The Social Relations of Intensive Interviewing

Abstract

The central question of this article is, What happens when interviewer and interviewee know, or come to know, one another, as they do in the intensive interview of qualitative research? The authors begin with the contradiction between the assumption of science that interview participants be strangers, on one hand, and the need for rapport in order to establish validity on the other. The authors construct a typology of the social relations in intensive interviewing: (1) the stranger dyad, in which unfamiliarity is assumed; (2) the web of relevance, in which interview participants know of one another at least indirectly; and (3) the web of group affiliation, in which participants are members of a primary group. For each type, different consequences of departures from strangeness for rapport and validity are explored. The authors conclude that although intensive interviews do produce valid data, the effects of familiarity appear problematic more often than not.