The interview is a purposive conversation in which one party asks and records and the other answers, undertaken to obtain information about the respondent's behaviour, circumstances, opinions or biography. What separates it from ordinary talk is not formality but asymmetry of purpose: the exchange is initiated, steered and later analysed by the researcher. What separates it from the self-administered questionnaire is the presence of a human intermediary — a presence that is simultaneously the technique's greatest asset and its most persistent source of error.

Interviews are best understood along a continuum of standardisation. At one end the structured interview uses a fixed schedule — identical questions in identical order and wording, mostly closed-ended — so that answers are comparable across thousands of respondents; it is the workhorse of the survey. In the middle the semi-structured interview works from a guide, a list of themes and core questions that the interviewer may reorder, rephrase and expand. At the far end the unstructured or in-depth interview begins from a single opening prompt and follows the respondent's own associations, and the life-history interview extends this across several sittings to reconstruct an entire biography, treating one life as a window onto a social structure.

Conducting the interview

Good interviewing is a craft with recognised moves. Funnelling proceeds from broad, easily answered questions to narrow and sensitive ones, so that rapport is established before the difficult ground is reached. Probing — a neutral follow-up, an echoed phrase, an expectant silence — extends a thin answer without suggesting its content; a leading probe destroys the data it collects. Sequencing must avoid question-order effects, where an earlier item frames the later answer.

Rapport must be built and then managed. Too little and the respondent gives guarded minimum answers; too much and the interviewer becomes a friend to whom one tells flattering stories. Recording poses a similar trade-off: audio recording plus full transcription preserves the exact language on which qualitative analysis depends, but a visible recorder can suppress precisely the candour it is meant to capture, so many fieldworkers rely on note-taking followed by immediate expansion. Ethically, the interview requires informed consent covering purpose, use and the right to withdraw, and normally anonymity through pseudonyms and the suppression of identifying detail — a serious difficulty in a small village where role alone identifies a person.

Interviewer effects in Indian fieldwork

The interviewer is never socially neutral, and in India the ascriptive markers are unusually legible. Caste is read from name, dress and speech within moments, and a Dalit respondent's account of untouchability will differ according to whether the questioner is perceived as upper caste. Class shows in vocabulary and manner and can convert an interview into a bureaucratic encounter in which the respondent answers as a supplicant before an official. Gender segregation means that male interviewers frequently cannot obtain private access to women, and that a husband or mother-in-law answers on a woman's behalf. Language adds a further layer: standard Hindi or English imposed on a dialect-speaking respondent narrows what can be said, and translation flattens idiom.

These conditions generate two characteristic distortions. Social desirability bias is the tendency to report the approved answer — that daughters are educated, that dowry was not given, that caste is not practised. Courtesy bias, well documented in South Asian survey work, is the tendency to give the answer the guest appears to want, since disagreeing with a visitor is discourteous. Both inflate agreement and both are worsened by an interviewer of visibly higher status. The remedies are partial: matched or locally recruited interviewers, training in neutral delivery, indirect and vignette questioning, and cross-checking against observation.

Strengths and limits against the questionnaire

Compared with a mailed or self-administered questionnaire, the interview reaches respondents who cannot read, secures far higher response rates, permits clarification of misunderstood items, allows the interviewer to observe the setting and the non-verbal response, and — in its looser forms — discovers meanings and categories the researcher had not anticipated. Its costs are equally clear: it is expensive in time, money and travel; it cannot be scaled to very large samples without teams whose consistency is hard to police; it sacrifices the anonymity that makes the questionnaire better for stigmatised behaviour; and it introduces interviewer variance, which is a threat to reliability. Loosely structured interviews yield rich material that is difficult to compare across cases, so standardisation buys comparability at the price of depth.

Ann Oakley's feminist critique attacks the orthodox prescription itself. The textbook interviewer is detached, deflects the respondent's questions and gives nothing in return; Oakley, interviewing women about childbirth, found this stance both practically unworkable and ethically indefensible, and argued for a reciprocal relationship in which the researcher answers questions and acknowledges shared circumstance. Her position reframes so-called bias as the constitutive condition of interviewing: data are co-produced, and the honest response is reflexive disclosure of the relationship rather than the pretence of a neutral instrument.

For the UPSC answer

Define the interview by its asymmetry of purpose and then lay out the continuum from structured schedule to life history, since the schedule–guide distinction is frequently the hinge of the question. Use interviewer effects as your analytical centre, illustrating with caste, gender and language in Indian fieldwork and naming social desirability and courtesy bias. Weigh the interview against the questionnaire on literacy, response rate, cost, scale, anonymity and reliability rather than asserting that one is superior. Close with Oakley, who converts a technical problem of bias into a theoretical claim that interview data are jointly produced — an argument that links the method back to interpretive sociology and reflexivity.

References & further reading

  1. Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms. In H. Roberts (ed.), Doing Feminist Research. Routledge.
  2. Kvale, S. (1996). InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Sage.
  3. Bryman, A. (2012). Social Research Methods. Oxford University Press.
  4. Young, P. V. (1966). Scientific Social Surveys and Research. Prentice-Hall.
  5. Bertaux, D. (ed.) (1981). Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences. Sage.
  6. Beteille, A. and Madan, T. N. (eds.) (1975). Encounter and Experience: Personal Accounts of Fieldwork. Vikas.