The Long Interview

by Grant McCracken

The Long Interview provides a systematic guide to the theory and methods of the long qualitative interview or intensive interviewing. It gives a clear explanation of one of the most powerful tools of the qualitative researcher. The volume begins with a general overview of the character and purpose of qualitative inquiry and a review of key issues. The author outlines the four steps of the long qualitative interview and how to judge quality. He then offers practical advice for those who commission and administer this research, including sample questionnaires and budgets to help readers design their own. The author introduces key theoretical and methodological issues, various research strategies, and a simple four-stage model of inquiry, from the design of an open-ended questionnaire to the write up of results.

Genres: Nonfiction, Research, Anthropology

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1988

About the author

I'm an anthropologist, born in Canada, now living in, and studying, the US. I divide my life into two halves. One is the writing half. The other is for clients: Netflix, the Ford Foundation, the White House, among others. My new book, out in late December from Simon and Schuster is called The New Honor Code.

Reviews

[Bucket · Rating 4 out of 5]

The steps of the long qualitative interview. This starts with the literature review, then a cultural review of you own thoughts, assumptions, and practices on the topic. Then you construct a questionnaire that begins with grand-tour questions and continues with prompts to ensure all areas are covered as nondirectively as possible. During the interview, the atmosphere should be safe and and the interviewer agreeable. Analysis has five steps that gradually move from specifics to general. Finally, the book goes over steps to ensure quality and for writing up the results.

This book is pretty old (1988) but still really helpful and relevant for the qualitative interview novice who doesn't have fancy textual analysis software or a team of graduate students. Just ignore the parts that talk about computers. I was especially interested in the detailed description of interview data analysis. I'm interested to try it out, and see how it goes in practice. Overall, a quick read and well worth it for anyone about to take on a qualitative interview research project for the first time.

Themes: research, textbook, social science

[Robert Bogue]

It’s easy to get wrapped up in big data, AI, and quantitative approaches to research and forget that there’s another dimension to research that is just as important as – if not more important than – the numbers that we seem to be driven by. The Long Interview (part of the Qualitative Research Methods Series) is one approach to qualitative research that can provide a semi-structured approach leading to important answers.

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[Rukhsar (rukhsandbooks) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but the long winded metaphors got annoying after awhile (though they were much liked at first)

[Jamie Showrank · Rating 4 out of 5]

useful refresher on qualitative research. Lots of possibilities to map to design thinking interviews