Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 74

While observers often interview those they are studying, they usually do so very informally and on the spur of the moment. Other sociologists rely mainly, or exclusively, on interviews in which they seek information from participants (respondents) by asking a series of questions that have been spelled out, at least to some degree, before the research is conducted (Gubrium et al. 2012). Interviews are usually conducted face-to-face, although they can be done by phone and are increasingly being done via the internet (James 2016). In addition, large-scale national surveys are increasingly including interviews. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is known for its national surveys, but it also uses interviews in its National Health Interview Survey, which has been conducted continuously since 1957 (Sirkin et al. 2011; see www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis/about_nhis.htm).

Interviews can take many forms and be more or less structured, depending on the researcher’s needs. Here an interviewer stops a passerby.

Janine Wiedel Photolibrary / Alamy Stock Photo

The use of interviews has a long history in sociology. One very early example is W. E. B. Du Bois’s ([1899] 1996) study of the “Philadelphia Negro.” A watershed in the history of interviewing in sociology was reached during World War II, when large-scale interview studies of members of the American military were conducted. Some of the data from those studies were reported in a landmark study, The American Soldier (Stouffer et al. 1949). More recently, Robert Wuthnow (2018) and his research assistants conducted over 1,000 in-depth interviews with individuals residing in rural communities to learn about how their norms, values, and local experiences are changing (see Trending box, Chapter 3).