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When the person of the researcher becomes the main research instrument, the competence and craftsmanship - the skills, sensitivity and knowledge - of the researcher become essential for the quality of the knowledge produced ([8] Kvale and Brinkmann, 2008, p. 84).
1 Introduction
Many novice researchers in business and management and other areas of the social sciences decide upon interviews as a means of collecting data. By interviews, we mean face-to-face verbal exchanges in which one person, the interviewer, attempts to acquire information from and gain an understanding of another person, the interviewee. The interviewee may be invited to talk about their own attitudes, beliefs, behaviours or experiences, as a citizen, user, consumer or employee. In research in organizational studies, management and business, the interviewee may be selected either as an individual or as a representative of their team, organization, or industry.
If you are new to research, and possibly engaging in research to complete a thesis or other small scale project, and are planning to use interviews as a research method, this article is written for you - in other words it helps you to think about the decisions that you need to make in designing interviews, and supports you with conducting the interviews, and analyzing the data that you gather from interviews. Along the way it provides answers to some of the questions that new researchers frequently ask. Whilst its emphasis is on helping you to do rigorous research and to succeed and maybe even excel, it is also pragmatic in recognizing the time and other constraints often experienced by new researchers.
There are many other sources of advice on conducting research interviews which you could also consult. First, there are many research methods textbooks that offer a basic grounding in research methods ([2] Bryman and Bell, 2003; [5] Cresswell, 2008; [6] Easterby-Smith et al. , 2008; [13] Saunders et al. , 2009); since these books have a wide scope, they only provide limited information on research interviews as a data collection method. Amongst such texts there are some that deal specifically with qualitative methods - these often give useful details on the use of interviews with different research strategies, such as ethnography and case study ([4] Cresswell, 2007; [9] Maxwell, 2005;...