Introduction to In-Depth Interviews: A Short Course

In-depth interviews play a vital role in the social sciences and applied research. Interviews offer a powerful tool to understand people’s accounts, experiences, narratives, and attitudes. While they are commonly a stand-alone research method, in-depth interviews are also frequently combined with surveys, participant observation, historical documents, and other data types.

While in-depth interviews are widespread, designing and executing an interview-based study successfully can be both challenging and rewarding. This course aims to help maximize the rewards, while providing resources to address the challenges.

Concretely, the course will equip you with skills necessary to:

1. Design compelling interview studies.
2. Conduct interviews face-to-face or remotely.
3. Analyze the data.
4. Present the findings.

The course is organized around the life of an in-depth interview study, covering each of the key stages of a project. We discuss the reasons to use interview methods (and how to justify them), how to design an interview guide, ways to recruit participants, how to successfully complete an interview (and how to manage difficulties), ways of making sense of data, and how to integrate findings into research products such as articles, books, and reports. We will also touch on topics such as multi-participant interviews, technology use, and ways interviews can be integrated into mixed-methods studies.

Starting March 7, we are offering this seminar as a 3-day synchronous*, livestream workshop held via the free video-conferencing software Zoom. Each day will consist of two lecture sessions which include hands-on exercises, separated by a 1-hour break. You are encouraged to join the lecture live, but will have the opportunity to view the recorded session later in the day if you are unable to attend at the scheduled time.

*We understand that finding time to participate in livestream courses can be difficult. If you prefer, you may take all or part of the course asynchronously. The video recordings will be made available within 24 hours of each session and will be accessible for four weeks after the seminar, meaning that you will get all of the class content and discussions even if you cannot participate synchronously.

Closed captioning is available for all live and recorded sessions. Live captions can be translated to a variety of languages including Spanish, Korean, and Italian. For more information, click here.