Speaker 1: So, in this module, I'm going to be talking about in-depth interviews, and I'm going to address the general question about what is an in-depth interview and why would we use it? What are the considerations in developing an in-depth interview and doing it well? An in-depth interview is an extended discussion with one or more people. Typically, it is very open-ended. It allows you to be flexible and adapt to what people tell you, and you can change your questions in order to get more information from people as the conversation evolves. Sometimes it can be more structured and looks more like a survey, but to be an in-depth interview, it tends to be slightly more open and allow for flexibility. Typically, people think about using in-depth interviews when their questions are exploratory. They want to understand something that there aren't too many theoretical explanations already. So an exploratory question is a question that you're just trying to get general information about. It can be explanatory, so maybe you've done some survey work, maybe you've done some analyses that give you a clue about what's going on, but in-depth interviews can give you more in-depth information about the questions that you want to answer. So often people want to know, how many in-depth interviews do we have to do in order to do them well? How many is enough? And that completely depends on the question that you're asking and who you would be asking them of. If you're doing in-depth interviews with people who represent a population, then often you want to be very clear in the same way that you would be to do a survey. You want to be very clear about what is the total sample, what is the total population that we need to sample from, and then select interviewees on characteristics that you need to be representative of. It could be gender, race, educational level, age, any of the various criteria that you would normally do a sampling frame for a survey. This can be applied to in-depth interviews. At the same time, in-depth interviews can be really useful and don't need to be representative of a population to be useful for other kinds of questions. This might be in an exploratory study. You're not exactly sure which criteria are important. So therefore, the first round of inquiry for your research is doing in-depth interviews to get an idea, for instance, of what this population of interest looks like. So that could be an actual goal of your research and your in-depth interviews to do this. So while representation could be a consideration for your work, it is not a necessary component of your research and doesn't make it less valid and less reliable if the considerations for representation don't apply in your particular case. Broadly speaking, there are two different kinds of in-depth interviews. An in-depth interview that is repeated with, for instance, students at Duke. You might do the same interview protocol with one group from a population. So if you're going to do research at Duke and you're thinking about student achievement, you might do in-depth interviews with a select number of students, and that interview protocol or the kinds of questions you ask, you'd ask the same ones of each person. So that ostensibly, the information you get from each individual is treated analytically the same. So one student is another student is another student. In the framework of your research, you would think about it that way. But another type of in-depth interview in which you become less concerned about questions of representation is called a key informant interview. So in the same kind of research agenda where you'd be thinking about student achievement, instead of trying to do a perfectly representative sampling frame to get students of various educational levels, socioeconomic backgrounds, racial identities, gender identities, this kind of a thing, you might actually think, well, instead of doing that, I'm going to go about interviewing certain faculty members, administrators, people who have a 15 or 30,000 foot view of student achievement, who might have been at Duke for 5, 10, 30, 40 years and have an idea broadly of what's happening at a structural level. And to this extent, you wouldn't weigh the content of that interview equally with that of one student or even necessarily with one another. A faculty member who comes from one school or one major has, in some ways, a limited perspective or a different perspective than an administrator who understands broader curriculum design goals. So a key informant interview is an interview with people who have a qualitatively different understanding and positionality with respect to the research question. So they might have power with respect to the research question. They might have a longer view with respect to a research question. You don't need to necessarily be concerned with questions about how many key informant interviews do I need to do. A key informant, by definition, is one person who has a very special understanding of your research question.