Intensive interviewing is a way of generating data for qualitative research. It typically means a gently guided, one-sided conversation that explores research participants’ perspective on their personal experience with the research topic. This topic may be broad and fluid such as the life histories of people who grew up during the Cold War era, or much narrower and more focused such as local elementary school teachers’ views of learning assessment policies and practices.

1. Interview in
grounded theory,
Charmaz approach
Mohammad Sajjad Lotfi: PhD Student Of Gerontology
Sajjad.Lotfi@yahoo.Com

2. Crafting and Conducting Intensive
Interviews
• In the following, one of my research assistants interviewed a middle-
aged woman, Carla, about having a life-threatening illness. Carla
talked about how she had reduced socializing with her extended family
as her illness progressed.
• Without receiving any audible prompting from the interviewer, Carla
volunteered a lengthy description of family relationships as she talked
about needing to attend to her health.
• Toward the end of her detailed portrayal, Carla added the following
story about her aunt.
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3. • Carla: My aunt contacted me a couple months ago wondering how
come I don’t come to family gatherings much, and I wrote a letter and
was just as honest as I could, and said you know, I’ve really moved in
a different direction and I have to watch my energy and I can’t go to all
these things [phone rings], anyway, I felt good about that I tried to do
that as nice as possible but couldn’t tell her that I just didn’t [phone
rings again]. I just don’t have the time and energy and I told her I was
on a different path so….[pauses].
• Interviewer: So you feel you’re a little selective with your time and
energy.
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4. • Carla: Oh definitely, definitely, in fact, I go to Weight Watchers and
today I meet a gal; she’s great and she always says that a friendship
must sustain you, not drain you, so that’s how I look at everything and
everybody in life. And there are a lot of people who are toxic or they’re
just – like my aunt called me up a couple years ago and I was having a
wedding for my son, oh she was having a wedding for her son and she
called to say, ‘Can you come?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m on vacation those
two weeks and all the kids – we’ve all got our times down and
everything.’And she said, ‘Well, can’t you change your vacation
days?’ and I said, ‘You know, my son is getting married and we can’t
meet your son’ and blah, blah, blah. And I said, ‘Auntie, I don’t even
know if I’m going to be here a year from now, so I’m going to do what
I want to do,’ so she hung up the phone on me….
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5. • Carla continued her story in detail. In the excerpt above, the
interviewer said very little but offered an encouraging, non-judgmental
summary statement in question form.
• In turn, her question elicited further details. Although research
interviewers may say little, their body language, gaze, and murmured
‘mmm’s and ‘uh huh’s (which can be too soft to be heard when
transcribing) express their interest and keep the conversation flowing
about the research participant’s experience.
• How do you learn when to speak and when to encourage and listen in
an intensive interview?
• What does good interviewing practice include?
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6. • This chapter gives you an overview of issues in intensive interviewing and
suggestions that can help you use intensive interviewing in grounded theory
studies.
• I emphasize the context of the interview situation, forming questions, and
conducting the interview.
• Researchers can learn to conduct intensive interview with skill, style, and
sensitivity.
• Novices can develop skills in creating a special interactional climate for the
interview and in encouraging the research participant to talk.
• Grounded theorists profit from knowing about the growing literature on
interviewing in qualitative research. Thus, I include diverse sources to spark
your ideas about developing, conducting, and evaluating intensive
interviewing.
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7. Thinking about Intensive
Interviewing
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8. • What is intensive interviewing?
• When do researchers use it?
• What is involved in crafting and conducting intensive interviews?
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9. • Intensive interviewing is a way of generating data for qualitative
research.
• It typically means a gently guided, one-sided conversation that
explores research participants’ perspective on their personal experience
with the research topic.
• This topic may be broad and fluid such as the life histories of people
who grew up during the Cold War era, or much narrower and more
focused such as local elementary school teachers’ views of learning
assessment policies and practices.
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10. Intensive interviewing typically
means a gently guided, one-sided
conversation that explores a person’s
substantial experience with the
research topic.
WHAT IS INTENSIVE INTERVIEWING?
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11. Key characteristics of intensive
interviewing include its:
• Selection of research participants who have first-hand experience that
fits the research topic
• In-depth exploration of participants’ experience and situations
• Reliance on open-ended questions
• Objective of obtaining detailed responses
• Emphasis on understanding the research participant’s perspective,
meanings, and experience
• Practice of following up on unanticipated areas of inquiry, hints, and
implicit views and accounts of actions.
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12. • In short, researchers use intensive interviewing to study specific topics
about which the research participant has had substantial experience.
• During the interview, the participant talks; the interviewer
encourages, listens, and learns.
• Intensive interviewing is one type of research interviewing. All types of
interviewing rely on conducting a more or less directed conversation
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13. • Different forms of interviewing and purposes for it affect the degree to
which the interviewer explicitly directs the interview.
• Standardized interviewing for quantitative research, for example,
aims for total interviewer direction. The logic of this approach depends
on the interviewer asking the same questions in the same way to all
research participants.
