ABSTRACT
Interviewing has become one of the most widely used qualitative data collection methods in L2 writing research; a search in the Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) database found 122 L2 writing articles using interviews that were published in major journals between 2000-2013, with the vast majority (103) appearing since 2008. Interviews commonly comprise one of several sources of data within a study, as in ethnographic or case study research, where they add an emic (insider) perspective to the researchers’ etic (outsider) perspective and contribute to data triangulation (see Chapter 4 ). They may also be part of mixed methods studies (see Chapter 5 ); for example, quantitative analyses of survey data may be supplemented by interviews with a subset of respondents in order to probe more deeply into issues raised by the survey results. In many studies, however, interviews comprise the primary or sole source of data, particularly in those focused on opinions, goals, beliefs, or identity, in which participants’ voices and perspectives take center stage.
