INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
(personal communication, March 23, 1997)pointed out,
ome situations and settings in which the necessity to
t may hinder the interviewing process, at least ini-
tially. In situations in which participants feel vulnerable because of the
sensitive nature of the topic of the interview, they may hesitate to sign the
consent form. Participants who, for a range of reasons, have a distrust of
forms and formalistic language may balk at being asked to sign. Partici-
pants who feel the power relationship between them and the interviewer
is inequitable may feel uneasy and awkward when asked to review and
sign the form.
My experience is that the interviewer can deal with some of this type
of uneasiness by thoughtfulness and care in the process of going over the
form with the participant. In addition, the process of interviewing the
participant three times and developing and sustaining a relationship over
a period of time can relieve initial discomfort to some extent and can
assuage the suspicion that may have arisen at the time that the researcher
asked the participant to read and sign the informed consent form. In
circumstances in which the interviewer does not have the ability to build
a relationship over time, the informed consent process may be inhibiting.
While necessary, seekinginformed consent is not without its complexities.
It is designed to foster equity between the interviewer and the participant.
It may at times inhibit it. It is clear that the informed consent process is
only the beginning and not the end of researchers' ethical responsibilities
toward their participants and their research.
Technique Isn't ~verythin~,
But It Is a Lot
It is tempting to say that interviewing is an art, a reflection of the person-
ality of the interviewer, and cannot be taught. This line of thinking im-
plies that either you are good at it or you are not. But that is only half
true. Researchers can learn techniques and skills of interviewing. What
follows is a discussion of those skills as I have come to understand them
from my own experience of interviewing and that of others.
LISTEN MORE, TALK LESS
Listening is the most important skill in interviewing. The hardest
work for most interviewers is to keep quiet and to listen actively. Many
books about interviewing concentrate on the types of questions'that inter-
viewers ask, but I want to start this chapter by talking about the type of
listening the interviewer must do.
Interviewers must listen on at least three levels. First, they must listen
to what the participant is saying. They must concentrate on the substance
to make sure that they understand it and to assess whether what they are
hearing is as detailed and complete as they would like it to be. They
must concentrate so that they internalize what participants say. Later,
interviewers' questions will often flow from this earlier listening.
On a second level, interviewers must listen for what George Steiner
(1978) calls "inner voice," as opposed to an outer, more public voice. An
outer, or public, voice always reflects an awareness of the audience. It is
not untrue; it is guarded. It is a voice that participants would use if they
were talking to an audience of 300 in an auditorium.
There is a language of the outer voice to which interviewers can
become sensitive. For example, whenever I hear participants talk about

64 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
the problems they are facing as a "challenge" or their work as an "adven-
ture,= I sense that I am hearing a public voice, and I search for ways to get '
to the inner voice. Challenge and adventure convey the positive aspects of
a participant's grappling with a difficult experience but not the struggle.
Another word that attracts my attention is fascinate. I often hear that
word on talk-show interviews; it usually works to communicate some sort
of interest while covering up the exact nature of that interest. Whenever I
hear a participant use fascinate, I ask for elucidation. By taking partici-
pants' language seriously without making them feel defensive about it,
interviewers can encourage a level of thoughtfulness more characteristic
of inner voice.
On a third level, interviewers -like good teachers in a classroom-
must listen while remaining aware of the process as well as the substance.
They must be conscious of time during the interview; they must be aware
of how much has been covered and how much there is yet to go. They
must be sensitive to the participant's energy level and any nonverbal cues
he or she may be offering. Interviewers must listen hard to assess the
progress of the interview and to stay alert for cues about how to move the
interview forward as necessary.
This type of active listening requires concentration and focus beyond
what we usually do in everyday life. It requires that, for a good part of the
time, we quash our normal instinct to talk. At the same time, interviewers
must be ready to say something when a navigational nudge is needed.
In order to facilitate active listening, in addition to tape-recording the
interview, interviewers can take notes. These working notes help inter-
viewers concentrate on what the participant is saying. They also help to
keep interviewers from interrupting the participant by allowing them to
keep track of things that the participant has mentioned in order to come
back to these subjects when the timing is right.