• This logic also assumes that the researcher knows the pertinent
questions to ask in advance and that research participants will
interpret the questions in the way that the researcher intends.
• Neither assumption fits intensive interviewing.
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14. • Grounded theorists may use each strategy but typically use intensive
interviewing, which I focus on in this chapter.
• When we conduct intensive interviews we also do some informational
interviewing to gather needed details for our studies.
• As grounded theorists, our interviewing approach may change as our
studies develop.
• Keep in mind that interviews take place within a culture at a specific
historical time and social context. Your approach to interviewing,
questions, specific word choice, and interactional style during the
interview need to respect the traditions and situations of your interview
participants.
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15. • Interviews are complex situations. Intensive interviews create and open
an interactional space in which the participant can relate his or her
experience.
• Yet the purpose of your interview, the people you talk with, their
understanding and stake in the interview all figure in the quality and
usefulness of its content. A researcher has topics to pursue.
• Research participants have problems to solve, goals to pursue, and
actions to perform, and they hold assumptions, form ideas, and have
feelings about all these concerns.
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16. • Both interviewer and interview participant bring their own priorities,
knowledge, and concerns to the interview situation, which may not be
entirely compatible.
• Interview participants’ questions about your study affect whether or
not they will participate. If they do decide to participate, their
reservations may affect the extent and quality of their statements.
• Participants might raise the following questions:
• Whose interests do you represent? How will the findings be used? Will
I be recognizable? Such questions may, however, remain unstated
when potential interview participants prefer to piece together their own
conclusions.
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17. • Intensive interviews focus on research participants’ statements about
their experience, how they portray this experience, and what it
means to them, as they indicate during the interview.
• A caveat: Social scientific reporting of interview statements lends them
a rational cast and thus these statements may seem to have greater
coherence than the actual interview might indicate.
• A number of my interviewees experienced memory loss, confusion,
fatigue, and medication effects that might have affected them, although
their transcribed statements hide these effects.
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18. • Such problems may contribute to the context of our interviews.
Instead, we examine how our research questions and mode of inquiry
shape our subsequent data and analysis.
• It helps you to become self-aware about why and how you gather data
and thus enables you to assess your effectiveness.
• You learn to sense when you are gathering rich, useful data that do not
undermine or demean your respondent(s).
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19. • Because the interviewer seeks to understand the research participant’s
language, meanings and actions, emotions and body language,
intensive interviewing is a useful method for interpretive inquiry.
• Grounded theorists may also occasionally use investigative
interviewing strategies with specific research participants, such as
politicians, in certain kinds of social justice projects, or in some
ethnographic studies when the researcher’s long-standing field
relationships permit pointed questions.
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20. • The in-depth nature of an intensive interview fosters eliciting each
participant’s interpretation of his or her experience at the time the
interview takes place. The interviewer seeks to understand the topic
and the interview participant has the relevant experiences to shed light
on it.
• Thus, the interviewer’s questions ask the participant to describe and
reflect upon his or her experiences in ways that seldom occur in
everyday life.
• The interviewer listens, observes with sensitivity, and encourages
the person to talk. Hence, in this conversation, the participant does
most of the talking.
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21. • In short, intensive interviewing is a flexible, emergent technique that:
• Combines flexibility and control
• Opens interactional space for ideas and issues to arise
• Allows possibilities for immediate follow-up on these ideas and issues
• Results from interviewers and interview participants’ co-construction
of the interview conversation.
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22. Preparing for the Interview,
Getting Ready
• Learn about the situation you will enter before you begin.
• A common grounded theory dictum is that you should avoid reading
the research and theoretical literatures about your topic.
• If you have the luxury of avoiding a literature review before entering
the field, you may enter it with a fresh mind – or not. You might enter
the field with unexamined preconceptions about the topic that you have
long held.
• Most researchers today cannot begin their research without prior
knowledge of the scholarship about their field.
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23. • Beyond doing a research literature review, you need to be current about
the experience or situation that you will be studying.
• for example, you expect to study how people with rheumatoid arthritis
manage mobility problems, you would be wise to be conversant with
common symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.
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24. • interviewers need to gain the tools to conduct interviews that involve
specialized knowledge and technical sophistication.
• Research problems that involve sophisticated technological questions
in biomedicine and information science are just two examples of
areas in which an interviewer may need to have prior knowledge about
the relevant technology.
• Interview studies usually lack the sustained involvement of
ethnography in which research participants may teach the researcher
about technological and organizational complexities of their world.
Thus, research problems that involve such complexities may require an
interviewer to do substantial preparation to apprehend the studied
world and get beneath its surface.
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25. • Practice interviews, particularly for emotionally sensitive topics , can
help avert mistakes during later interviews . Words such as "denial,
" "adjustment," and "cancer victim" can raise obvious warning signals
for specific studies .
• Terms that you may find in a professional literature may not help you
in the field . Words that both professionals and lay persons view as
apt and neutral might offend research participants .
