xxii INTRODUCTION
intellectual and emotional pleasure I have gained from interviewing as a
research method in education.
One final introductory note: Although this book concentrates on in-
depth interviewing as a method of research in education, I am not propos-
ing it as the sole, or the best, method of doing research. Some scholars
argue that having multiple sources of data is one of the intrinsic character-
istics of qualitative research (see Patton, 1989). The interviewing method
I describe, explain, and, hope, illuminate can be done in combination
with other approaches to understanding the world outside ourselves. On
the other hand, I think a case can be made that in some research situations
the in-depth interview, as the primary and perhaps singular method of
investigation, is most appropriate. Use of in-depth interviews alone, when
done with skill, can avoid tensions that sometimes arise when a researcher
uses multiple methods. That is especially the case when those methods
may be based on different assumptions of what it means to understand the
experience of others.
Why Interview?
I interview because I am interested in other people's stories. Most simply
put, stories are a way of knowing. The root of the word story is the Greek
word histor, which means one who is "wise" and "learned" (Watkins,
1985,p. 74). Tellingstories is essentially a meaning-making process. When
people tell stories, they select details of their experience from their stream
of consciousness. Every whole story, Aristotle tells us, has a beginning, a
middle, and an end (Butcher, 1902). In order to give the details of their
experience a beginning, middle, and end, people must reflect on their
experience. It is this process of selecting constitutive details of experience,
reflecting on them, giving them order, and thereby making sense of them
that makes telling stories a meaning-making experience. (See Schutz,
1967, p. 12 and p. 50, for aspects of the relationship between reflection
and meaning making.)
Every word that people use in telling their stories is a microcosm of
their consciousness (Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 236-237). Individuals' conscious-
ness gives access to the most complicated social and educational issues,
because social and educational issues are abstractions based on the con-
crete experience of people. W. E. B. Du Bois knew this when he wrote, "I
seem to see a way of elucidating the inner meaning of life and significance
of that race problem by explaining it in terms of the one human life that I
know best" (Wideman, 1990,p. xiv).
Although anthropologists have long been interested in people's stories
as a way of understanding their culture, such an approach to research in
education has not been widely accepted. For many years those who were
trying to make education a respected academic discipline in universities
argued that education could be a science (Bailyn, 1963). They urged their
colleagues in education to adapt research models patterned after those in
the natural and physical sciences.

2 INTERVIEWINGAS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
In the 1970s a reaction to the dominance of experimental, quantita-
tive, and behaviorist research in education began to develop (Gage, 1989).
The critique had its own energy and was also a reflection of the era's
more general resistance to received authority (Gitlin, 1987, esp. chap. 4).
Researchers in education split into two, almost warring, camps: quantita-
tive and qualitative.
It is interesting to note that the debate between the two camps got
especially fierce and the polemics more extreme when the economics of
higher education took a downturn in the mid-1970s and early 1980s
(Gage, 1989).But the political battles were informed by real epistemologi-
cal differences. The underlying assumptions about the nature of reality,
the relationship of the knower and the known, the possibility of objectiv-
ity, the possibility of generalization, inherent in each approach are differ-
ent and to a considerable degree contradictory. To begin to understand
these basic differences in assumptions, I urge you to read James (1947),
Lincoln and Guba (1985),chap. 1,Mannheim (1975),and Polanyi (1958).
For those interested in interviewing as a method of research, perhaps
the most telling argument between the two camps centers on the signifi-
cance of language to inquiry with human beings. Bertaux (1981) has ar-
gued that those who urge educational researchers to imitate the natural
sciencesseem to ignore one basic difference between the subjectsof inquiry
in the natural sciences and those in the social sciences: The subjects of
inquiry in the social sciences can talk and think. UnJike a planet, or a
chemical, or a lever, "If given a chance to talk freely, people appear to
know a lot about what is going on" (p. 39).
At the very heart of what it means to be human is the ability of people
to symbolize their experience through language. To understand human
behavior means to understand the use of language (Heron, 1981). Heron
points out that the original and archetypal paradigm of human inquiry is
two persons talking and asking questions of each other. He says:
The use of language, itself, . . . contains within it the paradigm of coopera-
tive inquiry; and since language is the primary tool whose use enables human
construing and intending to occur. it is difficult to see how there can be- "
any more fundamental mode of inquiry for human beings into the human
condition. (p. 26)
Interviewing, then, is a basic mode of inquiry. Recounting narratives
of experience has been the major way throughout recorded history that
,humans have made sense of their experience. To those who would ask,
however, "Is telling stories science?" Peter Reason (1981)would respond,
WHY INTERVIEW? 3
The best stories are those which stir people's minds, hearts, and souls and by
so doing give them new insights into themselves, their problems and their
human condition. The challenge is to develop a human science that can more
fully serve this aim. The question then, is not "Is story telling science?" but
"Can science learn to tell good stories?" (p. 50)
THE PURPOSE OF lNTERVlEWlNC
The purpose of in-depth interviewing is not to get answers to ques-
tions, nor to test hypotheses, and not to "evaluate" as the term is normally
used. (See Patton, 1989, for an exception.) At the root of in-depth inter-
viewing is an interest in understanding the experience of other people and
the meaning they make of that experience.
Being interested in others is the key to some of the basic assumptions
underlying interviewing technique. It requires that we interviewers keep
our egos in check. It requires that we realize we are not the center of the
world. It demands that our actions as interviewers indicate that others'
stories are important.
