ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a description of what qualitative interviews are. It argues that qualitative interviews can make a significant contribution to health studies. At times, such interviews may be the method of choice. They can provide data on settings and social processes that would not otherwise be open to investigation. Qualitative research interviews can also offer an escape route from some of the more intransigent problems and contradictions that beset quantitative forms of interviewing. The data they elicit can undermine the taken-for-granted assumptions of researchers and policymakers. In doing so, they offer the opportunity to discover aspects of a policy-relevant issue or problem that could not have been predicted at the outset of a study and the flexibility to pursue these leads once identified. The chapter then explains why qualitative interviews are sometimes more useful than quantitative ones. Finally, it discusses some of the limitations of qualitative interview data.