• In her study of loss of a murdered child , Sarah goodrum ( goodrum &
Keys , 2007 ) learned what to ask about and how to ask it by having
four participants act as informants before she began her formal
interviews .
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26. • One informant taught her about the insensitive meanings embedded in
the term ‘closure’:
• [E]ven still [4 years after our daughter’s murder], you know, [my
wife] Kathy and I hate this word ‘closure.’ ‘Do you have closure?’
[They say] ‘If they find the murderer, you’ll have closure then.’ I
say, ‘No, no. I won’t have closure. I’m never gonna have complete
closure, no matter what happens.’ (p. 252)
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27. • Knowing or just identifying some of your prospective participants "
key terms in advance can help you form questions and put your
research participant at ease.
• How you appear to research participants affects their response to your
topic and questions.
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28. • Each point out that how you look should be compatible with the world
of the people you will interview .
• Depending on your country and culture, you may not need to be
dressed for corporate success but you do need to look appropriate for
the setting, participant, and situation. Treat your participants, their
world, and the interview situation with respect .
• Points out that a researcher who shows up in tattered old clothes to
interview an impoverished elder evinces disrespect rather than fits into
the scene .
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29. Constructing Your Interview Guide
• Human subjects committees and institutional review boards (IRBs) are
proliferating across the globe, ostensibly to protect your research
participants. Such committees now routinely require a research plan
and interview guide before approving an interview study.
• Prospective organizations and research participants may also demand
to see an interview guide before they permit you to proceed.
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30. • Treat constructing your interview guide as a way to learn how to
obtain data and how to ask questions.
• Treat your completed interview guide as a flexible tool to revise.
• I recommend that new researchers develop a detailed interview guide
to think through the kinds of questions that can help them fulfill their
research objectives.
• An interview guide is also useful to experienced researchers, especially
when they begin a new project.
• Why not just jot down a list of topics to cover during the course of the
conversation? Some qualitative researchers advocate this approach to
allow the interview to be fluid and spontaneous.
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31. • Starting a new project without a working guide is, however, fraught
with pitfalls, particularly for novices.
• This approach invites asking awkward, poorly timed, intrusive
questions that you may fill with unexamined preconceptions.
• You can achieve a balance between designing a useful interview guide
that simultaneously focuses your topic and fosters pursuing new areas
that had not occurred to you .
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32. • The combination of insider knowledge and detailed study can yield
profound analyses when researchers are able to subject their
experiences, interview guides, and subsequent data to rigorous analytic
scrutiny .
• An interviewer’s questions and interviewing style outline the context,
frame, and content of the study . Subsequently , a naive researcher may
inadvertently force interview data into preconceived categories, and
that undermines a grounded theory study .
• Not only can asking the " wrong questions " result in forcing the data,
but also how interviewers pose , emphasize, and pace their questions
can force the data .
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33. • The wrong questions:
1. Fail to explore pivotal issues
2. Elicit participants’ experiences in their own language.
• This questions may also effect the researcher’s concepts, concerns,
and discourse upon the research participant’s reality – from the start.
• Let your research participant set the tone and speed and then mirror
what seems comfortable to him or her.
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34. • Recorded transcribed interviews make it easy to see when your
questions do not work or force the data .
• When irrelevant, superficial, or forced questions shape the data
collection, the subsequent analysis suffers.
• Thus, researchers need to be constantly reflexive about the nature of
their questions and whether they work for the specific participants and
the nascent grounded theory.
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35. • Constructing an interview guide prepares you for conducting the actual
interview.
• When you grapple with creating, revising, and fine-tuning your
interview questions, you gain a better grasp of how and when to ask
them in conversation.
• You will keep in mind how to form well-constructed questions
although you might not follow your original questions or glance at
your interview guide while conducting the interview.
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36. • Conducting interviews without constructing a guide may seem like a
better solution for engaging the interview participant in a spontaneous
conversation.
• Ironically, however, novices who try it frequently become anxious ,
miss places to follow leads, ask loaded questions, and may impose
their preconceived interests on the interview.
• Your interview guide can give you cues about where and when to
soften a question, depersonalize a response, or give the participant
another chance to decline to answer a line of questions.
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37. • Having questions in mind helps you to be able to go back to a topic
when the interviewee has already mentioned the answer to an
important question.
• You are less likely to become rattled or derailed when research
participants wander or ask if they are giving you what you aimed to
learn and you will have a question in mind that you can easily adapt to
further explore the topic.
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38. 1. Why did you take a leave
2. Could you tell me more ?
3. Why do you think that ?
• " The first question encourages ; the second asks for an accounting ,
explaining , or justification . The first question implies interest and
acceptance. The second question suggests inadequacy of the participant’s
response and casts doubt on its believability.
• Subsequently research participants may engage in a number of maneuvers
to save face , defend their actions , protect their identities , or simply
disengage from the interview .
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39. • Planned questions help you improvise in a smoother, less
confrontational way, which is a typical goal of intensive interviewing.