A good way to gauge listening skills is to transcribe an interview tape.
Separate the interviewer's questions from the participant's responses by
new paragraphs. Compare the relative length of the participant's para-
graphs with the interviewer's. If the interviewer is listening well, his or
her paragraphs will be short and relatively infrequently interspersed
among the longer paragraphs of the participant's responses.
Note the following one-page transcript, for example. It is taken from
the beginning of interview number two on the experience of being an
instructional designer.
INTERVIEWER: Could you tell me as much as possible about the details
of your experience at work as an instructional designer
presently or as a grad student working in the area of in-
structional design?
TECHNIQUE ISN'T EVERYTHING
PARTICIPANT: The details of instructional design . . . 0.K.
INTERVIEWER: Your present experience . . .
PARTICIPANT: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: ASan instructional designer.
PARTICIPANT: Umh . . . So something like . . . you mean something like
perhaps the last several jobs I've done?
INTERVIEWER: NO, what you're presently doing, like as a student maybe
right now or you said you did have a job that you're work-
ing on.
PARTICIPANT: Yeah, well, I have one current, current job umh, the thing
is that when you said current I may or may in any given
day, I may or may not happen to have a job; you know
they just, they just fall out of the sky. You don't really -
My experience in getting work has been that -no matter
what I do to try to get work I don't see any direct results
between those efforts and getting the jobs, right. On the
other hand, I do get jobs. They just fall out of the sky
[laugh]. All I can say about you know like meteorites.
Unh, and they range over a wide, wide variety of -of
contact. Umh [sniffle] it could be teaching office workers
how to use software. I've done all of those, all of those
kinds of things. Umh, and typically the things start
through the proposal, umh less and less I've been doing the
actual proposals, but usually I'm not ah- the actual get-
ting the business is not my job and someyhere there is a
line between; writing the proposal is part of getting the
business and um so I usually have something to do with
writing the proposal but I don't do a lot of getting the
business. Umh [sniffle] somewhere after the proposal is
written or during the proposal stage I'm brought in [snif-
fle]-and I get to do the work. (Reproduced from Trem-
blay, 1990)
This text is a good example of an interviewer's listening hard to a
participant. At the beginning of the interview, the participant is not quite
focused. The interviewer, concentrating on what he is saying, nudges him
into the frame of reference of the second interview. Once she has the
participant in the right channel, she listens and lets him talk. Even when
the participant pauses for a few seconds, she does not interrupt.
Patai (1987) describes the process of listening to her Brazilian women
participants as an intense form of concentration and opennessto them that
led her to become absorbed in them (p. 12).Although not every interview
takes on the almost magical quality that Patai describes, interest in the

INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
nd a willingness to hold one's own ego in check
of listening in an interview that leads to the type
FOLLOW UP ON WHAT THE PARTICIPANTSAYS
When interviewers do talk in an interview, they usually ask questions.
The key to asking questions during in-depth interviewing is to let them
follow, as much as possible, from what the participant is saying. Although
the interviewer comes to each interview with a basic question that estab-
lishes the purpose and focus of the interview, it is in response to what the
participant says that the interviewer follows up, asks for clarification,
seeks concrete details, and requests stories. Rather than preparing a preset
interview guide, the interviewer's basic work in this approach to inter-
viewing is to listen actively and to move the interview forward as much as
possible by building on what the participant has begun to share.
ASK QUESTIONSWHEN YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND
It is hard work to understand everything people say. Sometimes the
context is not clear. At other times we do not understand the specific
referent of what someone is saying. In everyday conversation we often let
such things slide by without understanding them. In interviewing such
sliding undermines the process.
The interview structure is cumulative. One interview establishes the
context for the next. Not having understood something in an early inter-
view, an interviewer might miss the significance of something a partici-
pant says later. Passages in interviews become links to each other in ways
that cannot be foretold. Also, the interviewer who lets a participant know
when he or she does not understand something shows the person that the
interviewer is listening.
Sometimes it is difficult to get the chronology of an experience
straight. It is important for interviewers to understand experiences in the
context of time. A question like, "Can you tell me again when that hap-
pened?" is a reasonable one. I use the word again so as not to imply to
participants that they are not being clear, thereby making them defensive,
but rather, as is often the case, to suggest that I was just not attentive
enough the first time around.
