Used by everyone from survey researchers to oral historians, the interview may be the most basic and essential field method in the qualitative researcher's toolkit. In this concise, student-friendly guide, Fontana and Prokos give a cogent introduction to the history, types, and methods of interviewing in the social sciences. They outline the range of ways in which interviews are conducted, both structured and unstructured, then provide instruction on conducting and interpreting interviews, and address ethical considerations in eliciting information from people. The authors also point to recent and future trends that will affect the use of this method. For researchers who need a primer and for students in methods courses or assigned fieldwork projects in other courses across the social sciences, this short, inexpensive volume is ideal.
About the Author: Andrea Fontana is Professor of Sociology and department chair at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. He has published articles on aging, leisure, theory, and postmodernism. He is the author of the Last Frontier: the Social Meaning of Growing Old, co-author of Social Problems, Sociologies of Everyday Life, and coeditor of The Existential Self in Society and Postmodernism and Social Inquiry. He is a former president of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and a former editor of the journal Symbolic Interaction. Among Fontana's last published essays are a deconstruction of the work of the painter Hieronymus Bosch, a performance/play about Farinelli, the castrato, an ethnographic narrative about land speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats, and a performance based on Six Feet Under. Fontana is currently working on a text, Death in America, for Polity Press.Anastasia H. Prokos is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She received her Ph.D. from Florida State University. Her primary research area is gender and work, which includes an emphasis on labor market inequalities as they relate to gender, race, and family. Most recently she has published papers on the earnings gap in science and engineering occupations in Gender & Society, and on gender and ethnoracial inequalities in employer-provided health insurance access and coverage in Sociological Inquiry. Prokos is currently expanding her research on health insurance disparities and continues to study gender and labor market inequality.