• Developing a set of questions helps researchers to become aware of
their
1. Interests
2. Assumptions
3. use of language.
• Studying these questions helps researchers not only to interrogate the
questions themselves, but also to reflect upon the research process
from the very beginning.
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40. • Subjecting one’s interview guide to the following questions prompts such
reflection and expedites revision:
1. To what extent does the interview guide elicit the research participant’s
views, concerns, and accounts of experience?
2. To what extent does the interview guide reflect my views and interests
instead of the participant’s experience?
3. Will the interview guide address the purpose of the research?
4. How can I shape my questions to open the conversation to what the
research participant has to say and simultaneously fulfill my research
objectives?
5. How well have I paced the questions? Have I eased the research participant
into the tough questions?
6. Have I asked the right background questions for what we need to do in this
interview?
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41. 7. Do I have enough information about the research participant to delve into
his or her experience?
8. Have I adequately prepared the research participant for what will ensue?
9. How would these questions sound to someone who has had this
experience?
10. What do my questions assume? To what extent will the research participant
share my assumptions?
11. Have I worded the questions in terms that the research participant would
use or understand?
12. Are the questions clear and concise?
13. Have I thought of probes that will follow up on the general questions? Are
any of my probes too intrusive?
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42. • To begin a grounded theory study , devise some broad , open - ended
questions.
• Then you can focus your interview questions to invite detailed
discussion of the topic.
• By creating open - ended , non - judgmental questions , you
encourage unanticipated statements and stories to emerge
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43. • Framing questions takes skill and practice .
• Questions must explore the interviewer’s topic and fit the participant’s
experience.
• As evident below, these kinds of questions cover a wide range of
experiences but are narrow enough to elicit and elaborate the
participant’s specific experience .
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44. • I include sample questions below to give you ideas about how to frame
questions to study process.
• These questions also reflect a symbolic interactionist emphasis on
learning about participants’ views, experienced events, and actions.
• The sample questions are intended to study individual experience.
• These sample questions merely provide examples to consider. Think
about them and write as few open-ended questions as possible for your
study. I have never asked all the questions below and may not get
beyond an initial set of questions in one session.
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45. • Having an interview guide with well-planned open-ended questions
and ready probes can increase your confidence and allow you to focus
on what the person says.
• Otherwise you may miss obvious points to explore because you
become distracted by what to ask next and how to ask it.
• Subsequently, you may ask a series of ‘do you’ questions that cut off
exploring the topic. At worst, your line of questioning can slip into an
interrogation. Both can defeat the purpose of conducting an intensive
interview.
• Interviewing takes skill, but you can learn how to do it.
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46. • I follow principles in such cases that may help you to design better questions as well
as to conduct the actual interview.
• Give the participant’s comfort level higher priority than obtaining juicy data
• Frame questions to understand the experience from the participant’s view
• Affirm that the participant’s views and experiences are important
• Be aware of questions that could elicit the participant’s distress about an experience or
incident
• Construct follow-up questions that encourage elaboration
• Slant ending questions toward positive responses to bring the interview to closure at a
positive level.
• Re-evaluate, revise, and add questions throughout the research process.
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47. A Sample of Grounded
Theory Interview Questions
about a Life Change
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48. Initial Open-ended Questions
1. Tell me about what happened [or how you came to ___________]?
2. When, if at all, did you first experience___________ [or notice ___________]?
3. [If so,] what was it like? If you recall, what were you thinking then? How did
you happen to ___________? Who, if anyone, influenced your actions? Tell me
about how he/she/they influenced you.
4. Could you describe the events that led up to ___________ [or preceded
___________]?
5. What contributed to ___________?
6. What was going on in your life then? How would you describe how you viewed
___________before ___________ happened? How, if at all, has your view of
___________ changed?
7. How would you describe the person you were then?
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49. Intermediate Questions
1. What, if anything, did you know about ___________?
2. Could you tell me about your thoughts and feelings when you learned about
___________?
3. What happened next?
4. Who, if anyone, was involved? When was that? How were they involved?
5. If you recall, could you tell me about how you learned to handle ___________?
6. How, if at all, have your thoughts and feelings about ___________ changed
since ___________?
7. What positive changes have occurred in your life (or ___________) since
___________?
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50. Intermediate Questions
8. What negative changes, if any, have occurred in your life (or ___________) since ___________?
9. Tell me how you go about ___________. What do you do?
10. Could you describe a typical day for you when you are ___________? (probe for different
times). Now tell me about a typical day when you are ___________.
11. Would you tell me how you would describe the person you are now? What most contributed to
this change [or continuity]?
12. As you look back on ___________, are there any other events that stand out in your mind?
Could you describe [each one] it? How did this event affect what happened? How did you
respond to ___________ [the event; the resulting situations ]?
