Unstructured and Semistructured Interviewing

By S. Brinkmann. 2020

88 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This chapter gives an introduction to qualitative interviewing in its unstructured and semistructured forms. Initially, the human world is depicted as a conversational reality in which interviewing takes a central position as a research method. Interviewing is presented as a social practice that has a cultural history and that appears in a variety of formats in the 21st century. A number of distinctions are introduced, which are relevant when mapping the field of qualitative interviewing between different levels of structure, numbers of participants, media of interviewing, and interviewer styles. A more detailed exposition of semistructured lifeworld interviewing is offered because this is arguably the standard form of qualitative interviewing today.

Subfields: General Social Sciences, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85b3cfc1147f2d6c231586e4a7d8e94f06d58e74