Sometimes participants use vague words that seem to be communicat-
ing but are not explicit. For example, one community college faculty
member whom I interviewed consistently described his students by saying,
"They are very nice." I did not know what he meant by the term nice. In
a way it seemed to trivialize the respect for his students that he had
communicated throughout the interview. I asked him, "What is nice?" He
said,
The students at the private university [wherehe had previously taught] were
rude, and they were frequently demanding. I don't mean intellectually de-
manding. They would say, "You didn't say that. You didn't say you were
goingto test us on that sort of thing." Our students at the community college
are really nice. I realize this sounds silly; I apologize for it. It really sounds
crazy to say for some reason we happen to have the nicest people around that
happen to live in this neighborhood. Now that's not likely. But we have an
attitude on this campus. There is a kind of mutual respect and I get a lot of
this when our studentscome back after they have gone somewhereelse. . . .
There is a different feeling, even though it is a bigger school, and you really
don't know everybody. Uh, nonetheless there is a kind of community feeling
here and there is a lack of what I call a mean spirit where you are just
touchy and aggressiveand, uh, inquisitive. Maybe our students are not that
motivated; maybe that's why they are not; but they are really nice to teach.
You almost never have anythingyou could call a discipline problem. It just
doesn't happen. . . . I don't know; I do like our students. I think it would be
absolutely perfect if they were a little better prepared, but that's not as
important as being nice people. . . . They are the kind of people that are
pleasant to work with. (Interviewin Seidman et al., 1983)
In responding to my request for clarification about his use of the word
nice, the participant went more deeply into the nature of his teaching
experience. By my taking his language seriously, he explored what he
meant when he used the word nice. As the interviewer, I then understood
better what, for him, were the complexities implied in his use of the
apparently simple word nice.
[ ASK TO HEAR MOREABOUT A SUBJECT
When interviewers want to hear more about what a participant is
saying, they should trust that instinct. Interviewers should ask questions
when they feel unsatisfied with what they have heard. Sometimes they do
not think that they have heard the entire story; other times they may think
that they are getting generalities and they want to hear the details; or they
may just be interested in what the participant is saying and want to hear
more. Sometimes when listening, interviewers begin to feel a vague ques-

68 INTERVIEWINGAS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
tion welling up inside them because they sense there is more to the story.
In those instances it is important for them to ask to hear more.
For example, in a study of older women returning to community
colleges (Schatzkamer, 1986), one student spoke about her experience in a
math course. The last two thirds of the technical math course she was
taking was devoted to calculus.
She said, "At that point, I capsized. That was beyond the capacities
of my math . . . it was beyond me. So I was obedient. This is something I
don't usually do in school, but I just memorized and did what I was told
and followed out the formulas the way I was told I should and which I
regret. I got an A, but I regret it."
The interviewer, hearing the phrase "I regret it," wanted to hear
more. She asked, based on what the participant had said, "What do you
regret?"
The participant responded, "I never really understood it, you know. I
didn't really learn. I'm sure there is something lovely there under all that
calculus to be learned and I didn't learn that. I theoretically learned how
to use it as a tool. By being slavish you know: plugging numbers into
formulas and finding the right formula and stuff; that's not the way math
should be learned and it's not really understanding."
By following up on the participant's phrase of regret, the interviewer
gave the participant a chance to go a step further in her story. In so doing
she revealed a desireto learn and a potential appreciation for the beauty of
math that increases the reader's understanding of her community college
experience and our respect for her as an individual.
EXPLORE, DON'T PROBE
In referring to the skill of following up on what participants say, the
literature on interviewing often uses the word probe. (See,e.g., Lincoln &
Guba, 1985; Rubin & Rubin, 1995.) I have never been comfortable with
that word. I always think of a sharp instrument pressing on soft flesh when
I hear it. The word also conveys a sense of the powerful interviewer
treating the participant as an object. I am more comfortable with the
notion of exploring with the participant than with probing into what the
participant says.
