An interview is a conversation for the purpose of collecting information. Following the work of feminist sociologist, Ann Oakley (1981), the interview has been understood as a relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee, jointly producing knowledge, rather than an ‘objective’ exercise of extracting information from an interviewee or research participant.
There are two traditions in conducting interviews:
In practice, interviews can incorporate both functions, as they do in the GenUrb project.
Interviews are particularly useful as a feminist research method because they:
When we research the city interviews are used for two main purposes:
These two purposes are not incompatible but they do have different emphases and epistemologies.
Different types of interviews that are commonly used in qualitative research include:
Next, we will examine some of these different types of interviews in greater detail.
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