Qualitative interviewing

7, 8 October 2020

Ophelia nicole-berva, coordinator, Unige

Philippe Zittoun (University of Lyon)

Philippe Zittoun is Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Lyon (laboratory LAET-ENTPE) and General Secretary of the International Public Policy Association. He has widely published books and articles in public policy and more specifically on understanding the policymaking process and its political dimension. He has developed a pragmatic constructivism approach to grasp the policy process based on qualitative methods. He has worked on housing policy, environmental policy, energy policy and more recently on economic policy with a specific attention to the 2008 crisis.

This course focuses on how to design and to conduct a qualitative interview.

While the qualitative interview is one of the most common methods used during empirical inquiry in social science, the techniques used to design and conduct an interview are generally based on a weak reflexivity and poor know-how. The main idea of this course is to discuss on the epistemological foundation of the different kind of qualitative interview such as "semi-structured", "focused", "ethnographic", "non directive" and "open-ended", on the multiple bias that interviewer must considered but also on the multiple techniques and tricks the interviewer can used during the interview.

During the course, we will have

· A large discussion on the epistemological foundation of the qualitative interview and its link with the approach mobilized

· An interactive focus on the multiple techniques to obtain, to prepare and to design an interview

· Sequences of interviewing simulation following by a collective analysis

Université de Genève

12