Interviewing in educational research

This chapter is concerned ·with introducing open-ended interviews, in other words, interviews in which the intent is to understand informants on their own terms and how they make meaning of their own lives, experiences, and cognitive processes. The interviews discussed here contrast with surveys and tests, both of which can be administered in oral form but are usually highly structured both in content and method by the researcher. The survey is typically used to find par-ticular pieces of information or to determine the frequency of different responses in preset cate-gories. The test is designed to see whether a respondent has knowledge of particular facts or procedures. Similarly, participant observation and collection of naturally occurring conversation can entail collection of verbal data but the researcher mllst infer the participants ' meaning less directly than is possible through in-depth interviewing. The open-ended interview, often also called a qualitative interview, gives an informant the space to express meaning in his or her own words and to give direction to the interview process. Because the interview is an interactional relationship, both informant and interviewer are engaged in an ongoing process of maldng meaning (Kvale, 1996). Different interviewing strategies facilitate this process. The goals of this chapter are to giv ~ a novice interviewer an overview of th