Interviews

Abstract

Interviewing is a means of engaging an individual in dialogue to reflect upon and share his or her life experience. For health humanities, this method accesses the lived reality of patients and healthcare providers. Asking people to share their personal narratives can allow for emic—from the subject’s perspective—and etic—from the researcher’s point of view—interpretation. Health humanities interviews consist of six steps: define the research question, design the interview, apply for Institutional Review Board approval, conduct the interviews, analyze the data, and distribute the findings. This chapter examines best practices for conducting interview studies including format (structured, unstructured, semi-structured), question type (closed- or open-ended), sampling (convenience, snowball), and notetaking. The author uses a study on collecting death histories to demonstrate this process and how to apply narrative, thematic, and frequency analyses.