Interviewing for Qualitative Inquiry

"In her inimitable way, Josselson captures the essence and the detail of qualitative interviewing that students in particular need. She clearly details the nature of human experience as a layered and complex manifestation of the storied or narrative nature of interaction that occurs in an interview. The excellence of Josselson's text resides in her accurate prediction of the many challenges that students will experience as they pursue the use of qualitative research interviewing methodology. In effect, she alerts students to plan for various pitfalls that can and will occur, leaving them excellently prepared with tools and strategies as they venture into their beginning participant interviews. What makes Josselson's text an outstanding teaching tool is her insistence that it is the development of the participant-researcher relationship that leads the novice researcher through the seeming quagmire of methodology and provides the key factor in obtaining rich, textured data....Josselson's excellent text provides the steps and examples necessary for students and researchers to acquire and further develop their knowledge and relational skills as qualitative researchers. She inspires students by describing many of the difficulties encountered as being reasonable expectations rather than making this aspect of qualitative research difficult to understand and master. I recommend Interviewing for Qualitative Inquiry for a broad audience, including novice to experienced qualitative researchers....Doctoral and postdoctoral-level researchers and educators will, in reading this text, coalesce their earlier interview experience into a coherent whole to be presented to graduate students and research fellows. Experienced quantitative researchers will find in this resource an excellent explanation of the validity of the qualitative research-interviewing methodology."