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This article explores the relationship between the method of process tracing and the data collection technique of elite interviewing. The process tracing method has become an increasingly used and cited tool in qualitative research, a trend that has recently accelerated with the publication of Alexander George and Andrew Bennett's text (2005), Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. That book outlines and explores the process tracing method in detail, highlighting its advantages for exploring causal processes and analyzing complex decision-making. Yet while the book presents a rigorous and compelling account of the process tracing method and its critical importance to case study research, the value of the method itself remains contested in some quarters, and tiiere are aspects of George and Bennett's treatment of it that require further exploration.1
This article identifies one issue that has considerable relevance for process tracing, but that is under-explored in George and Bennett (2005)-the research tool of elite interviewing. Process tracing requires collecting large amounts of data, ideally from a wide range of sources. Yet George and Bennett concentrate largely on documentary research and generally refer to interviewing only in passing. This article draws together the disparate discussions of interviewing in George and Bennett (2005), and supplements them with insights from the wider literature on interview methods, and on elite interviewing in particular. The article focuses on three primary issues: first, the uses of interview data for the process tracing method; second, considerations of how to establish the evidentiary value of interview data; and finally, die implications that the process tracing method has for how researchers should approach sampling their interview subjects. In particular, the article argues for the use of non-probability sampling approaches to elite interviewing when utilizing the process tracing method.
As will be discussed further below, the goal of process tracing is to obtain information about well-defined and specific events and processes, and the most appropriate sampling procedures are thus those that identify the key political actors-those who have had the most involvement with the processes of interest. The aim is not to draw a representative sample of a larger population of political actors that can be used as the basis to make generalizations about the full population, but to draw a sample that...