13. Could I ask you to describe the most important lessons you learned through experiencing
___________?
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51. Intermediate Questions
14. Where do you see yourself in two years [five years, ten years, as
appropriate]? Describe the person you hope to be then. How would you
compare the person you hope to be and the person you see yourself as
now?
15. What helps you to manage ___________? What problems might you
encounter? Could you tell me the sources of these problems?
16. Who has been the most helpful to you during this time? How has he/she
been helpful?
17. Has any organization been helpful? What did ___________ help you
with? How has it been helpful?
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52. Ending Questions
1. What do you think are the most important ways to ________? How did you discover
[or create] them? How has your experience before ___________ affected and how
you handled ___________?
2. Could you tell me about how your views [and/or actions, depending on the topic and
preceding responses] may have changed since you have ___________?
3. How have you grown as a person since ___________? Tell me about the strengths
that you discovered or developed through ___________. [If appropriate] What do you
most value about yourself now? What do others most value in you?
4. After having these experiences, what advice would you give to someone who has just
discovered that he or she ___________?
5. Is there something that you might not have thought about before that occurred to you
during this interview?
6. Is there something else you think I should know to understand ___________ better?
7. Is there anything you would like to ask me?
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53. • These questions overlap to allow the interviewer to return to an
earlier thread to gain more information, or to winnow unnecessary
or potentially uncomfortable questions.
• Using a recorder allows you to give full attention to your research
participant, with steady eye contact, and to obtain detailed data.
• Jotting down key points during the interview helps as long as it does
not distract you or your participant.
• Your memo remind you to return to these points and suggest how to
frame follow - up questions
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54. • You may need to ask more ending questions if the research
participant broaches sensitive topics late in the interview process.
• The additional questions help you to impart a sense of completion of
the interview.
• After designing your guide for the open - ended questions, think about
the informational background questions you need to ask for this
study.
• Designing these questions later will help you tailor them for your topic
so that the requested information leads smoothly to the subsequent
open - ended questions.
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55. • Before asking your question say this sentence:
• I don’t know if this is an appropriate question or not, but…
• I feel like maybe all these questions are too personal. You can tell me
to shut up anytime you want.
• Could I ask you?
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56. • Intensive interviewing does mean improvising.
• You need to be sensitive to how your research participant responds
to the questions.
• Asking an awkward or intrusive question during a tense or sad moment
disrupts the tone and flow of the interview, and you may seem
disrespectful as well.
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57. • Research participants often expect their interviewers to ask questions
that invite reflections about the topic.
• Rather than uttering ‘uh huh’s’ or just nodding as if meanings are
automatically shared, an interviewer might ask,
• ‘That’s interesting, can you tell me more about it?’ or ‘Would you
tell me how you define it, so I have it in your words?’
• In your role as an interviewer, your comments and questions can help
the research participant to articulate his or her intentions and
meanings.
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58. • As the interview proceeds, you may request clarifying details to
obtain accurate information and to learn about the research
participant’s experiences and reflections.
• Unlike ordinary conversation, an interviewer can shift the
conversation and follow hunches.
• An interview goes beneath the surface of ordinary conversation and
examines earlier events, views, and feelings afresh.
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59. • Intensive interviews allow an interviewer to:
1. Ask for an in-depth description of the studied experience(s)
2. Stop to explore a statement or topic
3. Request more detail or explanation
4. Ask about the participant’s thoughts, feelings, and actions
5. Keep the participant on the subject
6. Come back to an earlier point
7. Restate the participant’s point to check for accuracy
8. Slow or quicken the pace
9. Shift the immediate topic
10. Validate the participant’s humanity, perspective, or action
11. Use observational and social skills to further the discussion
12. Respect the participant and express appreciation for his or her participation.
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60. • Intensive interviews allow research participants to:
1. Break silences and express their views
2. Tell their stories and to give them a coherent frame
3. Reflect on earlier events
4. Be experts
5. Choose what to tell and how to tell it
6. Share significant experiences and teach the interviewer how to interpret them
7. Express thoughts and feelings disallowed in other relationships and settings
8. Gain a new perspective on past and present events
9. Receive affirmation and understanding.
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61. lists guidelines for conducting intensive
interviews
• DO
1.Listen, listen, and listen some more.
2.Try to understand the described events, beliefs, and feelings from your
research participant’s point of view, not your own.
3.Aim to be empathetic and supportive.
4.Build trust.
5. Encourage your research participant to state things in his or her own terms.
6.Let the participant explore a question before you ask more specific probes.
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62. lists guidelines for conducting intensive
interviews
7. Ask the participant to elaborate, clarify, or give examples of his or her views.
8. Be sensitive to the participant’s non-verbal responses to you and your questions.
9. Revise a question that doesn’t work.
10. Be willing to take time for unanticipated issues that might come up.
11. Leave the participant feeling positive about the interview experience and about self.
12. Express your appreciation for the opportunity to talk with (and, perhaps, get to
know) him or her.
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63. • DON’T
1. Interrupt.
2. Correct the research participant about his or her views, experiences, or
feelings.
