Using Interviews to Research Education

Table of Contents

Last Updated on October 16, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Interviews are one of the most commonly used qualitative research methods in the sociology of education. In this post I consider the practical, ethical and theoretical strengths and limitations of using interviews to research education, focusing mainly on unstructured interviews, with two classic examples of interview research in schools.

This post is designed to get you thinking about Methods in Context, or “applied research methods”: the 20-mark question on Paper 1 where you have to apply a method to an education topic. If you’re new to these questions, start with How to Answer Methods in Context Questions. For interviews as a method in general (structured, unstructured, semi-structured and group), see Interviews in Social Research.

Practical issues with interviews in education

Gaining access may be a problem, because schools are hierarchical institutions: the lower down the hierarchy someone is, the more permissions you need to interview them. For example, you might need the head teacher’s permission to interview a teacher, while to interview pupils you’ll need the head teacher’s permission and their parents’.

However, if you can gain consent and get the head teacher onside, the hierarchy may make interviewing more efficient: the head can ask teachers to release pupils from lessons for the interviews, for example.

Interviews take more time than questionnaires, so finding time for them may be a problem. Teachers are unlikely to want to give up lesson time, and pupils are unlikely to want to spend their free time at break or after school being interviewed. Teachers also tend to be very busy, so they may be reluctant to give up time in their day.

However, if the topic is especially relevant or interesting, this will be less of a problem, and the researcher could use incentives (rewards) to encourage people to take part. Group interviews would also be more time-efficient (see below).

Younger respondents tend to find it harder to keep to the point, and often pick up on unexpected details in questions, which can make interviews take longer.

Younger respondents may also have a shorter attention span than adults, which means interviews need to be kept short.

Validity issues

Pupils may see the interviewer as a “teacher in disguise”: part of the hierarchy of the institution. This could distort their answers and lead them to give socially desirable responses. Asked about homework, for example, pupils may say they do the number of hours the school tells them to, rather than the hours they actually do.

To get round this, the researcher might conduct interviews away from school premises and guarantee confidentiality.

Young people’s intellectual and linguistic skills are less developed than adults’, so the interviewer needs to keep in mind that they:

may not understand longer words or more complex sentences
may lack the language to express themselves clearly
may have a shorter attention span than adults
may read body language differently from adults

Having said all of that, younger people with weaker literacy are probably going to be more comfortable speaking than reading and writing, which means interviews are nearly always going to be a better choice than questionnaires where younger pupils are concerned.

To get more valid data from interviews with pupils, researchers should try to:

avoid leading questions, because young people are more suggestible than adults
use open-ended questions
not interrupt pupils’ answers
learn to tolerate pauses while pupils think
avoid repeating questions, which can make pupils change their first answer because they assume it was wrong

Unstructured interviews may therefore be more suitable than structured interviews, because they make it easier for the researcher to rephrase questions when they need to.

The location may also affect validity. If a pupil associates school with authority and the interview takes place in school, they are probably more likely to give socially desirable answers.

If the researcher is interviewing over several days, later respondents may get wind of the topics or questions, which may influence what they say.

Ethical issues

Schools and parents may object to pupils being interviewed about sensitive topics such as drugs or sexuality, and so may not give consent.

To get round this, the researcher might consider running the interviews with the school as part of its PSHE programme.

Interviews may be unsettling for some pupils: they are, after all, artificial situations. This could be especially true of group interviews, depending on who makes up the group.

Group interviews

Peer-group interviews may well be a good choice for researching some topics in the sociology of education. They can feel safer for pupils, they’re familiar from class discussion, peer support reduces the power imbalance with the interviewer, the conversation can flow more freely, and they save time. HOWEVER, peer pressure may stop pupils being honest, or encourage them to exaggerate for a laugh, and group interviews are hard to standardise and repeat, so they are low in reliability.

For group interviews in more depth, see the group interviews section of Interviews in Social Research. For a worked exam answer, see Evaluate group interviews to investigate subject choices made by pupils (June 2022).

Examples of interview research in education

Becker: teachers and the “ideal pupil”

Howard Becker’s study of Chicago schoolteachers, published in 1952, is one of the earliest pieces of interview research on schools. Becker later recalled that he interviewed “50 or 60” teachers. He found that teachers judged pupils against an image of the “ideal pupil”, and that the pupils who came closest to it were the middle-class ones: interested, well prepared at home and quick to learn. Teachers saw pupils from the poorest backgrounds as the hardest to teach, and adjusted their teaching and expectations accordingly.

As an example of the method: interviews let Becker get at teachers’ own meanings and categories, which is exactly what interpretivists value. HOWEVER, he only had teachers’ accounts of what they did, not observation of what actually happened in classrooms, and those accounts may have been shaped by how teachers wanted to present themselves to a researcher. For the findings themselves, see Class Differences in Education: The Role of In-School Factors.

Archer et al: working-class girls and education

Louise Archer, Anna Halsall and Sumi Hollingworth (2007) used semi-structured interviews, alongside discussion groups and photo diaries, to study working-class girls at risk of leaving school at 16 in London schools. It’s a good example of interviews being combined with other methods to get round their limitations. For the full study, see Semi-Structured Interviews to Research Education.

Interviews in Methods in Context questions

Interviews come up regularly in the 20-mark Methods in Context question. When you write about them, keep tying the method back to who you are interviewing (pupils, teachers, parents), where (school, home), and how sensitive the topic is. For worked examples, see:

For the research contexts, see Researching Pupils, Researching Teachers and Researching Parents.

Signposting

This post has been written for students studying the Methods in Context part of the research methods topic, as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course. For other methods applied to education, see Using Surveys to Research Education, Participant Observation to Research Education and Experiments and Education.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.comPeer group interviews may well be a good a choice for researchers studying topics within the sociology of education.