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The aim of this article is to address some aspects of a cross-cultural interview study conducted in a PhD research project. This is done by reflecting on and discussing the influence of language and culture on the research process, as experienced by the researcher.

The experiences have been taken from an interview study with fifteen American participants in which the researchers were Norwegian. The interviews were conducted in English.

By offering insights into experiences of the research process in a cross-cultural interview study, the article connects the discussion to the concepts of positionality and reflexivity. These concepts are found to be especially relevant when managing differences between the researcher and participants in cross-cultural studies, and for improving the trustworthiness of the research.

The experiences and reflections discussed in the article may be useful to other researchers in similar (cross-cultural) research contexts and situations.

This article has been inspired by the experience of conducting research in a second language and in a different country. By drawing on a researcher’s point of view, this article reflects on these aspects when working as a visiting researcher doing international research.

In their daily practice, criminal justice professionals tell stories about their ‘clientele’ and these narratives legitimise their roles and decision-making. My research underscores how narratives of crime inform the practice of youth justice. The research presented in this chapter is based on court case file analysis and interviews with youth justice practitioners, concentrating on how they ‘theorise’ the causes of crime of migrant youth and which interventions they deem appropriate.

The chapter raises a methodological discussion on whether narrative researchers can and should attempt to actively question research participants' accounts, which constitute (penal) harm, introducing an interviewing model that I call ‘light’ Socratic dialogues. The aim of this interviewing style is to gradually move the narrator from doxa (‘common’ knowledge and practice) to episteme and to actively question research participants' accounts. ‘Socrates light’ that I propose in this chapter draws on two bodies of methodological literature. On the one hand, I integrate some principles from ‘active’ interviewing styles, often used in ‘researching up’. On the other hand, I draw on feminist methodology, which offers important insights on how to counterbalance the confronting aspects of ‘active’ interviewing.

The chapter reflects on some of my research interactions and discusses the rationale and the implications of the proposed mode of interviewing. I make three points: first, extensively documenting the interview context and interactions helps us to reflect on the (shifting) narrative performance of those involved in research. Second, becoming ‘active’ as researchers during the interview can enhance the analysis. Third, narrative studies can potentially be transformative if we question the narratives.

This chapter draws upon our experiences of using materials in research interviews. We build on the work of Woodward (2016, 2020) by reflexively exploring how our use of material objects; in this case, Lego enabled both participants and researchers to connect more fully with the entrepreneurial phenomena under investigation (Williams et al., 2021). In doing so, we unpack how our use of objects reveals the research interview as a more complex phenomenon than is typically represented (Gubrium et al., 2012).

Elite interviewing is a well-established area of interview research methods. Nevertheless, the actual casting of an “elite” has been generally conducted in a prima facie or broad manner. A consideration of entrepreneurs and owner-managers as “elites” has been less profiled and received less attention, therefore the paper views the entrepreneurs and owner-managers as constituting a form of “local elite” within given and varying sectorial, regional and community boundaries. The authors argue that a consideration of entrepreneurs as “local elites” and transferring knowledge from an elite interviewing perspective may strongly support scholarly research in the entrepreneurship field.

The study conducts a comprehensive narrative literature review of elite interviewing literature and transfers key methodological insights to the entrepreneurship field. The methodological contribution based on literature is complemented by experiences and observations from an extensive inductive interview study with over 30 entrepreneurs of German manufacturing Small and Medium-sized Entities (SMEs) and are used to reflect on, and refine, interview research approaches with entrepreneurs.

The reflections and discussions in this paper provide valuable insights for other researchers conducting research in entrepreneurship domains regarding the power dynamics of negotiating access, procedural issues of interviews and thereby enhancing the quality of data.

The contribution to knowledge is mainly of a methodological nature. While the paper takes a novel act of recasting elite interviewing in the SME and entrepreneurship context, the paper methodologically contributes to the entrepreneurship and elite interview literature thereby facilitating higher quality interviews.

Unlike quantitative studies, interview data generally cannot be validated; yet, they are typically the only evidence of the research. This study develops protocols for using verbatim interview quotations in research and for assessing the quality of interview quotations.

This research reviews 20 empirical papers using in-depth interviews containing 600 interview quotations to examine authors' approaches to verbatim interviewee quotations. The research analyses the sample papers for interview transcript handling, selection of quotations, the number and length of interview quotations, how they are placed and presented, the proportion of interviewee voices reproduced in quotations and the disclosure of protocols for translating and editing quotations. This paper includes illustrative interview quotations as exemplars of best practice.

Given the modest discussion of the principles influencing the reproduction of quotations in research, this study develops a framework for evaluating prior research. Researchers use a wide variety of practices to reproduce interview quotations in accounting research. The issues derived from this review, and their application to interview-based papers, frame an argument for a general set of quality criteria and protocols rather than rigid rules for assessing qualitative work. These criteria can serve as anchor points for qualitative evaluation.

There is little guidance on the use of interview quotations in qualitative research which this study bridges.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how fund managers in a non-Western country like Malaysia follow investment processes developed in the West and taught in the finance departments of universities.

This convergent interview research investigates how fund managers in Malaysia actually make their decisions, and develops a framework about their investment process.

