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188 CHAPTER 8 Interviews and focus groups

8.2 PROS AND CONS OF INTERVIEWS

The ability to “go deep” is perhaps the strongest argument in favor of interviewing.
By asking questions that explore a wide range of concerns about a problem and giv-
ing interviewees the freedom to provide detailed responses, researchers can use in-
terviews to gather data that would otherwise be very hard to capture. Given a chance
to answer questions that encourage reflection and consideration, interviewees may
go on at great length, generating ideas and sharing insights that would have been lost
to surveys.
Like ethnography (Chapter 9) and other observational techniques, interviews can
be open-ended and exploratory. Although almost all interviews have specific ques-
tions that must be asked, interviews can be extremely flexible. Based on interviewee
responses, interviewers can choose to reorder questions or invent completely new
lines of inquiry on the fly. Opportunistic interviewing—taking an interesting idea
and running with it—can be particularly useful for increasing understanding.
The flip side of this compelling flexibility lies in the challenges of managing
potentially unbounded discussions. Interviews are much more difficult to conduct
than surveys. Interviewing is a skill that can take significant practice to develop.
Furthermore, it's hard work. Sitting with one interviewee (or a dozen focus group
participants) for an hour, listening carefully, taking notes, trying to decide which
comments to pursue with further questions, and trying to understand nonverbal reac-
tions all take substantial effort.
Higher effort requirements also limit interview-based studies to relatively small
numbers of participants. Surveys can easily be sent to dozens, if not hundreds, of po-
tential respondents who can complete them at their leisure. Interviews, however, are
much more limiting. If each interview is one hour long, someone on your research
staff team has to spend that hour with an interviewee. You're likely to find that your
personnel resources are the limiting factor: don't be surprised if you find that you
simply don't have the time to conduct all of the interviews that you were hoping for.
Analysis is also a major challenge. Transforming raw notes and recordings of
open-ended responses to broad questions can take a great deal of time—as much as
10 h for a single hour of audio recording (Robson, 2002). Deciding what is important
and what is not—separating the good from the bad—can be a challenge.
Interviews share some inherent shortcomings with surveys. As both involve data
collection that is separated from the task and context under consideration, they suffer
from problems of recall. As participants report on their perceptions of needs or expe-
riences, they are telling you what they remember. While this may provide some very
useful data, it is, by definition, one step removed from reality. If you ask a software
user which features they might need, the answers you get during an interview may be
very different from the answers that same person might provide while sitting in front
of a computer and actually using the tool in question.
To avoid these potential disconnects, you might consider combining your inter-
views with other techniques, such as observation—possibly during the interview ses-
sion. These observations will help you understand the relationship between what