One Interviewer Versus Several: Modernist and Postmodernist Perspectives in Qualitative Family Interviewing

Abstract

In the past I worked at meeting modernist research standards by carrying out qualitative family research using multiple interviewers. But different interviewers brought back different interview material, and although from a postmodern perspective that is to be expected and can be beneficial, it created several problems. As I have evolved to be more of a postmodern researcher, the modernist standards I once believed in still matter to me, but I now think that, from symbolic interaction, social construction, and other perspectives, single‐interviewer research is legitimate and, in some ways, preferable. But then I have found in my recent interview research that there are good reasons to use more than one interviewer as long as they interview together.