interview

interview A social interaction which results in a transfer of information from the interviewee to an interviewer or researcher. Interviews may be personal, conducted face to face, or by telephone (which has certain advantages for more sensitive topics), or may be conducted at one remove through a postal questionnaire (which gives people more time to consider their replies). The questions put to interviewees may treat them as a respondent who supplies information about their own circumstances, activities, and attitudes, or as an informant who supplies factual information about social phenomena within their experience and knowledge, such as the number of rooms in their home, an estimate of their total household income, characteristics of their local community, trade union, or employer. Less commonly, people are invited to be proxy informants for a respondent who is not available, such as a wife answering questions on her husband's job.

Interviews vary in style and format, from the structured interview based on a questionnaire (which is typical in sample surveys), to the unstructured interview based on a list of topics to be covered, to the depth interview or qualitative interview which may last hours and range widely around the topics in an interview guide. A somewhat different approach to interviewing consists of the group discussion, in which four to twelve people discuss the topic of interest to the researcher, under the guidance of the researcher (see FOCUS GROUPS).

The research interview has some similarities to other interview situations, such as job selection interviews, in that it is an interaction between unequals rather than an ordinary conversation: the topics are chosen by the researcher and interviewers must reveal nothing of themselves in case this biases responses. Researcher control over the interview is greatly increased by the use of computer-based questionnaires for personal and telephone interviews, such as Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) systems. See also INTERVIEW BIAS; INTERVIEWER BIAS.