Can You Just Call Me: The Methodological Benefits and Tradeoffs of In-Depth Qualitative Phone Interviews

• In Event: 20458 - Qualitative Methodology

Abstract

After the March 2020 shutdown of nearly all public spaces due to COVID-19 many sociologists necessarily turned to computer-mediated data-collection methods, both for their own and their participants’ safety. Though a common method was videoconferencing interviews through applications like Skype and Zoom, other qualitative researchers turned to a remote strategy for qualitative data collection that, if is not actually less common, is less commonly discussed: phone interviews. As two poverty-focused scholars who study marginalized groups, including urban Black, rural white, Latine, and Native populations, in this paper we describe our histories with qualitative research and analyze our recent research experiences to uniquely highlight the numerous advantages, as well as the trade-offs, of phone-based, in-depth interviews. Specifically, we draw on our combined experiences of conducting more than 200 in-depth phone interviews prior to and throughout the pandemic (2018-2024), our methodological notes on these interviews, and a review of sociological studies conducted over recent decades that relied solely on phone interviewing. We consider the opportunities and challenges of phone interviewing specifically as a sociological data collection method guided by feminist perspectives and equity commitments and address methodological, epistemological, and structural issues, including access, rapport, privacy, safety, confidentiality, positionality, reflexivity, and ethics. Ultimately, we show how the phone – and the phone alone – can be a qualitative data-collection tool that allows researchers to avoid many of the power-related problems that plague visual data collection methods and to simplify the research relationship into one focused on being a sympathetic ear in search of insight into pressing sociological issues.

Authors

• Jennifer Randles, California State University-Fresno

• Jennifer Sherman, Washington State University