InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing

"I think the book is a fine job, coming ′′up close′′ to issues that are often avoided or left tacit, and as a consequence have become terra incognita to many qualitative researchers. More precisely, they do not even know that they do not know."

--Matthew B. Miles, Senior Research Associate, Center for Policy Research

"The book will have an immediate and very wide audience. It is a marvelous statement, very synthetic, very accessible, and so nicely interpretive."

--Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Interviewing is an essential tool in the repertoire of the qualitative researcher, and yet the intricate relationship between the "hows" and the "whys" of the interview process is not always easily understood. Steinar Kvale′s InterViews provides both theoretical underpinnings and practical aspects of the interview process. After examining the role of the interview in the research process, Kvale considers some of the key philosophical issues relating to interviewing: the interview as conversation, hermeneutics, phenomenology, concerns about ethics as well as validity, and postmodernism. Having laid out the framework, the author takes the reader through the seven stages of the interviewing process, from designing a study to writing it up.

Fundamental and essential, InterViews is written for students and professionals in qualitative and research methods, psychology, education research, nursing, social work, counseling, family studies, gerontology, evaluation, sociology, and anthropology.

Steinar Kvale (1938-2008) was professor of educational psychology and director of the Centre of Qualitative Research at the University of Aarhus, and adjunct faculty at Saybrook Institute, San Francisco. He was born in Norway and graduated from the University of Oslo. He continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg with an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship and was a visiting professor at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, and West Georgia University, Carrolton, and the University of Bergen. His long-term concern was with the implications of such continental philosophies as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and dialectics for psychology and education.