Beyond the In-Person Interview? How Interview Quality Varies Across In-person, Telephone, and Skype Interviews

Abstract

Conducting qualitative interviews in-person is usually presented as the gold standard, with other modes being seen as inferior. There have been arguments, however, that remote interviews, such as those conducted using the telephone or videoconference technologies, should be seen as equivalent to or even superior to in-person interviews. Evaluations of these claims have been limited by the small number of interviews used to compare modes. We analyze over 300 interviews conducted using three modes: in-person, telephone, and Skype. Our analyses find that in-person interviews have clear advantages when it comes to producing conversation turns and word-dense transcripts and field notes but do not significantly differ from the other two modes in interview length in minutes, subjective interviewer ratings, and substantive coding. We conclude that, although remote interviews might be necessary or advantageous in some situations, they likely do often come at a cost to the richness of information produced by the interviews.