At the same time, too much and ill-timed exploration of the partici-
pant's words can make him or her defensive and shift the meaning making
from the participant to the interviewer. The interview can become too
easily a vehicle for the interviewer's agenda rather than an exploration of
the participant's experience. Too little exploration, however, can leave an
TECHNIQUE ISN'T EVERYTHING 69
interviewer unsure of the participant's meaning in the material he or
she has gathered. It can also leave the participant using abstractions and
generalities that are not useful (Hyman et al., 1954).
LISTEN MORE, TALK LESS, AND ASK REAL QUESTIONS
Listen more, talk less. I repeat the first principle of interviewing here
foremphasis and because it isso easy to forget. When you do ask questions,
ask only real questions. By a real question I mean one to which the inter-
viewer does not already know or anticipate the response. If interviewers
want to ask a question to which they think they know the response, it
would be better to say what they think, and then to ask the participant
what he or she thinks of the assertion.
AVOID LEADINGQUESTIONS
A leading question is one that influences the direction the response
will take. Sometimes the lead is in the intonation of the question: The
tone implies an expectation. Sometimes it is in the wording, syntax, and
intonation of the question, as when an interviewer asks, "Did you really
mean to do that?" Sometimes the lead is in the conclusion implied by the
question. One interviewer, listening to a participant's story about her
family and her early schooling, asked: "Your parents pushed you to study,
didn't they?" Or in another place, the interviewer asked, "How satisfied
were you with your student teaching placement?" instead of, for example,
"What was your student teaching placement like for you?" (For a more
extensive discussion of leading questions, see Kvale, 1996; Patton, 1989;
Richardson et al., 1965.)
ASK OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS
An open-ended question, unlike a leading question, establishes the
territory to be explored while allowing the participant to take any direc-
tion he or she wants. It does not presume an answer. There are at least two
types of open-ended questions especiallyrelevant to in-depth interviewing.
One is what Spradley (1979) calls the "grand tour" question (pp. 86-87),
in which the interviewer asks the participant to reconstruct a significant
segment of an experience. For example, in interviewing a counselor, an
interviewer might say, "Take me through a day in your work life." Or in

70 INTERVIEWINGAS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
working with a student teacher, an interviewer might ask, "Reconstruct
your day for me from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed."
'
There is also the mini-tour, in which the interviewer asks the partici-
pant to reconstruct the details of a more limited time span or of a particu-
lar experience. For example, an interviewer might ask a vice principal to
reconstruct the details of a particular disciplinary session with a student;
or an interviewer might ask a teacher to talk about the experience of a
particular conference with a parent.
A second type of open-ended question focuses more on the subjective
experience of the participant than on the external structure. For example,
a participant might begin to talk about her experience in a parent confer-
ence. After asking her what happened at the conference, the interviewer
might ask her to talk about what that conference was like for her.
Although there are many approaches to open-ended questioning,
when I am interested in understanding the participant's subjective experi-
ence, I often find myself asking the question, "What was that like for
you?" As Schutz (1967) indicated, it is not possible to experiencewhat the
participant experienced. If we could, then we would be the participant.
Perhaps the closest we can come is to ask the metaphorical question im-
plied in the word like.When interviewers ask what something was like for
participants, they are giving them the chance to reconstruct their experi-
ence according to their own sense of what was important, unguided by the
interviewer. (For a thoughtful discussion of questioning strategies she uses
in oral history interviewing, see Yow, 1994,pp. 38-44.)
FOLLOW UP, DON'T INTERRUPT
Avoid interrupting participants when they are talking. Often an in-
terviewer is more interested in something a participant says than the
speaker seems to be. While the participant continues talking, the inter-
viewer feels strongly tempted to interrupt to pursue the interesting point.
Rather than doing so, however, the interviewer can jot down the key word
and follow up on it later, when doing sowill not interrupt the participant's
train of thought. The opportunity may come later in the same interview
or even in a subsequent one (Richardson et al., 1965).
Once, for example, a teacher had been talking early in the second
interview about the frenetic pace of her day and about having no place to
hide. At the time, I was very interested in what she said, but she went
right on to other aspects of her experience. Rather than interrupting her
then, I wrote down in my working notes the phrases "frenetic pace" and
"no place to hide."
