Reviewing challenges and the future for qualitative interviewing

In this article, we consider challenges for the existence and practice of qualitative research interviews. We review key features of qualitative interviewing, in particular the debate over the radical critique of interviewing and the nature of the data it generates, to set the scene for our arguments about the current standing and future prognosis for the method of generating data and the technologies that enable this. We look at qualitative interviewing in the context of the political project of neoliberalism and the regime of austerity associated with it, and the linked turn to what is known as ‘big data’, a feature of digital technological developments in garnering data. Qualitative researchers using interview methods have been creative in working with and resisting features of neoliberal austerity pragmatically and politically, and we provide some examples. We also consider an epistemological challenge and resistance from outside of the dominant framework – interviewing in indigenous methodologies. We argue that it is the relationship between the interview as a method of data generation for research and the ways of knowing about the world, that is the epistemology that the interview-based research proceeds from, that is crucial in considering the potentials for the method’s practice.