Are you new to qualitative research or a bit rusty and in need of some inspiration? Are you doing a research project involving in-depth interviews? Are you nervous about carrying out your interviews? This book will help you complete your qualitative research project by providing a nuts and bolts introduction to interviewing. With coverage of ethics, preparation strategies and advice for handling the unexpected in the field, this handy guide will help you get to grips with the basics of interviewing before embarking on your research. While recognising that your research question and the context of your research will drive your approach to interviewing, this book provides practical advice often skipped in traditional methods textbooks. Written with the needs of social science students and those new to qualitative research in mind, the book will help you plan, prepare for, carry out and analyse your interviews.    

Product Description: Offering a theoretically-informed guide for researchers learning how to interview in the social sciences, this book provides a practical approach to interviewing, helping researchers to learn about themselves as interviewers in ways that will inform the design, conduct, analysis, and representation of interview data...read more

Product Description: Interviewing is used very widely in qualitative research, and takes many different forms. It is also a method that is constantly evolving, in response both to theoretical and technological developments. The authors present a clear and thorough guide to the use of interviews in contemporary qualitative research...read more

Product Description: The First Edition of InterViews has provided students and professionals in a wide variety of disciplines with the “whys” and “hows” of research interviewing, preparing students for learning interviewing by doing interviews and by studying examples of best practice...read more

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Product Description: By asking internationally respected scholars from a range of traditions in discourse studies to respond to the same interview material, this book reveals key differences in methodology and theoretical perspective. The use of interviews to explore attitudes towards race allow contributors to bring up sensitive issues regarding the development and interpretation of interviews on controversial topics...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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The social survey has become an essential tool in modern society, providing crucial measurements of social change, describing social life, and guiding government policy. But the validity of surveys is fragile and depends ultimately upon the accuracy of answers to survey questions. As our dependence on surveys grows, so too have questions about the accuracy of survey responses.Authored by a group of experts in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and survey research, Questions About Questions provides a broad review of the survey response problem. Examining the cognitive and social processes that influence the answers to questions, the book first takes up the problem of meaning and demonstrates that a respondent must share the survey researcher’s intended meaning of a question if the response is to be revealing and informative. The book then turns to an examination of memory. It provides a framework for understanding the processes that can introduce errors into retrospective reports, useful guidance on when those reports are more or less trustworthy, and investigates techniques for the improvement of such reports. Questions about the rigid standardization imposed on the survey interview receive a thorough airing as the authors show how traditional survey formats violate the usual norms of conversational behavior and potentially endanger the validity of the data collected.Synthesizing the work of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Cognition and Survey Research, Questions About Questions emphasizes the reciprocal gains to be achieved when insights and techniques from the cognitive sciences and survey research are exchanged."these chapters provide a good sense of the range of survey problems investigated by the cognitive movement, the methods and ideas it draws upon, and the results it has yielded." —American Journal of Sociology

Product Description: This text examines the problems of gaining co-operation on sample surveys and evaluates the tactics for optimizing response currently available. In this study what actually happens "on the doorstep" between interviewer and respondent is revealed, as interviewers tape recorded their interactions with the people approached for interview...read more

Product Description: Interviews are ubiquitous in modern society, and they play a crucial role in social scientific research. But, as Charles Briggs convincingly argues in this book, received interviewing techniques rest on fundamental misapprehensions about the nature both of the interview as a communicative event, and of the nature of the data that it produces...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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