3. Interrogate or confront.
4. Rely on ‘do you’ and ‘did you’ probes. (These questions elicit ‘yes’ or ‘no’
responses, rather than information and reflections.)
5. Ask ‘why’ questions. (‘Why’ questions are generally taken as hostile
challenges in numerous cultures. Instead, phrase questions in these ways:
‘Tell me about …,’ ‘Could you tell me more about …,’ ‘How did …, ‘
‘What was …?’)
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64. • Ask loaded questions. (Try to frame questions, even follow-up questions, in
neutral terms.)
• Expect your research participants to answer questions that you would be
unwilling to answer.
• Take an authoritarian stance in the interview. (It is a privilege to share someone’s
private views and personal experience – establish equality, not authority.)
• Ignore or gloss over what the participant wishes to talk about. Be willing to take
more time with him or her, if need be.
• Forget to follow up and thus overlook clarifying points and/or asking for further
thoughts and information.
• Truncate the interview to get it over ‘on time.’
• Leave when the participant seems distressed.
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65. • In addition to the dynamics of power and professional status, gender,
race, and age can affect the direction and content of interviews.
• The social locations of both the interviewer and the interviewee matter.
• How they matter depends on the topic, interview participants’
experience with this topic, their relative willingness to be interviewed,
and their preconceptions about the interview and impressions of the
interviewer.
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66. • differences between interviewer and research respondent in race, class,
gender, age, and ideologies may affect what happens during the
interview.
• Such differences can arise in ambiguous and troubling ways during the
interview, particularly when we consider the confluence of the
interview topic, context, and immediate interaction
• The context of the interview and the credibility of the researcher
affect interviewing across racial lines .
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67. Problems, Prospects, and
Strengths of Interviewing
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68. • Numerous criticisms attack the aims and assumptions underlying
research interviewing.
• A number of their criticisms and those who follow them turn on
notions of accuracy.
• Interviews consist of retrospective narratives. What people say may
not be what they do, have done, and would do in the future.
• Interviews are performances that research participants give for
particular purposes.
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69. • Thus the critics warn researchers not to assume that interviews forge
direct links to authentic experience and immediate disclosure of the
research participant " s private self.
• It may leave out many people and be limited to specific social classes
and cultures.
• Whether participants recount their concerns without interruption or
researchers request specific information , the result is a construction -
or reconstruction - of a reality .
• call for rejection of " untheorized and uncritical endorsement of
personal narratives
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70. • Other critics develop typologies that label research interviewing with such
terms as " emotionalism , " " romanticism , " " neopositivism , " " revised
neopositivism " and apply them as though they represent discrete entities.
• Some of the criticisms lament the lack of use of ethnography or
conversational analysis in natural settings.
• A common criticism of interviews is that they are tainted by the participants
" subjectivity , and therefore are suspect , particularly when the researcher
accepts the participant " s disclosures at face value.
• Researchers can be drawn into an inauthentic collusion with their
participants , with an outcome of producing useless interviews .
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71. Interviewing in Grounded
Theory Studies
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72. • learning the participant’s words and meanings; and exploring the
researcher’s areas of emerging theoretical interest when a participant
brings them up.
• Intensive interviewing serves as a way of opening inquiry and as a tool
for advancing our theoretical analyses.
• Intensive interviewing and grounded theory fit together well as
complementary data collection and analysis methods .
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73. • When we engage in theoretical sampling, we may assume a more
active role in the interview and ask more direct questions than in
earlier interviews.
• Thus, I offer suggestions about ways to pursue theoretical interests
while remaining respectful of our participants.
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74. Why Intensive Interviewing Fits
Grounded Theory
• Both grounded theory methods and intensive interviewing are:
1. Open-ended yet directed
2. Shaped yet emergent
3. Paced yet unrestricted.
• Researchers adopt intensive interviewing precisely because it
facilitates conducting an open-ended, in-depth exploration of an area
in which the interviewee has substantial experience.
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75. • Intensive interviewing focuses the topic while providing the interactive
space and time to enable the research participant’s views and
insights to emerge .
• Any interviewer assumes more direct control over the construction of
data than most other qualitative methods allow .
• This combination of focused attention and open - ended inquiry in
intensive interviewing mirrors grounded theory analysis .
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76. • An intensive interview may involve a range of responses and
discourses, including a person’s concerns at the moment, justifications
of past actions, and measured reflections.
• In turn, responses and discourses flow from the research participant’s
multiple identities and social connections.
• During an interview, the participant’s responses may echo a shared
discourse tied to one or more identities. Yet as an emergent event, an
interview conversation may elicit the participant’s reappraisal of a
taken-for-granted discourse and its social foundations.
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77. • Discourses accomplish things.
• People do not only invoke them to claim explain, and maintain, or
constrain viewpoints and actions, but also to define and understand
what's happening in their worlds.
• Thus, the discourses serve goals but not all of these goals are strategic.
• Interviews offer one way of eliciting discourses, which may be
multiple, fragmented and contradictory as well as coherent and
consistent.