At the heart of interviewing research is an interest in other individu-
als' stories because they are of worth. That is why people whom we inter-
view are hard to code with numbers, and why finding pseudonyms for
participants' is a complex and sensitive task. (See Kvale, 1996, pp. 259-
260, for a discussion of the dangers of the careless use of pseudonyms.)
Their stories defy the anonymity of a number and almost that of a pseud-
onym. To hold the conviction that we know enough already and don't
need to know others' stories is not only anti-intellectual; it also leaves us,
at one extreme, prone to violenceto others (Todorov, 1984).
Schutz (1967, chap. 3) offers us guidance. First of all, he says that it
is never possible to understand another perfectly, because to do so would
mean that we had entered into the other's stream of consciousness and
experienced what he or she had. If we could do that, we would be that
other person.
Recognizing the limits on our understanding of others, we can still
strive to comprehend them by understanding their actions. Schutz gives
the example of walking in the woods and seeing a man chopping wood.
The observer can watch this behavior and have an "observational under-
standing" of the woodchopper. But what the observer understands as a
result of this observation may not be at all consistent with how the wood-
chopper views his own behavior. (In analogous terms, think of the prob-
lem of observing students or teachers.) To understand the woodchopper's
behavior, the observer would have to gain access to the woodchopper's

4 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
"subjective understanding," that is, know what meaning he himself made
out of his chopping wood. The way to meaning, Schutz says, is to be able
to put behavior in context. Was the woodchopper chopping wood to sup-
ply a logger, heat his home, or get in shape? (For Schutz's complete and
detailed explication of this argument, see esp. chaps. 1-3. For a thoughtful
secondary source on research methodology based on phenomenology, for
which Schutz is one primary resource, see Moustakas, 1994.)
Interviewing provides access to the context of people's behavior and
thereby provides a way for researchers to understand the meaning of that
behavior. A basic assumption in in-depth interviewing research is that the
meaning people make of their experience affects the way they carry out
that experience. To observe a teacher, student, principal, or counselor
provides access to their behavior. Interviewing allows us to put behavior
in context and provides access to understanding their action. The best
article I have read on the importance of context for meaning is Elliot
Mishler's (1979) "Meaning in Context: Is There Any Other Kind?" the
theme of which was later expanded into his book, Research Interviewing:
Context and Narrative (1986).Ian Dey (1993)also stresses the significance
of context in the interpretation of data in his useful book on qualitative
data analysis.
INTERVIEWING: "THE" METHOD OR "A" METHOD?
The primary way a researcher can investigate an educational organi-
zation, institution, or process is through the experience of the individual
people, the "others" who make up the organization or carry out the pro-
cess. Social abstractions like "education" are best understood through the
experiences of the individuals whose work and lives are the stuff upon
which the abstractions are built (Ferrarotti, 1981). So much research is
done on schooling in the United States; yet so little of it is based on
studies involving the perspective of the students, teachers, administrators,
counselors, special subject teachers, nurses, psychologists, cafeteria work-
ers, secretaries, school crossing guards, bus drivers, parents, and school
committee members, whose individual and collective experience consti-
tutes schooling.
A researcher can approach the experience of people in contemporary
organizations through examining personal and institutional documents,
through observation, through exploring history, through experimentation,
through questionnaires and surveys, and through a review of existingliter-
ature. If the researcher's goal, however, is to understand the meaning
people involved in education make of their experience, then interviewing
WHY INTERVIEW? 5
provides a necessary, if not always completely sufficient, avenue of in-
quiry.
An educational researcher might suggest'that the other avenues of
inquiry listed above offer access to people's experience and the meaning
they make of it as effectively as and at less cost than does interviewing. I
wouId not argue that there is one right way, or that one way is better than
another. Howard Becker, Blanche Geer, and Martin Trow carried on an
argument in 1957that still gains attention in the literature because, among
other reasons, Becker and Geer seemed to be arguing that participant
observation was the single and best way to gather data about people in
society. Trow took exception and argued back that for some purposes
interviewing is far superior (Becker& Geer, 1957; Trow, 1957).
The adequacy of a research method depends on the purpose of the
research and the questions being asked (Locke, 1989). If a researcher is
asking a question such as, "How do people behave in this classroom?"
then participant observation might be the best method of inquiry. If the
researcher is asking, "How does the placement of students in a level of the
tracking system correlate with socialclass and race?" then a survey may be
the best approach. If the researcher is wondering whether a new curricu-
lum affects students' achievements on standardized tests, then a quasi-
experimental, controlled study might be most effective. Research interests
don't always or often come out so neatly. In many cases, research interests
have many levels, and as a result inultiple methods may be appropriate. If
the researcher is interested, however, in what it is like for students to be in
the classroom, what their experience is, and what meaning they make out
of that experience-if the interest is in what Schutz (1967) calls their
"subjective understandingm-then it seems to me that interviewing, in
most cases, may be the best avenue of inquiry.
I say "in most cases," because below a certain age, interviewing chil-
dren may not work. I would not rule out the possibility, however, of
sitting down with even very young children to ask them about their experi-
ence. Carlisle (1988)interviewed first-grade students about their responses
to literature. Shefound that although she had to shorten the length of time
that she interviewed students, she was successful at exploring with first
graders their experience with books.
WHY NOT INTERVIEW?
Interviewing research takes a great deal of time and, sometimes,
money. The researcher has to conceptualize the project, establish access
and make contact with participants, interview them, transcribe the data,