TECHNIQUE ISN'T EVERYTHING 71
Later, when there was a pause in her responses, I returned to those
phrases by saying, "A while back you talked about a very frenetic pace.
You talked about coming in the door, teaching your class, walking to your
office, keeping extensive hours, having no place to hide. Would you talk
more about that frenetic pace and having no place to hide?" [Richardson
et al., 1965, term this approach "the echo" (pp. 157-163) and caution
against its overuse.]
The participant responded by talking about the effect of her commu-
nity college's architecture on her daily life. In order to make faculty as
accessible as possible to students, the designers of her campus had made
the wall of faculty offices that faced the hallway of glass. The participant
spoke about her frustrationwith never having a place to go in her building
where she could get some work done without being seen and, most likely,
interrupted. Although she could close the door of her office, she could
never close out those who sought her.
ASK PARTICIPANTS T O TALK T O YOU
AS IF YOU WERE SOMEONE ELSE
Every interviewer probably develops favorite approaches to partici-
pants. I have two to which I return often. The first I use when I sense that
I am hearing a public voice and I am searching for an inner one (see
above). In those situations, I often use what Patton (1989) calls role-
playing questions (see also Spradley, 1979). I try to figure out the person
with whom the participant might be most comfortable talking personally.
I then try asking the participant to imagine that I am that person.
I might say, "If I were your spouse (or your father, or your teacher,
or your friend), what would you say to me?" Sometimes this question falls
flat. I am unable to shift the participant's frame of reference enough so
that he or she talks to me as though I were someone else. But often, if used
sparingly, the role-playing approach works. The participant takes on a
different voice, becomes animated in a way that he or she has not been
until then, and both the participant and I enjoy for a few moments the
new roles that we have assumed.
ASK PARTICIPANTS T O TELL A STORY
I also often ask participants to tell me a story about what they are
discussing. In a sense, everything said in an interview is a story. But if a
participant were talking about, for example, relationships with students, I

72 IkjTERVlEWlNG AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
might ask for a story about one particular student who stands out in his or
her experience.
Not everybodyis comfortable with being asked directly to tell a story.
The request seems to block people who may think they do not tell good
stories or that story telling is something only other people do. Others,
however, suddenly remember a particular incident, become deeply en-
grossed in reconstructing it, and tell a wonderful story that conveys their
experience as concretely as anything could.
I will always remember the story one student teacher told when she
was describing the trouble she was having figuring out how to relate to
her students. She had envisioned herself as a friendly older sister to them.
One day she overheard a group of her students telling dirty jokes, and she
told them a mild one.
About a week later, the vice principal called her to his office to say
that parents were outraged about the joke. The student teacher went on to
tell of a seriesof meetingswith parents in which shehad to explain herself.
She described the vice principal's lack of real support during those meet-
ings. Finally she talked about the sobering realization that she had not
known where to draw the line with her students. She said, "The dirty joke
was horrendous, and I understood that. I understood that I was just trying
to be one of the kids, that I felt close to them. . . . I was just being too
familiar. I always thought that teaching . . .was relating to the kids."
Stories such as this, in which the student teacher gave a beginning,
middle, and end to a segment of her experience, drew characters, pre-
sented conflict, and showed how she dealt with it, convey experience in an
illuminating and memorable way. (See Mishler, 1986, chap. 4, for an
extended discussionof the power of narratives.) If an interviewer continu-
ally asks participants to illustrate experiences with a story, the technique
will wear out quickly. Used sparingly, however, and targeted at particular
aspects of the participant's experience, it can lead to treasured moments in
interviewing.
KEEP PARTICIPANTS FOCUSEDAND ASK FOR CONCRETE DETAILS
Keep participants focused on the subject of the interview. If they
begin to talk about current experience in the first interview, try to guide
them back to the focus of that interview, which is to provide contextual
background from their life story. Although the interviewer must avoid a
power struggle, he or she must exercise enough control of the process so
that participants respect the structure and individual purpose of each of
the three interviews in the series.
