ABSTRACT
Interviews are so extensively used by sociologists that Benney and Hughes (1956) have referred to modern sociology as 4the science of the interview’. Indeed, a brief glance at texts and monographs devoted to methodology and to empirical research confirms this point. However, close inspection reveals that there is a considerable difference between the interviews that are discussed in standard methodology texts (cf. Goode and Hatt, 1952; Moser and Kalton, 1971; Selltiz et al., 1976) and the practice of interviewing that has been discussed by Corbin (1971), Oakley (1981), Platt (1981 c), Finch (1984) and Stenhouse (1984) based on their experiences of conducting empirical studies. The divergence involved reflects opposite ends of the research continuum.
