What is interviewing?

As expressed in the etymology of the word interviewing is a method of viewing into another person. The interview is about somebody else, and it is about learning something that we did not know about that person. This may seem trivial, but it has some important consequences:

1. That the interview is not necessarily efficient in telling us something about the interviewer. In fact, we would often like the interviewer to be much less present than the interviewed person.
2. That the interview is a highly structured form. Even though the interviewer may not seem present in the interview, it is the interviewer who has control of the interview. It is the interviewer who determines the subject for the interview and takes care of the progress of the interview, and it is the interviewer who is responsible for making the interview interesting.

 

John Sawatsky: the news interview

Putting together questions in the right way for an interview requires a lot of training: there is some preparation and there is a lot of practice to conducting a good interview. John Sawatsky is an expert on interviewing for media. Watch these short videos illustrating Sawatskys central points about questions:

• Anatomy of a question: John Sawatsky part 1
• Open, neutral, lean and sins: John Sawatsky part 2
• Method in action: John Sawatsky part 3

 

Stephen Schwartz: the feature interview

The feature producer Stephen Schwartz developed a unique approach to interviewing. His technique focused on how to revive a moment from the interviewed persons memory. In his “capture the moment” technique, what has come to be termed “the full Schwartz”, he invests all energy in painting vivid pictures from the interview persons memory.  The full Schwartz involves a dark room, candle lights and an interview person lying down. Read about the technique in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporations recent blog on Stephen Schwartz here.

 

The ethnographic interview.

Interviewing is also an important method in ethnographic research. James P. Spradley in The Etnographic Interview describe the technique in 12 steps. Basically the ethnographic technique is struggling with the paradox of the interview being a highly structured form controlled by the interviewer and at the same time being a form to dig into somebody else’s mind. For ethnography and anthropology it is of huge importance not to influence the collected material too much, so the ethnographic or semi-structured interview method incorporates techniques to ensure that the interviewer do not put words, expressions and ideas in the mouth of the interviewed person. 

The ethnographic method is clearly very different from the Full Schwartz, where the interviewer end the interviewed person collaborate to produce the most vivid version of the interviewed persons memory, yet the ethnographic interview is not that far from some other interview methods developed in feature production, e.g. the idea about the “fly on the wall”, where a reporter simply follows a person while practically always recording. The idea here is that the person portrayed at some point will stop thinking about the interviewer and just start acting as in ‘normal’ everyday life.

As illustrated there are many approaches to interviewing, and there are different roads to take in order to produce structures and interesting content from someone else's mouth and mind. For a project exploring the radio studio as a place Sandra Lori Petersen and I (Jacob Kreutzfeldt) combined semi structured interviews, field work, reportage and sound montage to uncover some of the semantic structures working in informants accounts of their experiences in radio studios. You can hear the “audio paper” that resulted from the project here.