TECHNIQUE ISN'T EVERYTHING 73
Throughout the interviews, but especially in the first two, ask for
concrete details of a participant's experience before exploring attitudes
and opinions about it. The concrete details constitute the experience; atti-
tudes and opinions are based on them. Without the concrete details, the
attitudes and opinionscan seem groundless.
D O NOT TAKE THE EBBS AND FLOWS OF
INTERVIEWING TOO PERSONALLY
Watch for an ebb and flow in interviews and try not to take it too
personally. In-depth interviewing often surprisesparticipants because they
have seldom had the opportunity to talk at length to someone outside their
family or friends about their experience. As a result, they may become so
engrossed in the first interview that they say things that they are later
surprised they have shared (Spradley, 1979). Interviewers often arrive at
the second interview thinking what a wonderful interview the first was,
only to be surprised that now the participants pull back and are not willing
to share as much as before. At this point, interviewers have to be careful
not to press too hard for the type of-sharing they experienced before. The
third interview allows participants to find a zone of sharing within which
they are comfortable.They resolve the issue for themselves.
SHARE EXPERIENCES O N OCCASION
There are times when an interviewer's experience may connect to that
of the participant. Sharing that experience in a frank and personal way
may encourage the participant to continue reconstructing his or her own
in a more inner voice than before. Overused, however, such sharing can
distort an interview and distract participants from their own experience to
the interviewer's. I can remember sharing stories of mine that I thought
connected to what the participant was saying and sensing that the partici-
pant was impatient for me to stop talking. (For a somewhat different
perspective on the amount of interaction that is desirable between inter-
viewer and participant, see Oakley, 1981.)
ASK PARTICIPANTSTO RECONSTRUCT, NOT TO REMEMBER
Avoid asking participants to rely on their memories. As soon as inter-
viewers ask if people remember something, impediments to memory

74 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
spring up (Tagg, 1985).Ask participants, in effect, not to remember their
experiencebut rather to reconstruct it. Ask directly "What happened?" or
"What was your elementary school experience like?" instead of "Do you
remember what your elementary school experience was like?"
Interviewers can assume that the participants will be able to recon-
struct their experience and thereby avoid many of the impediments to
memory that abound. Reconstruction is based partially on memory and
partially on what the participant now senses is important about the past
event. In a sense, all recall is reconstruction (Thelen, 1989).In interview-
ing, it is better to go for that reconstruction as directly as possible.
AVOlD REINFORCING YOUR PARTICIPANTS' RESPONSES
Avoid reinforcing what your participant is saying, either positively or
negatively. A useful training exercise is to transcribe verbatim 5 minutes
of an early interview. What sometimes becomes clear is that the inter-
viewer is in the habit of saying "uh huh" or "O.K." or "yes" or some other
short affirmative response to almost every statement from the participant.
Sometimesinterviewers are hardly aware that they are doing it.
On having such reinforcement called to their attention, many new
interviewers suggest that there is nothing inappropriate about the prac-
tice. They argue that it shows they are listening and being attentive and
that participants appreciate knowing that; it keeps them talking. Often, I
think, it is a relatively benign controlling mechanism that is difficult to
give up.
But interviewers who reinforce what they are hearing run the risk of
distorting how the participant responds (Richardson et al., 1965).A more
effective and less invasive method is to refer later in an interview to some-
thing participants said earlier. (For a more balanced perspective on rein-
forcements, see Richardson et al., 1965.)
EXPLORE LAUGHTER
Often a participant will say something and then laugh, sometimes
because what he or shejust said is self-evidently funny. At other times, the
laughter may be nervous or ironic, its origin unclear to the interviewer
and often worth exploring. For example, when interviewing a female
scienceteacher, I asked her how the fact that there were 10 women in her
community college science division of 60 faculty affected her sense of
power in the college. I related the question to Rosabeth Moss Kanter's
TECHNIQUE ISN'T EVERYTHING 75
(1977)discussion of numbers and power in her book, Men and Women of
the Corporation. The participant responded:
Well, you see this isn't a corporation. I mean, people are not jockeying for
positionwithin, and that would make a tremendousdifference, I think, if we
were really competitivewith one another for something, [laugh]it might be
a tremendously important factor. But we're not competing for anything.
