provides easier access to people’s subjective views, motivations, and emotions. Through what they relate during the interview, you as a researcher gain a window into how exactly they feel about a topic (or at least what they say about how they feel, as we’ll discuss later).

Because qualitative interviews are designed to elicit detailed information, they are especially useful when a researcher’s aim is to study the “how” of various phenomena. Put another way, they are adept at understanding causal mechanisms—the specific pathways by which one variable affects another variable (as we mentioned in Chapter 3: The Role of Theory in Research, qualitative research is particularly good at elucidating causal mechanisms). In part, this is because in-depth interviews allow interviewees to describe—at length, and in depth—the process by which a phenomenon occurs and the many dimensions it encompasses. For example, you could ask people about how exactly growing up in an affluent home with well-educated parents prepared them for pursuing a professional career years later. Your interviewees could tell you stories of all the things they learned from a young age about the work world and what types of professions they could pursue, who or what they needed to know to get those jobs, and so on. If you are a skilled interviewer, your interviewees might provide many examples of such causal mechanisms and might explain each of them in great detail. Likewise, if you were interviewing people who decided not to have children, you could ask them how others in their lives have responded to that decision. As you can imagine, answering these “how” questions often requires a back-and-forth dialogue with interviewees. When they begin to tell you their story, inevitably new questions will come up—ones that may not have occurred to you when you did previous interviews, given that each person’s story is unique. In-depth interviews allow you to pose these follow-up questions, but survey interviews do not.

More broadly, in-depth interviewing excels at gathering data about a process or a sequence of events. For instance, if you are interviewing people who decided not to have children, you might ask them how they came to that decision. They might recount one or more incidents or conversations that pushed them in the direction of not having kids, and you could capture that sequence in your in-depth interviewing. Because the process of making such an important decision can be complicated for many people—involving multiple overlapping and contradictory reasons—describing that process by responding to closed-ended questions on a survey wouldn’t work particularly well. Through in-depth interviews, you can also gather data about events or experiences that are difficult or impossible for you to directly observe, including those that took place far back in the past. Indeed, one common strategy in in-depth interviewing is to ask about an interviewee’s life history—the formative events in their lives (family life, education, work history, and so on) that may have contributed to their orientation toward a particular issue or their experience of a particular phenomenon today.

In-depth interviews are especially effective when you are dealing with emergent phenomena—newly emerging topics or issues that researchers have not yet studied intensively. In an in-depth interview, your questions can plumb the various dimensions of that phenomenon, and you can adapt your questions as you learn more about it, asking follow-ups as needed. As we described in Chapter 4: Research Questions, if you are conducting exploratory research on a brand-new development—say, a popular new app or a policy change—you might want to start off by conducting in-depth interviews with the people who use the app or those who have experienced the policy change. That would give you some basis for figuring out the issues and concerns you should really care about. You could then devise a new set of questions to be asked of a larger pool of people—either via in-depth interviews or surveys—based on what you discovered in your initial open-ended conversations.

An often overlooked benefit of qualitative interviews is that researchers can make observations that go beyond what interviewees explicitly say. Their body language can give hints about their mood or their views on a topic they’re discussing. For instance, a smirk or an awkward pause might suggest they have ambivalent feelings about the words coming out of their mouths (Pugh 2013, 2014). In addition to these nonverbal cues, the interviewee’s appearance and overall demeanor can give you useful information about their social position and relationship to the topic you’re studying. Even their choice of a particular time and location for an interview might say something meaningful, depending on the topic you’re studying. Indeed, as we’ll discuss later, if the site where you hold the interview has some significance to the interviewee—such as their home or workplace—taking detailed notes about that setting will allow you to garner valuable details about who they are and what they do or think.

As with any research method, the benefits of in-depth interviews come with drawbacks. First, there is the problem of veracity. Qualitative interviews rely on interviewees’ ability to accurately and honestly recall specific details about their lives, circumstances, thoughts, opinions, and behaviors. Through interviews, you can learn what people think about a particular issue—but their stated views may be erroneous or deceptive. You can explain why people acted the way they did—but the reasons they give may not be correct.

Obviously, some people are willing to lie to an interviewer if they do not want to divulge certain information or they want to present themselves in a better light (the latter being an example of social desirability bias, which we discussed in Chapter 7: Measuring the Social World). But interviewees can mislead researchers even when they do not intend to do so. If your questions have to do with something far in the past, or if you’re asking about precise details, interviewees will often get things wrong. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, given how memories get distorted over time to line up with people’s views or assumptions. People may truly believe they do things for particular reasons, yet empirical evidence may suggest other considerations are more decisive—consider, for instance, the findings in social movements research that people get involved with activism largely because of their social ties to other people who are already part of those movements, rather than, say, their undying personal passion for a particular cause (McAdam 1990). And interviewees often need some sort of documentation to help them recall specific figures—for instance, the household income they reported on their taxes. For all these reasons, ethnographic observation and qualitative content analysis can be superior to in-depth interviewing if your goal is to get trustworthy data on what people actually do rather than what they say they do (Esterberg 2001). With firsthand observation, you’ll actually see how they act. With a content analysis of video footage or written records, you’ll hopefully gain a picture of their activities that they cannot so easily airbrush or hide.

Another drawback of qualitative interviewing is that it requires a lot of time and effort. In addition to drafting questions, recruiting interviewees, and conducting interviews, you usually want to write down notes about your observations and transcribe or at least summarize what was said in each interview. You then need to analyze the qualitative data you collected, which can be an especially painstaking process. Keep in mind you are also asking much more of your interviewees than you would be if you simply emailed them a questionnaire with closed-ended questions. Among other things, this high bar for participation means that fewer people will take you up on your offer to sit down for an in-depth interview.^[1]

As we discussed in Chapter 6: Sampling, the intensity of in-depth interviewing means that you almost never can gather a representative sample of your population of interest. You will therefore need to look with skepticism at any findings you uncover from your nonprobability sample. For the most part, you will just want to conclude that any pattern you observed in your qualitative data may apply more broadly—that is, your results suggest this might be true—and leave it to other researchers to suss out whether the pattern holds up in other contexts (refer back to Chapter 4: Research Questions regarding the limitations of the inductive approach that qualitative researchers typically employ, as well as the ways they can move beyond that approach of strictly theory generation). That said, rigorous in-depth interviewing can provide a compelling and credible picture of social life. And many qualitative researchers pair in-depth interviewing with other methods, such as ethnographic observation and content analysis, so that the data obtained through other research methods can be used to corroborate or challenge their interview data (and vice versa)—a process known as triangulation.

Conducting qualitative interviews is not only labor-intensive but can also be emotionally taxing. Hearing about the negative impacts that social problems have on people is difficult, especially when you are learning about them directly from the people affected. You might find that people get upset when you broach a sensitive topic, and they may even become hostile toward you. Researchers new to in-depth interviewing should consider what reactions they might encounter in the course of asking their questions, and whether they are in the right state of mind to listen without judgment to what people have to say.

To summarize, in-depth interviews are especially useful when the following are true:

1. You wish to gather very detailed information.
2. You anticipate wanting to ask respondents follow-up questions based on their responses.
3. You plan to ask questions that require lengthy explanation.
4. You are studying a new, complex, or potentially confusing topic.
5. You are studying processes, such as how people make decisions.
6. You want to learn about events or experiences that are difficult for you to directly observe.