• And research participants can use interviews to find, piece together,
or reconstruct a discourse to make sense of their situation.
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78. • The flexibility of intensive interviewing permits interviewers to
discover discourses and to pursue ideas and issues immediately that
emerge during the interview.
• Grounded theory methods and intensive interviewing are similar in the
type of flexibility on which they depend.
• From the beginning of our research, we grounded theorists aim to
learn what is happening.
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79. • Our attempts to learn help us to correct tendencies to follow
preconceived notions about what is happening in the field.
• In addition to picking up and pursuing themes in interviews, we look
for ideas through studying our data and then, return to the field and
gather focused data to answer analytic questions and to fill
conceptual gaps.
• Thus, the combination of flexibility and control inherent in intensive
interviewing techniques fits grounded theory strategies for increasing
the analytic incisiveness of the resultant analysis
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80. • Clearly, grounded theorists need to balance hearing the participant’s
story in its fullness with searching for the analytic properties and
implications of major processes.
• Placing arbitrary limits on the length of an interview can, however,
negate researchers’ best intentions.
• Arbitrary time limits can stifle a story or curtail possibilities for
analytic exploration.
• Achieving a balance between story and analysis becomes particularly
problematic when researchers combine narrative interviewing and
grounded theory strategies, as many researchers do.
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81. Pursuing Theory
• You have two overall objectives for interviewing: attending to your
research participants and constructing theoretical analyses.
• Accomplishing both objectives might require either more than one
interview or building additional carefully constructed and focused
questions into later interviews.
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82. • The form and content of your interviews demand careful assessment
throughout your study .
• Your project and purpose will likely shift or change as you proceed .
• If you take your grounded theory project into theory construction , four
theoretical concerns affect which data you seek and how you collect
them :
• theoretical plausibility
• Direction
• Centrality
• Adequacy 09/12/2018

83. • These theoretical concerns about data collection supersede interviewing.
• Grounded theory studies rely on collecting data to advance the theoretical
analysis.
• Thus, obtaining data that helps you construct theoretical plausibility, direction,
centrality, and adequacy is important in whatever form of data collection you
use.
• Interviewing gives you more control over generating data than in most other
forms of qualitative data gathering.
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84. • Should you aim to construct theory, these four theoretical concerns
come into play.
• I categorize them here to offer a language for developing theory and to
draw your attention to the significance of theoretical thinking in
grounded theory, not to impose a set of external criteria to apply to
your study.
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85. 09/12/2018

86. • the theoretical plausibility of your idea arises early in the research,
and soon this idea gains theoretical centrality and gives your work
theoretical direction.
• The extent to which it has theoretical adequacy becomes evident
through grappling with it in your comparative analysis. Many of us
may view key interview statements as theoretically plausible.
• However, we may not define the theoretical centrality and direction of
the study itself until we have done considerable coding and memo-
writing.
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87. • When developing a grounded theory from interviews, theoretical
plausibility trumps the accuracy to which many qualitative researchers
aspire.
• But ‘accuracy’ may be significant.
• Two points concerning accuracy are at issue here.
• First, from a grounded theory perspective, collecting a substantial
amount of data offsets the negative effects of several misleading
accounts and thus reduces the likelihood of the researcher making
misleading claims or writing a superficial analysis.
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88. • Grounded theory aims to make patterns visible and understandable.
Gathering data with broad and deep coverage of your emerging
categories strengthens both the precision and theoretical plausibility of
your analysis.
• Data you obtain through the iterative process of grounded theory alerts
you to limited, misleading, or fabricated accounts.
• Such approaches to data collection will help you define the range and
types of variation occurring in your data.
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89. • Second, you might view some research participants as offering
inaccurate, embellished, minimalist, or deceptive accounts. Yet these
accounts can still give you important data about these participants, their
situations, and the theoretical range of empirical possibilities.
• I adopted the category of ‘creating fictional identities’ for people with
chronic illnesses whose self-presentations no longer fit their lives. I found
that these participants constructed fictional identities to maintain
continuity with the past, not to manipulate or lie. The past beckons when
one can no longer construct a valued identity in the present.
• In addition, my data on chronic illness and disability has long shown that
experience can change faster than self-concepts.
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90. • Third , be open to what you hear , see , and learn in an interview .
• Specific data may not recur but might instead represent a tacit
recurring pattern that went unmarked and , likely , heretofore unnoted .
• Occasionally, someone will say something that captures and
crystallizes what other people indicated in earlier interviews.
• Here one fragment of data gains theoretical plausibility precisely
because it provides a way of understanding many more situations you
have encountered, including both statements and silences.
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91. • As you conduct and analyze your interviews, the theoretical direction
of your study will begin to emerge.
• Some interview responses stand out; other interview statements cluster,
which becomes apparent as you code and write memos.
• Hence, patterns emerge and begin to shape your analysis.
• These patterns inform what you aim to accomplish in subsequent
interviews and prompt you to think about how you will accomplish it.