There are very few people who want to, say, go up to the next step, which is
division director. I feel I could get elected to division director, if I so chose.
[Pause]My sex would not at all interfere. [Pause] It might even be a plus,
but, uh, most people here are not interested, it's not a power play situation;
we're all retired really [laugh].(Interviewin Seidman et al., 1983)
After she finished and I weighed in my mind the juxtaposition of her
laughter with what she was saying, I said, "That sounds bitter." In reply,
she spoke about the positive and negative aspects,inher experience of not
being in a highly competitive, upwardly mobile faculty. I did not follow
up at that point because I thought doing so might make her defensive. I
wrote in my working notes, "laughter?" and came back to it later in the
interview. As Studs Terkel has said, "A laugh can be a cry of pain, and a
silence can be a shout" (Parker, 1996, p. 165).
FOLLOW YOUR HUNCHES
Foliow your hunches. Trust your instincts. When appropriate, risk
saying what you think or asking the difficult question. Sometimes during
an interview, a question will start to form, perhaps first as a vague impres-
sion, then as a real doubt. My experience is that it-is important to trust
those responses, to figure out the question that best expresses them, and to
ask it.
During one interview with an intern teacher, I became increasingly
uncomfortable. I could not figure out what was bothering me until I
realized that the participant was talking positively about his teaching
experience in a very formal way but with very little energy. His nonverbal
language was contradicting his verbal language. I began to think he was
really very unhappy with his teaching, even though he was talking rela-
tively positively about it.
I was very uncomfortable with this hunch, but finally after we were
more than two thirds of the way into the second interview, I said to him,
"You know, I can't figure this out. You are talking as though you are
enjoying your teaching, but something about the way you are talking
makes me think you are not. Is that fair?"

He responded as though I had opened a floodgate. He began to talk
about how angry he was that intern teachers got all the "lowest" classes.
He said that even though he had solid math preparation, he would not
have a chance to teach upper-level courses for perhaps 5 more years,
because all course assignments were made on the basis of seniority. Then
he talked about how hard he worked, how little time he had on weekends
to be with his wife, and how little money he was making. As a result of
following up on a hunch, I gained a completely different picture of his
experience, and in the rest of the interview his verbal and nonverbal
language coincided.
USEAN INTERVIEWGUIDE CAUTIOUSLY
Someforms of interviewing depend on an interview guide. (See, e.g.,
Yow, 1994.) The interviewers arrive with preset questions to which they
want answers or about which they want to gather data. In-depth inter-
viewing, however, is not designed to test hypotheses, gather answers to
questions, or corroborate opinions. Rather, it is designed to ask partici-
pants to reconstruct their experience and to explore their meaning. The
questions most used in an in-depth interview follow from what the partici-
pant has said.
Nonetheless, in-depth interviewers may want to develop an inter-
viewing guide. The basic structure of the interview is the question that
establishesthe focus of each interview in the series. However, interviewers
never come into an interview situation as clean slates. They have interests,
or they would not have chosen the research topic they did. In addition,
some participants will require more prompting than others to go forward
in the reconstructionof their experience. Also, over the courseof a number
of interviews, the interviewer may notice that several participants have
highlighted a particular issue, and the interviewer may want to know how
other participants have responded to that issue.
For these reasons, in our study of the experience of student teach-
ers we developed a guide that listed the following areas: student
teachers' relationship with mentors, with students, with other student
teachers, with parents, with tracking, testing, and grading. In most cases,
student teachers raised these topics on their own as they talked about their
teaching experience. In those instanceswhen they did not, and if there was
an opportunity to do so without interrupting or diverting a participant's
reconstruction of his or her own experience, the interviewer referred to the
interview guide and raised an issue that had not been touched upon.
If interviewers decide to use an interviewing guide, they must avoid
manipulating their participants to respond to it. Interviewers should ask
TECHNIQUE ISN'T EVERYTHING 77
questions that reflect areas of interest to them in an open and direct way,
perhaps acknowledging that the question comes more from their own
interest than from what the participant has said. Interviewers must try to
avoid imposing their own interests on the experience of the participants.