Understanding the economy was important for the managers but was an ongoing learning process. Their analyses sometimes started bottom-up or top-down, but all followed a four-layer process. The managers did not believe the investment process could be quantified.

Convergent interviewing is meant to be a first step in a complete research program. So, future researchers could consider extending the research to different periods, different research settings in other countries like Singapore, India or Indonesia, different types of investors and different methodologies like surveys.

Practitioners should build on their experience, and understand principles of behavioral finance. Students in business schools should be taught in an experiential way, and school staff should use qualitative methods like convergent interviewing in their research projects.

Contributions centre on the article’s behavioural finance findings that experience and non-quantitative methods are the core of Malaysian investment managers’ decision-making, and on its detailed description of the unusual research methodology in finance of convergent interviewing.

The aim of this review paper is to identify the methodological practices and presentational styles used to report interview-based research in “leading” management and organisation journals.

This paper reviews a sample of 225 articles using qualitative interviews that were published in management, human resource management, organisational behaviour and international business journals listed in the Financial Times 50 list between 2009 and 2019.

The review found diversity and plurality in the methodological practices used in these studies and the presentational styles used to report interview research.

The findings are expected to help doctoral students, early career scholars and those new to using qualitative interviews to make decisions about the appropriateness of different methodological practices and presentational styles. The findings are also expected to support editors, reviewers, doctoral examiners and conference organisers in making sense of the dissensus that exists amongst qualitative interview researchers (Johnson et al., 2007). These insights will also enable greater “paradigmatic awareness” (Plakoyiannaki and Budhwar, 2021, p. 5) in the evaluation of the quality of interview-based research that is not restricted to standardised criteria derived from positivism (Cassell and Symon, 2015).

To make sense of this plurality, the authors map these practices and styles against the onto-epistemological paradigms identified by Alvesson (2003, 2011). The paper contributes to calls for philosophical diversity in the evaluation of qualitative research. The authors specifically articulate concerns about the use of practices in interview-based studies that derive from the positivistic logic associated with quantitative research.

Despite the growing pressure to encourage new ways of thinking about research methodology, only recently have interview methodologists begun to realize that “we cannot lift the results of interviewing out of the contexts in which they were gathered and claim them as objective data with no strings attached”. The purpose of this paper is to provide additional insight based on a critical reflection of the interview as a research method drawing upon Alvesson's discussion from the neopositivist, romanticist and localist interview perspectives. Specifically, the authors focus on critical reflections of three broad categories of a continuum of interview methods: structured, semi‐structured and unstructured interviews.

The authors adopt a critical and reflexive approach to understanding the literature on interviews to develop alternative insights about the use of interviews as a qualitative research method.

After examining the neopositivist (interview as a “tool”) and romanticist (interview as “human encounter”) perspectives on the use of the research interview, the authors adopt a localist perspective towards interviews and argue that the localist approach opens up alternative understanding of the interview process and the accounts produced provide additional insights. The insights are used to outline the skills researchers need to develop in applying the localist perspective to interviews.

The paper provides an alternative perspective on the practice of conducting interviews, recognizing interviews as complex social and organizational phenomena rather than just a research method.

This article aims to describe the personal experience and ethical dilemmas that the author encountered when conducting qualitative research on a highly sensitive topic, i.e. interviews with offenders convicted of child pornography.

This study uses an autoethnographic approach to describe and reflect on my personal experience, emotions and ethical dilemmas when undertaking sensitive research that examines illegal acts.

Ethical dilemmas and emotional challenges highlighted refer to the issue of access to useful empirical material, conducting interviews with convicted offenders in prison environments, the complexity surrounding confidentiality when interviewing offenders about their criminal activities, vulnerability and insecurity for the researcher and emotional challenges for the researcher when listening to the offenders’ stories describing serious crimes against children.

This article contributes with insights and reflections on conducting qualitative research with a marginalized and stigmatized group in prison environments.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the long‐term effects of qualitative interviews on respondents. The paper offers a reflexive account of the author's research practices with regard to “safeguarding” research participants and researcher accountability.

In 1999‐2002, 20 women and 18 men who are in dual earner marriages/partnerships were interviewed separately. The study was entitled “Hard Labour 1”. In this paper, It is explained how, in 2007, 17 “Hard Labour 1” participants were contacted for a follow‐up study entitled “Hard Labour Revisited”. They were asked, via telephone and e‐mail, whether (and if so, how) they perceived themselves to have been affected by their interview for “Hard Labour 1”.

Some respondents are interviewed at a time of personal anxiety. This group perceived their interview as having been influential because it made them reflect deeply on their situation, bringing their thoughts to bear when they conducted subsequent negotiations with partners. However, participants do not see this as a reason to avoid qualitative research. They describe themselves as agentic beings who felt ownership of their involvement in “Hard Labour 1”. Their approach make to reflect upon the author's interpretation of “safeguarding” which is now regarded as a concept which may be co‐constructed between researcher and participants.

The paper explores “safeguarding” in relation to the long‐term effects of qualitative research interviews. It is suggest that undertaking a reflexive reappraisal of research practices is important because analyses of past projects may (as in the author's case) result in a “shift” in understanding of research concepts from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective.