ABSTRACT
Interviewing is rather like marriage: everybody knows what it is, an awful lot of people do it, and yet behind each closed door there is a world of secrets. Qualitative interviews are distinguished from survey interviews in being less structured in their approach and in allowing individuals to expand on their responses to questions. This chapter suggests that guidelines which may be useful to the research student and to consider some of the issues raised by more recent analyses of the social relations underpinning the qualitative interview. In conducting interviews it is obviously necessary to retain a critical awareness of what is being said and to be ready to explore some issues in greater depth—what Linda Measor calls ‘listening beyond’. The question of the extent to which it is possible to be an ‘insider’ merely by virtue of shared gender identity, race or ethnicity remains open to debate.