Interviewers working with an inteniew guide must allow for the possibil-
ity that what may interest them or other participants may be of little
interest to the person being interviewed. Interview guides can be useful
but must be used with caution.
TOLERATE SILENCE
Interviewers sometimes get impatient and uncomfortable with si-
lence. They project that discomfort onto their participants. They see
pauses as voids and jump into the interview with a quick question to fill
the void. A useful exercise is to play back an interview tape and record
how much time the interviewer gives the participant to think before he or
shejumps in with a question. My experienceis that new interviewers think
they are waiting a considerable time before askingtheir next question, but
when we go over audiotapes of their interviews, we determine that in
reality they are waiting only a second or two. Thoughtfulness takes time;
if interviewers can learn to tolerate either the silence that sometimes fol-
lows a question or a pause within a participant's reconstruction, they may
hear things they would never have heard if they had leapt in with another
question to break the silence. (See Mary-Budd Rowe, 1974, on the effect
of how much time teachers wait for answers to questions on the quality of
students' responses.)
On the other hand, Yow (1994, p. 63) and Gordon (1987) point out
that too long a studied silence on the part of the interviewer can put undue
pressure on the participant. The interviewer's staying silent too long can
turn a "pregnant or permissivepause" into an "embarrassingsilence" (Gor-
don, 1987,pp. 423,426).
As in other aspects of interviewing, there is a delicate balance be-
tween jumping in too soon with a question and waiting too long in silence.
There are no rules of thumb here. It is important to give your participant
space to think, reflect, and add to what he or she has said. This may take
a second or two for some participants and 20 seconds for others.
CONCLUSION
There is no recipe for the effective question. The truly effective ques-
tion flows from an interviewer's concentrated listening, engaged interest

78 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
in what is being said, and purpose in moving forward. Sometimes an
important question will start out as an ill-defined instinct or hunch, which
takes time to develop and seems risky to ask. Sometimes the effective
question reflects the interviewer's own groping for coherence about what
is being said and is asked in a hesitant, unsure manner.
Effective questioning is so context-bound, such a reflection of the
relationship that has developed between the interviewer and the partici-
pant, that to define it further runs the risk of making a human process
mechanical. To some extent, the way interviewers are as people will be
the way they are as interviewers. If interviewers are the sort of people who
always have to be talking, who never listen, who demand to be the center
of attention most of the time, who are really not interested in other peo-
ple's stories, no matter what procedures they follow in interviewing, those
characteristics will probably pervade the interviewing relationship.
The most important personal characteristic interviewers must have is
a genuine interest in other people. They must be deeply aware that other
people's stories are of worth in and of themselves and because they offer
something to the interviewer's experience. With a temperament that finds
interest in others, a person has the foundation upon which to learn the
techniques of interviewing and to practice its skills.
Interviewing as a Relationship
Interviewing is both a research methodology and a social relationship that
must be nurtured, sustained, and then ended gracefully (Dexter, 1970;
Hyman et al., 1954; Mishler, 1986). In part, each interviewing relation-
ship is individually crafted. It is a reflection of the personalities of the
participant and the interviewer and the ways they interact. The relation-
ship is also a reflection of the purpose, structure, and method of in-depth
interviewing. For example, the fact that the participant and the inter-
viewer meet three times over 2 or 3 weeks results in a relationship different
from that which would result from a single-interview structure.
Interviewers can try to craft relationships with their participants that
are like islands of interchange separate from the world's definitions, classi-
fications, and tensions. However, individual interviewing relationships
exist in a social context. Although an interviewer might attempt to isolate
the interviewing relationship from that context and make it unique to the
interviewer and the participant, the social forces of class, ethnicity, race,
and gender, as well as other social identities, impose themselves. Although
interviewers may try to ignore these social forces, they tend to affect their
relationships with participants nonetheless.
INTERVIEWINGAS AN "I-THOU" RELATIONSHIP
In a section of his book that is elegant even in translation, Schutz
(1967)explains that one person's intersubjective understanding of another
depends upon creating an "I-Thou" relationship, a concept bearing both
similarities to and significant differences from the philosopher Martin
Buber's use of the phrase. "Thou" is someone close to the interviewer, still