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Preface

Learning about the world through qualitative interviews has extended our intellectual and emotional reach, and by turns, roused and satisfied our intellectual curiosity. Qualitative interviews have operated
for us like night-vision goggles, permitting us to see that which is not ordinarily on view and examine that which is often looked at but seldom seen. Interviewing has enabled us to jump social barriers, of
race, income, national origin, sex, and occupation. We have examined foreign-aid programs and probation offices, talked to community organizers rebuilding inner-city neighborhoods and to federal
officials responding to threats of agency termination. We are continually absorbed by the sense of discovery and pleased by the depth, thoroughness, and credibility of the final reports. In Qualitative
Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data we hope to transmit not only a set of techniques but also some of the exhilaration we have experienced in doing our research.

You should use the model we present—choosing interviewees who are knowledgeable about the research problem, listening carefully to what they tell you, and asking additional questions about their
answers until you really understand them—whenever you need to learn about something in depth from another person's point of view. We call this approach responsive interviewing because the researcher
is responding to and then asking further questions about what he or she hears from the interviewees rather than relying on predetermined questions. We describe the philosophy that underlies the model,
underscoring the importance of working with interviewees as partners rather than treating them as objects of research.

Depth interviewing contrasts sharply with quantitative research. Many of our colleagues believe that only statistical techniques are rigorous and dismiss all forms of qualitative research as mere
storytelling, useful at best as prologue to a statistical study. These colleagues have little idea of the richness of the findings from depth interviews or of the careful standards, the built-in credibility checks,
and the systematic analysis that guide depth interviewing. Rather than stripping away context, needlessly reducing people's experiences to numbers, responsive interviewing approaches a problem in its
natural setting, explores related and contradictory themes and concepts, and points out the missing and the subtle, as well as the explicit and the obvious.

Qualitative Interviewing distills our experiences from careers spent in the field, supplementing our experiences with lessons drawn from a wide array of published research, as well as examples supplied by
professional colleagues. In particular, Professor Jim Thomas shared with us his work on criminals and Professor Steven Maynard Moody sent us copies of his interviews with street-level bureaucrats.

Although we know our approach works, we are not suggesting a new orthodoxy that must be practiced exactly as presented. Instead, we are offering a way for novice researchers to begin, fully expecting
that they will modify our model based on their own experiences.

Modifications to the Second Edition

In this second edition, we have updated the examples and clarified topics that our students found difficult, particularly, how to choose a topic, how to recognize concepts and themes that suggest follow-up
questions and then guide the analysis, and how to create an overall structure for the interview. We discuss in detail how responsive interviews are built around main questions, which address the overall
research problem; probes, which help manage the conversation and elicit detail; and follow-up questions, which explore and test out new ideas that emerge during the interviews. We emphasize how to
figure out and word follow-up questions meant to explore new concepts and themes.

We have expanded the discussion of computer techniques, explaining what you should and should not expect from your software. We have added material and explained more clearly how to analyze
interviews in ways that suggest new questions for subsequent interviews, how to resolve research puzzles, and how to theorize about the implications of the research findings. We have maintained the
distinction between topical and cultural interviews, but instead of discussing each in separate chapters, we have contrasted them throughout the text.

In this revision we show more explicitly that the stages of research—design, data gathering, and analysis—are intimately linked. We try to drive home the idea that researchers perform analysis throughout
their projects, not just at the end, so that as they learn more, they can modify both the research problem they are exploring and the questions they ask. In responsive interviewing, ongoing analysis
necessitates continual design as researchers figure out how to explore new information they discover.

We emphasize the importance of developing and maintaining a partnership with the interviewees and stress the necessity of behaving in an ethical way. Since the first edition, universities and government
agencies have strengthened their institutional review boards (IRBs), which are set up to ensure that research subjects are not harmed. We discuss how to work out proposals that will meet the requirements
of IRBs while maintaining the flexibility needed for qualitative interviewing.

Though we have made numerous changes in this edition, our underlying approach to research remains the same: Find interviewees who know about your research problem from first-hand experience or
direct knowledge, ask them questions about their experiences and knowledge, and listen intently to their answers. Then keep questioning until you have a good, rich, and credible answer to your research
problem.

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