ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the detailed practice of interviewing, to be able to make the most out of them. In-depth interviews often have as their ideal a free, informal conversation; an ideal that is very prone to disruption by an interview guide. For more extensive in-depth interviews, interview guides are often longer. The interview guide is divided into several topics in order to make it easier both for the interviewers and the participants to keep track of the many questions. An stepwise-deductive inductive-design with focused interviews or in-depth interviews needs to be directed towards specific narratives and experiences to ensure best possible reliability. Technologies are available for making sound recordings of telephone conversations. As the patient participants were aged 70–90, and often hard of hearing, using telephone interviews would result in a significant loss of reliability. The most significant loss from interview to transcription, however, is the loss of visual cues and information about mood during the interview.