• You may rethink what you seek in an interview, which questions you
ask, and when and how you ask them. In short, your interview guide
evolves with your study.
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92. • Similarly, as you develop a theoretical direction, the theoretical
centrality of certain ideas and areas of inquiry leads you to pursue
them.
• You may decide to drop less compelling lines of inquiry in your data
and nascent analysis. By this time, you will direct parts of your
interviews to focusing on your main codes and tentative categories.
• Finally, the content of your later interviews will include questions that
help you assess the theoretical adequacy of your categories.
• Theoretical adequacy gets at the core of theoretical sampling.
• The purpose of theoretical sampling is to make your theoretical
categories robust.
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93. • Theoretical concerns may affect the amount of time you spend with
interview participants and the content you cover .
• With some research participants, a quick conversation about their
experience suffices for obtaining data to clarify a theoretical point .
Talking with other participants may take more time.
• If you can only interview each person once , then build more questions
into the interview conversation as you proceed to check your emerging
theoretical categories.
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94. Interviewing in
Theoretical Sampling
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95. Interviewing in Theoretical Sampling
• The iterative process of grounded theory often brings researchers back
to research participants whom they have already interviewed.
• Alternatively, we include new lines of inquiry in later interviews that
reflect our developing analyses.
• When we construct a tentative category from our interviews, we often
find it to be intriguing but incomplete.
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96. Interviewing in Theoretical Sampling
• Have we identified the properties of the category?
• Do we need greater clarity on the conditions under which the category
illuminates the empirical world – and when it no longer fits?
• Might we need to ascertain how and to what extent it compares with
another category we have developed?
• Such questions take us back to seeking data for answers.
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97. • Theoretical sensitivity can also turn an unexpected moment during
an interview into an occasion for theoretical development.
• Thus , opportunities for theoretical sampling may occur without
being planned in advance.
• Unlike initial formal interview, however, ask direct questions and
focus them on the areas for which get more data.
• The focused nature of theoretical sampling sometimes can lead to
asking more direct questions than earlier.
• Thus interview participants may be brought into the grounded
theorist’s analytic questions in similar ways to key informants in
ethnographic research.
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98. • When using interviews for theoretical sampling, researchers need to be
attentive to the kind of interactional space their approach and questions
could create.
• That means building a context and pacing before asking difficult or
possibly intrusive questions.
• Asking a participant to explain why he or she took a particular stance or
engaged in specific actions will likely incite defensive moves.
• Thus ‘how’ questions work better when your theoretical sampling touches
on sensitive areas or undercuts taken-for-granted understandings.
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99. How Many Interviews?
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100. • The question of how many interviews has special importance in:
1. View of the theory construction goal in grounded theory
2. The emphasis on generalization, particularly among objectivist
grounded theorists.
• When novices ask how many interviews they need, their question
likely rests on three presuppositions.
• First, the question presupposes that the number of interviews answers a
researcher’s concern about performance, whether this concern is about
meeting barely adequate, credible, or exemplary standards.
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101. • Second, the question presupposes that experts can specify a concrete
number of interviews.
• Third, it presupposes that they would agree on the same concrete
number.
• All three presuppositions are problematic.
• Forming any answer to the question is more complex than it seems
and raises a series of related questions.
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102. • An answer based primarily on the topic, research purpose,
disciplinary traditions, institutional human subjects’ reviews, or
the researcher’s professional goals does not suffice, although such
concerns figure in planning an interview research project.
• In qualitative research, a standard answer to the question of how many
interviews is that it depends on your research purpose. This question
holds significance for grounded theorists, too.
• The number of interviews depends on the analytic level to which the
researcher aspires as well as these purposes.
• When researchers pursue straightforward research questions to resolve
problems in local practice in applied fields, a small number of
interviews may be enough.
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103. • Some researcher attempted to answer the question about how many
interviews researchers needed by conducting an experiment using
their codebooks from an earlier qualitative interview study.
• They correctly observed that researchers held fuzzy, contradictory
criteria for saturating concepts.
• In my view, however, they incorrectly turned away from saturating
emergent categories and concepts, as is consistent with grounded
theory practice.
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104. • In their quest to establish how many interviews researchers need, Guest
et al. aimed to saturate data, not categories.
• Their approach stands in contrast to the iterative, emergent strategies of
grounded theory.
• Saturating data differs from saturating the researcher’s emergent
categories and concepts and requires much less engagement with data.
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105. • The following guidelines may help you decide how many interviews
you need.
• Increase your number of interviews when you:
1. pursue a controversial topic
2. anticipate or discover surprising or provocative findings
3. construct complex conceptual analyses
4. use interviewing as your only source of data
5. seek professional credibility.
• In short, my advice is to learn what constitutes excellence rather than
adequacy in your field – and beyond, if your project portends of having
larger import – and conduct as many interviews as needed to achieve it.
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106. thanks
• Any questions?
• Sajjad.lotfi@yahoo.com
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