Doing Interview Research

Uwe Flick is Senior Professor of Qualitative Research in Social Science and Education at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is a trained psychologist and sociologist and received his PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1988 and his Habilitation from the Technical University Berlin in 1994. He has been Professor of Qualitative Research at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, Germany and at the University of Vienna, Austria. Previously, he was Adjunct Professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Canada; a Lecturer in research methodology at the Freie Universität Berlin; a Reader and Assistant Professor in qualitative methods and evaluation at the Technical University Berlin; and Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Medical Sociology at the Hannover Medical School. He has held visiting appointments at the London School of Economics, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Cambridge University (UK), Memorial University of St John’s (Canada), University of Lisbon (Portugal), Institute of Higher Studies in Vienna, in Italy and Sweden, and the School of Psychology at Massey University, Auckland (New Zealand). His main research interests are qualitative methods, social representations in the fields of individual and public health, vulnerability in fields like youth homelessness or (forced) migration and chronical illness in everyday live. He is the editor of The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Design (2 Vols.; Sage 2022). The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis (Sage, 2014), The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit (Sage, 2nd edn, 2018), A Companion to Qualitative Research (Sage, 2004), Psychology of the Social (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His most recent publications are the seventh edition of An Introduction to Qualitative Research (Sage, 2023), Doing Grounded Theory (Sage, 2018), Doing Triangulation and Mixed Methods (Sage, 2018), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection (editor, Sage, 2018), the third edition of Introducing Research Methodology – Thinking Your Way through Your Research Project (Sage, 2020) and Doing Interview Research - The Essential How To Guide (Sage 2022). In 2019, Uwe Flick received the Lifetime Award in Qualitative Inquiry at the 15th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.

Part I: How to Understand Interview Research
Chapter 1: What Doing Interview Research Means
Chapter 2: Theories and Epistemologies of Interviewing
Chapter 3: When to Choose Interviews as a Research Method
Chapter 4: Methods and Formats of Interviewing
Part II: Designing Interview Research
Chapter 5: Planning and Designing Interview Research
Chapter 6: How Many Interviewees?: Sampling and Saturation
Chapter 7: Accessing and Recruiting Participants
Part III: How to Conduct Interviews
Chapter 8: How to Respect and Protect: Ethics of Interviewing
Chapter 9: Semi-structured Interviews: Working with Questions and Answers
Chapter 10: Interviewing Experts and Elites
Chapter 11: Integrating Narratives in Interviews: Episodic Interviews
Part IV: Doing Interviews in Contexts
Chapter 12: How to Work with Life Histories: Narrative Interviews
Chapter 13: Working with Focus Groups as Interviews
Chapter 14: Ask in the Field: Ethnographic and Mobile Interviewing
Chapter 15: Doing Online Interviews
Part V: How to Work with Interview Data
Chapter 16: Working with Interview Data
Chapter 17: Credibility and Transparency: Quality and Writing in Interview Research
Chapter 18: From Interviewing to an Inner View: Critiques and Reflexivity